Taiwan’s all-passion, no-budget rock festival, Beastie Rock, returns this weekend for its fourth year. It will feature over 100 rock bands playing on four outdoor stages in Tamsui, including half a dozen minor acts from Japan, a couple from South Korea and at least one from Malaysia, along with all the usual suspects from Taiwan’s underground music scene.
The stages will be rough and improvised, and the sound systems will be only slightly better than the stages. But the one thing this rough and ready open-air festival has going for it is a fervent desire for Taiwan’s indie bands to step forward on their own terms. That’s one reason so many local bands are happy to support this event. They get to gig in front of a rowdy crowd that includes a fun mix of fans and all the other musicians they know from the rehearsal rooms around Taipei. If there is one festival where you can buy a ticket and literally walk into the midst of Taiwan’s indie rock scene, this is probably it. It is not glamorous. There is barely any backstage. Rather it’s a place where indie rockers celebrate what they do as a surprisingly cohesive unit. The beer also tends to be very cheap.
Since the Beastie Rock festival site is compact, crowds tend to form quickly when the best bands are playing, so the best navigation advice is to follow your nose. Beyond that, groups to look out for include the always outrageous and parodic LTK Commune (濁水溪公社), one of the best bands in Taiwan for more than two decades, playing tonight. Tomorrow’s lineup features the South Korean up-beat nth-generation punk band Patients, the Japanese post-punk, two-girl noise duo Zargani$ and dubstep inflected nu-metal from OVDS. Sunday, expect a lot of buzz for one of the festival’s closers, the Japanese post-punk trio Suichi Blanco.
Photo Courtesy of White Wabbit Records
■ Beastie Rock (巨獸搖滾) runs today through Sunday at Tamsui Culture Park (淡水文化園區), 22 Bitou St, New Taipei City (251新北市鼻頭街22號), just a 5-minute walk from the Tamsui MRT Station. Tickets are NT$1,400 for a three-day pass at the door, or NT$1,200 in advance through Indievox.com. Single day tickets are NT$600 for today and NT$800 for tomorrow or Sunday.
Acid Mothers Temple & The Discography Of Babel
The last time Acid Mothers Temple came to Taipei was early 2012, and that show easily rated one of the best, most mind-perforating rock performances in Taiwan that year or any time since. The Japanese neo-psychedelic band fuses heavy, intensely loud stoner riffs (you might want to bring earplugs) and a real dedication to fully living (or re-living) late 60s psychedelia in every aspect, including graphics, album titles, the guru stylings of band leader Makoto Kawabata and the their lifestyle on a collective in the countryside of Japan’s Kansai region. (In 1996, they were confused for the Aum Shinrikyo cult and forced to move house by suspicious neighbors.)
Photo Courtesy of Patients
The group plays at The Wall tonight as Acid Mothers Temple and the Cosmic Inferno, which means a slightly different lineup from two years ago, when they played as Acid Mothers Temple and the Melting Paraiso U.F.O. They bring their newest album Astrogasm from Inner Space, a double LP on vinyl only. It is literally just one of a hundred plus recordings in the nineteen years of the group’s insanely huge discography.
Looking through the enormous haystack of album titles, one striking thread is the post-modern way the band has of making pastiche references to the 60s and 70s bands that inspired them. This by no means provides a definitive portrait of the band, but it is so much fun to sort through, it’s worth taking a quick sample.
Are We Experimental? (2009) is a funny enough album title on its own, for a band that is obviously on the fringes of everything. It’s also a quotation of Jimi Hendrix’s, Are You Experienced? (1967), with album art driving home the point that this is an homage. Power House of Holy (2006) references Led Zeppelin, and not incidentally, a huge number of Acid Mothers Temple album covers borrow the Houses of the Holy aesthetic of naked pubescent women in psychedelic landscapes.
The Ripper at the Heaven’s Gates of Dark (2011) and Darkside of the Black Moon: What Planet are We On? (2009) both rephrase Pink Floyd album titles, though with curious warping additions. Minstrel in the Galaxy is a fairly obvious reference to Jethro Tull’s Minstrel in the Gallery (1975), and ln Search of Hawkwind (2010) offers tribute to the 70s British stoner metal band.
Then there’s Chaos Unforgiven Kisses or Grateful Dead Kennedys (2012), which parodies to two totally different bands at once. Ziggy Sitar Dust Raga (2003) meanwhile conjures both David Bowie and Ravi Shankar. (The CD features only one long track of sitar music.)
But there are also album titles that evoke other facets of this thousand-sided diamond-in-the-rough — like chamber music (In C (Remastered), 2006), the purely psychedelic (Have You Seen the Other Side of the Sky, 2006) and the completely inscrutable (For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Goofy Funk?, 2011). It is the stuff of weird genius, and the music is even better. If you missed them the first time, don’t make that mistake again.
■ Acid Mothers Temple play with Skip Skip Ben Ben tomorrow at The Wall, B1, 200, Roosevelt Rd, Sec 4, Taipei City (台北市羅斯福路四段200號B1). Tickets are NT$1,200, or NT$1,000 in advance through www.books.com.tw.
In recent weeks the Trump Administration has been demanding that Taiwan transfer half of its chip manufacturing to the US. In an interview with NewsNation, US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said that the US would need 50 percent of domestic chip production to protect Taiwan. He stated, discussing Taiwan’s chip production: “My argument to them was, well, if you have 95 percent, how am I gonna get it to protect you? You’re going to put it on a plane? You’re going to put it on a boat?” The stench of the Trump Administration’s mafia-style notions of “protection” was strong
Late last month US authorities used allegations of forced labor at bicycle manufacturer Giant Group (巨大集團) to block imports from the firm. CNN reported: “Giant, the world’s largest bike manufacturer, on Thursday warned of delays to shipments to the United States after American customs officials announced a surprise ban on imports over unspecified forced labor accusations.” The order to stop shipments, from the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), came as a surprise to Giant, company officials said. Giant spokesman Ken Li (李書耕) said that the CPB never visited the company’s factories to conduct on-site investigations, nor to interview or
Every now and then, it’s nice to just point somewhere on a map and head out with no plan. In Taiwan, where convenience reigns, food options are plentiful and people are generally friendly and helpful, this type of trip is that much easier to pull off. One day last November, a spur-of-the-moment day hike in the hills of Chiayi County turned into a surprisingly memorable experience that impressed on me once again how fortunate we all are to call this island home. The scenery I walked through that day — a mix of forest and farms reaching up into the clouds
“Eighteen years ago, people didn’t even know the name of this ingredient,” says 58-year-old Gil Sa-hyeon, holding up a cluster of dried brownish stems. “Now it’s everywhere.” His shop, Joseon Yakcho, sits in the heart of Seoul’s Yangnyeongsi Market, South Korea’s largest traditional medicinal herb market, its streets lined with shops displaying buckets of herbs such as licorice root and cinnamon bark that spill on to the pavements, filling the air with their distinct, earthy aroma. The ingredient Gil is referring to is hovenia dulcis, known in Korean as heotgae — the oriental raisin tree that’s become the cornerstone of South Korea’s
RSS