With New Years Day already behind us, the upcoming two days are shaping up to be a lost weekend. So rather than fight it, I’ll embrace that feeling of being too-hungover-to-get-off-the-couch, which also happens to be a perfect mental state to look back on Taiwanese live music last year, as well as what’s coming up this year.
The news that’s hot off the presses is that Taipei’s own Muddy Basin Ramblers have been nominated for a Grammy — in CD packaging design. Their album Formosa Medicine Show, designed by the local firm Onion Design, will compete against recent albums by The Pixies, Pearl Jam, FJA Twigs and Passenger for the golden statue of that strangely upright dude. Bandleader David Chen and designer Andrew Wong will fly to LA for the awards ceremony on Feb. 8. Best of luck!
Interesting to note, Taiwan has only ever had Grammy recognition for album art, never for music. Local designer Xiao Qing-yang (蕭青陽) has been nominated four times for music packaging since 2005, but he has never won. Last year’s winner in the Recording Packaging category went to an album by a relatively small band, Reckless Kelly, but previous years saw awards go to major names including Bjork, Arcade Fire, The Black Keys and David Byrne.
Photo courtesy of Ian Kuo
A couple of major music festivals went on hiatus last year, but will back this year. The Formoz Festival (野台開唱), normally held in early August in Taipei, and the Megaport Festival (大港開唱), an annual festival in March in Greater Kaohsiung, both took a break last year following a shareholders’ shakeup at The Wall, a top music promoter.
Megaport, now in the hands of a group headed by Freddy Lim (林昶佐) of the band Chthonic (閃靈), is set to return Mar. 28 and Mar. 29 in Greater Kaohsiung’s Pier 2 District with several Japanese headliners, mostly punk or metal bands. The same weekend in Taipei, The Wall is mounting its own T Fest, which in local slang sounds like a festival for lesbians, though I am assured that is not the case. T Fest headliners will be British and Danish shoegaze bands Yuck and Mew. Both festivals happen just one week before Spring Scream. Can anyone say, “awkward”? Let the music festival wars begin.
The best music festival last year was the Heart Town Festival (山海屯音樂節) in Greater Taichung, and not just because it filled a vacuum. It had the best bands and was the most fun. The music was all raging metalcore, hardcore and punk. It rained hard every afternoon. And I have never in one day seen so many bands instruct crowds to form a wall of death, crouch down then jump up, swirl into a circle pit and so on. But the bands were at the top of their game and the crowd was massively energized. Crossfaith and Dark Rain, a couple of white-hot young bands from Japan, channeled every volt of the massive wattage behind them for butt-kicking shows.
Photo courtesy of Go chic
Most notably, Heart Town Festival was organized by a new promoter, Jimmy Liu (劉鈞輝). A new festival promoter on the scene is definitely a good thing.
After Heart Town Festival, my other best shows last year were the German avant-garde pianist and composer Nils Frahm at Legacy, the Japanese no wave punk girls of the ZZZ’s, also at Legacy, and the Idan Raichel Project, an Israeli band that played at Daniel Pearl Day, albeit without frontman Idan Raichel. Raichel had committed to the gig but at the last minute was called away to New York by Alicia Keys. Yet his band was still a whirlwind of traditional music and neo-soul, and everyone in the front was dancing. Unfortunately they were also the only ones who could hear, as the sound system was badly underpowered.
The best shows I missed was probably The National, which people raved about. Whoops.
Photo courtesy of ovds
The best performance by a Taiwanese band goes to Go Chic at The Wall last February. A Japanese promoter next to me at the show was visibly impressed, and the electro art-rock trio went off to tour Japan just after that show. Go Chic then became the first Taiwanese band to play Glastonbury. Sadly, they have taken an indefinite break, as one band member has some serious personal issues.
Another fantastic band to call it quits last year was the Deadly Vibes. They went out with a final rockabilly sendoff at Revolver in March. For almost a decade, JT Long, JD Long and Jason Copps were pound-for-pound one of the most rocking acts in Taiwan. As expats playing a locally unfamiliar, retro genre, they were perhaps doomed to small rooms and DIY tours, but they still rocked harder, better and with more commitment than anyone.
The best indie albums of the year go to Forests for No Fun, a fuzzy garage punk masterpiece, and OVDS for Heartbreak Resistance, a surprising fusion of dubstep, rap and hardcore.
Photo courtesy of forests
That’s it for last year. A new year is already upon us.
Water management is one of the most powerful forces shaping modern Taiwan’s landscapes and politics. Many of Taiwan’s township and county boundaries are defined by watersheds. The current course of the mighty Jhuoshuei River (濁水溪) was largely established by Japanese embankment building during the 1918-1923 period. Taoyuan is dotted with ponds constructed by settlers from China during the Qing period. Countless local civic actions have been driven by opposition to water projects. Last week something like 2,600mm of rain fell on southern Taiwan in seven days, peaking at over 2,800mm in Duona (多納) in Kaohsiung’s Maolin District (茂林), according to
Aug. 11 to Aug. 17 Those who never heard of architect Hsiu Tse-lan (修澤蘭) must have seen her work — on the reverse of the NT$100 bill is the Yangmingshan Zhongshan Hall (陽明山中山樓). Then-president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) reportedly hand-picked her for the job and gave her just 13 months to complete it in time for the centennial of Republic of China founder Sun Yat-sen’s birth on Nov. 12, 1966. Another landmark project is Garden City (花園新城) in New Taipei City’s Sindian District (新店) — Taiwan’s first mountainside planned community, which Hsiu initiated in 1968. She was involved in every stage, from selecting
It’s Aug. 8, Father’s Day in Taiwan. I asked a Chinese chatbot a simple question: “How is Father’s Day celebrated in Taiwan and China?” The answer was as ideological as it was unexpected. The AI said Taiwan is “a region” (地區) and “a province of China” (中國的省份). It then adopted the collective pronoun “we” to praise the holiday in the voice of the “Chinese government,” saying Father’s Day aligns with “core socialist values” of the “Chinese nation.” The chatbot was DeepSeek, the fastest growing app ever to reach 100 million users (in seven days!) and one of the world’s most advanced and
The latest edition of the Japan-Taiwan Fruit Festival took place in Kaohsiung on July 26 and 27. During the weekend, the dockside in front of the iconic Music Center was full of food stalls, and a stage welcomed performers. After the French-themed festival earlier in the summer, this is another example of Kaohsiung’s efforts to make the city more international. The event was originally initiated by the Japan-Taiwan Exchange Association in 2022. The goal was “to commemorate [the association’s] 50th anniversary and further strengthen the longstanding friendship between Japan and Taiwan,” says Kaohsiung Director-General of International Affairs Chang Yen-ching (張硯卿). “The first two editions
RSS