Tickets are about 70 percent sold for next week’s double showcase of American and European indie bands, featuring The National, Asgeir and Youth Lagoon on Tuesday and Mogwai, Daughter and King Krule on Wednesday, according to organizers. The original allotment of two-day passes has been sold out, but the promoter Earwax says it will continue to offer the discounted passes through the weekend, as it hopes to fill both nights. The concerts will take place at NTU Sports Stadium.
While these are not the most compelling lineups Earwax has given us since they became essentially the Taiwan franchise of the Tokyo-based promoter Hostess Club about a year ago, they are interesting, especially if you are into the kind of folk-tinged rock and electronica that is now invading modern pop.
The Scottish post-rock band Mogwai, who headline Tuesday, is the most senior group in the bunch. Formed in 1995, they have been cultivating a local fan base since 2003, when they christened The Wall, playing the first ever gig at the club. That show marked a major arrival of post-rock with Taiwanese fans, and the wave has hardly stopped cresting since. We know what to expect. The guitar feedback will do all the talking, yet the pairing with younger, vocalist-driven bands Daughter and King Krule will provide some nice variation on the night.
Photo courtesy of earwax
The Taiwan debut of The National, who headline the second night, is more than timely. The dark, folky Cincinnati band just put out its sixth album, Trouble Will Find Me, last year, and following a 10-page panegyric spread about the group in the New York Times Magazine, that record has been nominated Best Alternative Album in the upcoming Grammy Awards. According to the article, the group has created “the great Middle American novel as music, an album for our time.”
King Krule, Youth Lagoon and Asgeir are all very young one-man projects. The oldest, Trevor William Powers of Youth Lagoon, is only 25. King Krule (real name Archy Marshall) is a skinny carrot-topped kid who looks like a British version of Michael Anthony Hall from the 1980s film, The Breakfast Club. Only instead of playing the nerd, Marshall is one of the bad kids. His music ranges eclectically from 50s greaser rock to heavy hip hop beats played acoustically, and his ornery, attitude-heavy and marble-mouthed vocals sit somewhere between hip hop MCing and the talking blues.
Asgeir, the stage name of Asgeir Trausti Einarsson, sings quaint folk-pop, but more than anything else he makes me wonder at the success of Icelandic indie. Bjork, Sigur Ros and Mum have all played Taipei in the last year or so, commanding premium ticket prices. That’s not bad for an island nation of 320,000. Taiwan’s cultural industries should be deeply jealous.
Photo courtesy of earwax
■ On Tuesday, The National, Asgeir and Youth Lagoon perform. On Wednesday it is Mogwai, King Krule and Daughter. Both days’ performances begin at 7pm in the NTU Sports Center (台大綜合體育館) at the corner of Roosevelt Rd and Xinhai Rd. Single day tickets are NT$3,200 in advance or NT$3,500 at the door. Two-day advance passes are NT$4,200 through www.indievox.com or www.books.com.tw.
MUSIC FROM A CHINESE EXILE
In January, I received a CD in the mail that included a song with lyrics by Wang Dan (王丹), the Chinese democracy activist, who was the number one most wanted student leader from the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations. The song, called That Man Is Old (那個人老了), is not a political, but a poem that had been set to music by another Chinese exile, Duan Xinjun (段信軍).
Photo courtesy of earwax
Wang’s poem describes an old man, who sits quietly yet powerlessly, observing the world around him. “He has become old/ He sits without moving/ listening to the cries of the vendors outside the courtyard, which fill the air/ He is as serene as that tree/ watching the bits of dust as they chase each other through sunbeams.” With those two final stanzas, the short poem ends.
In June, it will be 25 years since the Tiananmen Square massacre. Wang’s poem is not about Tiananmen, and at the age of 45, he is certainly not yet old. But knowing his personal story and that of the faltering state of the Chinese democracy movement, it is hard not to listen to these lyrics without feeling a strong sense of Wang’s resignation. It is a personal lament on the passing of youthful aspiration, a heroic mission that remains incomplete, and the powerlessness to do anything about it.
This song is one of fourteen on Duan’s first ever album, Idyll of Taipei (敘事詩台北). Duan, a native of Jiangxi Province, first came to Taiwan in 2004, performing as part of the punk band Pangu (盤古) at a political rally supporting the Democratic Progressive Party just weeks ahead of that year’s presidential election. After screaming out “Taiwan independence” onstage, he was unable to return to China for fear arrest. After a year of hiding in Thailand, he was given political asylum by Sweden and is now a naturalized Swedish citizen.
Photo courtesy of earwax
Duan met Wang on one of his later trips to Taipei, and Wang sent him a volume of poems. As part of Pangu, Duan played on numerous overtly dissident songs, including an entire album on Tiananmen, June 4 (六 四). (The album was released in 2010 over the Internet.)
As part of Pangu, Duan however only played backup to the political firebrand of lead singer and guitarist Ao Bo (敖博). Duan has since left Pangu and downplayed his own politics. Last year, after more than a week of questioning by China’s National Security Bureau, he was allowed to return to China to visit his family for the first time in almost a decade.
Like Wang’s poem, Idylls of Taipei is more the story of exile than dissent. It is intended as autobiography, and the songs are a sort of booming, grandiose folk sung in impassioned, throaty growls reminiscent of the Northwest Wind style (西北風) that ushered rock ‘n roll into China in the late 1980s.
The album is mainly interesting for Duan’s personal story and its observations of a Chinese exiled in democratic Taiwan. Though many of its lyrics are prosaic, their directness affords a certain point of view. The opening song Taiwan is Heaven … Sometimes is about Duan’s own utopian expectations for Taiwan, and his later discovery that even this democratic society has an imperfect record of human rights. Mostly however, he sees Formosa as a symbol of hope, even if sometimes it is a tragic one.
■ Idylls of Taipei was released in January on Hove Entertainment (禾廣娛樂).
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