The weekend plus Monday party in Kenting did not disappoint this year. After a month of miserable weather in Taipei, which seemed like four, it was great to take a dip in the clear, blue ocean waters and feel the sun kissing the skin.
One of the musical highlights of the weekend was Dallas Waldo’s mid-afternoon set at Spring Scream, which started off with fifteen minutes of yoga, a quiet beginning that attracted plenty of attention. Then, while the audience had their eyes closed for the last minutes of mediation, Waldo dropped beats and rhymes and got the people up from their lotus position to a full on throw your hands in the air hip-hop show.
Another highlight of the weekend was DJ Tujamo’s set at the biggest party in Kenting, 2016 Spring Break on the Beach (2016 夏都春宴). The relaxed producer ran through every kind of popular music including EDM, trap, house and dubstep, while calmly manning four CDJs, and filling the beach with peak energy during his prime slot on Sunday night at 9pm.
Photo courtesy of Super Dome Production
In it’s third year of being the only party going until dawn, the Reggae Party at Alex’s Campground, ran into some snags. On the first night, the police were near the entrance a lot of the night, which kept the sound extremely low. Someone was heard to say, “I could play my music this loud in my hotel room and the neighbors wouldn’t call the cops.”
The second night was reportedly better, but on Monday night, the police were again a thorn in the side of the party and shut it down early.
While transportation, hotels and the massive amounts of people are always a headache, it’s a small price to pay for the Kenting weekend to officially kick off the party season in Taiwan.
HEAR HIM ROAR
While many magazines and publications that only a few years ago championed the rise of EDM are now predicting its demise. In Taiwan, however, that is far from the truth.
Tomorrow, the world’s number two DJ (DJ Mag’s top 100 list), Hardwell, will be headlining his own festival, I Am Hardwell United We Are at Dajia Riverside Park (大佳河濱公園).
Hardwell, 28, is the prototypical EDM DJ. He is young, Dutch (where it seems every successful EDM DJ is from), in every photo he looks like he is doing the Blue Steel pose (made popular by Ben Stiller in Zoolander) and he likes to do crazy gimmicks (a 10,000 person guest list at a show in India).
Within the last five years, Hardwell has shot to the top on the strength of his banging tracks and his phenomenal promotional team. He is doing a lot of things right as the tickets for this 10,000-person festival sold out a month ago.
While tickets are sold out, a Vinyl Word tip is to get there around the start time and ask around for tickets. It seems that every big event has a few people who bought tickets for their friends who have flaked out and need to sell them at face value to recoup their money.
■ I Am Hardwell United We Are with opening act Kill the Buzz is tomorrow from 3:30pm to 9:30pm at Taipei’s Dajia Riverside Park (大佳河濱公園).
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su