Erlend Oye seems to be on a mission to defy not only genre, but geography as well. The 39-year-old Norwegian singer-songwriter is currently backed by an Icelandic reggae band (The Rainbows). He lives is Sicily and has lately begun writing songs in Italian, though for his latest album, Legao, which came out last October, the first release was a song with a Portuguese title, Garota (meaning “girl”), and the music video was shot in South Korea.
His musical trajectory has been just as erratic. Oye, pronounced “oh yay,” started out as an electric guitarist, and launched his first band, The Kings of Convenience, in London in the late 1990s. By the mid 2000s he was in Berlin, DJing and cultivating an electronic sound, notably hanging tight with Royksopp, a euro-dance duo of fellow Norwegians. At the same time, he formed a second band, The Whitest Boy Alive. The group, initially going for an electronic sound, it quickly settled into the light, coffee-shop friendly genre of indie-pop. Though that band officially called it quits last summer, Oye, who is sort of a dashing nerd on stage, has remained in indie-pop, now as a singer-songwriter leading his own band. His new album is full of soft, catchy tunes that sound like a highly talented musician who lives far from Brazil and is trying to remember what bossa nova sounds like. It’s music that has heard of the sunshine, but doesn’t know how to dance around in it. One can suppose that this is what they call reggae in Iceland.
Perhaps it’s no wonder that Oye’s music is popular locally, where indie rock crowds tend to be shy and almost never dance with confidence. Oye has been to Taiwan twice before, first in 2010 with The Kings of Convenience, then in 2011 with The Whitest Boy Alive. Both shows filled Legacy with several hundred fans, and both were produced by The Wall, which will host Oye’s next visit on Tuesday. This is Oye’s first Taiwan show performing under his own name.
Photo courtesy of SSIGHBORGGGG
■ Erlend Oye performs on Tuesday beginning at 8pm at The Wall, B1, 200, Roosevelt Rd, Sec 4, Taipei (台北市羅斯福路四段200號B1). Tickets are NT$1,500 in advance through www.books.com.tw.
SSIGHBORGGGG
Seoul’s indie scene is in many ways a mirror image of Taipei’s, only a little bit bigger. It’s a mix of locals and expats creating alternative energy in the margins, and the trickle of K-bands touring through Taipei is steadily growing.
Photo courtesy of the Wall
On Sunday, Revolver will host a gig by Ssighborgggg, a high-energy math rock project of two Americans living in Seoul. Sean Maylone plays keyboards, guitars and other electronics, and DeAnthony Nelson plays drums. The music seems to draw from all sorts of alternative electronic genres, ranging from experimental rock of Battles and the abstract electronica of Aphex Twin to nerdcore hip hop beats. It’s purely instrumental and always a bit cerebral, but on occasion, it achieves a manic, danceable energy.
In Korea’s music scene, Maylone is known both for his band and as a promoter. Contacted by e-mail, he says that he and Nelson started Ssighborgggg first, then LA-based, Asian-American hip hop producer Nosaj Thing e-mailed them through their band page “and asked us if we could set up something together.” He then started promoting shows under the label SuperColorSuper.
SuperColorSuper has so far put together shows for Nosaj Thing, Caribou, Gold Panda, Zach Hill (of Deathgrips), No Age, Yacht, Xiu Xiu and others. Ssighborgggg played all of these as one of the warm-up bands.
Maylone says the group plays instrumental music, because, “there should be no ‘face’ or ‘meaning’ that a voice guides a listener within our music. We provide the songs, so listeners should go to their own places and meanings as they experience it.”
They’ve also managed to carve out a niche for themselves in Korea.
“In Seoul we’re between a few punk bands and some on the electronic side —- it’s a place we feel at home, which might sound really strange for two Americans. We have lots of bands we regularly play and drink with and some tight producer and press friends,” says Maylone.
However, he adds that “it’s not a place to blow up as a weirdo band. It’s uphill in the music scene for all non-K-pop bands. We’ve seen our music catch attention in more exotic lands faster.”
In short, it sounds a lot like Taiwan.
■ Ssighborgggg plays with local acts Kishikan (既視感), BHD and Constant & Change (康士坦的變化球) on Sunday from 7pm at Revolver, 1-2 Roosevelt Road, Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市中正區羅斯福路一段1-2號). Tickets are NT$400 at the door.
Taiwan has next to no political engagement in Myanmar, either with the ruling military junta nor the dozens of armed groups who’ve in the last five years taken over around two-thirds of the nation’s territory in a sprawling, patchwork civil war. But early last month, the leader of one relatively minor Burmese revolutionary faction, General Nerdah Bomya, who is also an alleged war criminal, made a low key visit to Taipei, where he met with a member of President William Lai’s (賴清德) staff, a retired Taiwanese military official and several academics. “I feel like Taiwan is a good example of
March 2 to March 8 Gunfire rang out along the shore of the frontline island of Lieyu (烈嶼) on a foggy afternoon on March 7, 1987. By the time it was over, about 20 unarmed Vietnamese refugees — men, women, elderly and children — were dead. They were hastily buried, followed by decades of silence. Months later, opposition politicians and journalists tried to uncover what had happened, but conflicting accounts only deepened the confusion. One version suggested that government troops had mistakenly killed their own operatives attempting to return home from Vietnam. The military maintained that the
“M yeolgong jajangmyeon (anti-communism zhajiangmian, 滅共炸醬麵), let’s all shout together — myeolgong!” a chef at a Chinese restaurant in Dongtan, located about 35km south of Seoul, South Korea, calls out before serving a bowl of Korean-style zhajiangmian —black bean noodles. Diners repeat the phrase before tucking in. This political-themed restaurant, named Myeolgong Banjeom (滅共飯館, “anti-communism restaurant”), is operated by a single person and does not take reservations; therefore long queues form regularly outside, and most customers appear sympathetic to its political theme. Photos of conservative public figures hang on the walls, alongside political slogans and poems written in Chinese characters; South
Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) announced last week a city policy to get businesses to reduce working hours to seven hours per day for employees with children 12 and under at home. The city promised to subsidize 80 percent of the employees’ wage loss. Taipei can do this, since the Celestial Dragon Kingdom (天龍國), as it is sardonically known to the denizens of Taiwan’s less fortunate regions, has an outsize grip on the government budget. Like most subsidies, this will likely have little effect on Taiwan’s catastrophic birth rates, though it may be a relief to the shrinking number of
RSS