Only a few years ago, the so-called "underground" bands of Taiwan like the Clippers, LTK and Sticky Rice were largely defined by their cult followings and gigs played in basement pubs. In the last 12 months, they've been releasing CDs and showing up on MTV. Live music in Taiwan, especially rock, it seems, is finally coming of age. Next weekend Taiwan's youth will celebrate this phenomenon with the seventh Spring Scream, the music festival that has both accompanied and supported this movement from a time when it barely existed.
Spring Scream Snake, the name of this year's festival, will be held from April 5 through April 8 in Kenting at the Liufu Ranch (六福山莊), the same venue as in the last two years. Like live music in Taiwan, the festival continues to grow, this year adding a third stage and hosting 155 bands and solo performers.
PHOTO: DAN NYSTED, TAIPEI TIMES
The new three-stage format will be more democratic than in years past, as top acts won't play back-to-back sets on the same stage. "We'll try to keep things rotating, so there won't be bands of the same style playing one after the other," said concert organizer Jimi Moe.
PHOTO COURTESY OF SASQUATCH
In addition to non-stop musical performances, Spring Scream will offer a film festival, art displays, a half-pipe for skateboarding, a ping pong center and athletic club, an intra-band basketball tournament, the usual line-up of vendors and food stalls and a geodesic dome.
The festival's main thrust, however, continues to be live music. Below is an introduction to a select few of the bands that will play.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF TCM
FOREIGN BANDS
PHOTO COURTESY OF GUARDIAN ALIEN
Guardian Alien (USA: eastern ragtime hip pop rock)
In a previous incarnation, Guardian Alien was known to Spring Scream as Banjovi, that hip-swaying mama of a banjo band that has awed Kenting crowds in years past. Then last year the group's banjo virtuoso, Guy Davis, showed up at Spring Scream to sit in with Q, but was cheated from interpreting the guitar solo from AC/DC's You Shook Me All Night Long when a wind gust tore loose a banner and nearly carried the drummer off stage. Davis later made up for it with some incredibly trippy electric banjo on the second stage, playing a surreal Flamenco type scale. In addition to Davis' phenomenal skills, Guardian Alien fuses the vocals of Christina Honeycutt (also formerly of Banjovi), percussion and the often huge and billowing sound of the chromatic concertina. This is definitely not a band to miss.
PHOTO: DAVID FRAZIER
Mimie-chan (Japan: ska, cosplay)
PHOTO COURTESY OF TRA
Last year Mimie-chan amazed and bewildered the Spring Scream crowd with the entrance of Daiper, a sumo-esque and non-instrument playing band member who finished the set wearing only a pair of too-small spandex underwear. The year before, the band played in silver stretch briefs, stuffed full of things they found in their hotel bathroom. But that's just them being Mimie-chan. The band was born when a male punk trio added a horn section of three cuddly women and started playing red hot ska, much of it put together by Maru, the bass player. The music is as outrageous as the stage antics, and if it doesn't move you to dance, you are probably dead.
Miracle Saru (Japan: psychedelic rock, trance)
PHOTO COURTESY OF TRA
Miracle Saru showed up at last year's Spring Scream on a whim after someone in Thailand told them that the festival was a good party. So they showed up in Kenting and blew everyone away. Their jam moves from 1970s power guitar riffs to drum beats that are so deep they are almost electronic. One minute you are swimming in the music, the next you are pulsing with it. The six piece ensemble is from Tokyo, where they play a couple gigs a month. The band's lead guitarist, Kazz, is an accomplished studio guitarist who has played with everyone from drummers in Niger to Japanese pop idol Sayuki.
PHOTO COURTESY OF DZAPDAU DAU:
Dzapdau Dau (
This three-girl band from Hong Kong used to be into noise, but now just wants to make songs that are simpler and, well, happier. The result is punk with a cheery, poppy edge. A year ago, the band came to Spring Scream as M2R, but changed its name after adding a new bass player.
Q (USA: bluegrass, randomness)
In a Superman-Clark Kent type of dichotomy, the seemingly phenomenal and overachieving hee-haws of Q are actually ingenious and philosophical slugs from the slacker culture of Austin, Texas. On stage, they combine a stand-up double bass with a banjo and use songs to tell their bizarre and hilarious tales (Ted Turner done stole my girlfriend's soul/Now she's workin' for CNN Espanol?).
Hayashi Kiichiro (
One of the more reliable phenomena to witness at Spring Scream is how the crowd's jaws seem to go slack in unison when Hayashi gets on stage. Playing an acoustic guitar through a hulking sound processor lugged all the way from Osaka, the music Hayashi produces is a trippy, explosive wall of sound. "Machines are pretty innocent tools, it all depends on our idea," he said. Last year Hayashi was accompanied on stage by a didgeridoo player and a ghoulish basho dancer who ended the show in an extended head stand.
TAIWAN BANDS
Nipples (rock)
Comparisons to Sonic Youth are inevitable. Nipples was founded in 1998 with the American band as a model, and over time singer/guitarist Little Flower and bassist/singer KK even struck up a romance much like the duo's heroes Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon. KK says their music is "like the anatomy we're named after, sometimes hard, sometimes soft." The sound is gritty and intentionally lo-fi and their lyrics rarely rise out of the gutter, giving them a visceral appeal that leaves you either entranced or sets you running the opposite direction.
Show Girls (
A thrash band with a sense of humor, these are young men who do funny things. They perform lame circus stunts to the backdrop of a medium-hard groove. Yes, a groove. And one of them mans a chih-ling (the Chinese type of yo-yo with a string and two sticks). So they can do more than just bang guitars, they can entertain.
Nicole Darcy (
One of only a few veterans of all six Spring Screams so far, Nicole Darcy is also one of the few musicians who will get up on stage and play by herself. She's composed over a hundred songs in Mandarin, her themes encompassing everything from songs of conscience to the quirky things that happen in the life of an English teacher.
Chthonic (
The only Taiwanese band to ever play at the Fuji Rock festival in Japan, Chthonic has time and again proven it is good at what it does -- which invariably includes face paint, pupil-less contact lenses and lead vocalist Freddy singing in the voice of the beholder. Musically, they provide a combination of hard metal riffs and symphonic overtures, with some pieces even using the erhu.
Silence of Spiral (
The group's frontman and MC has his hair up in cornrows and raps with a matching I-wish-I-was-from-Compton attitude -- until the band behind him decides it's time to thrash. They're pretty hard and full of teen rage, but not especially fresh.
Milk (barnyard funk, miscellaneous groove)
A seven-piece chicken fetish ensemble composed entirely of foreigners from Taichung, Milk thrives on pure zaniness. During a set, vocalist Erin King spends about half his time squawking, strutting and flapping like a chicken while other band members accompany with a variety of farm noises.
MC Hot Dog (MC
After playing one of the dopest, hypest sets at Spring Scream last year, Hot Dog blew up large and signed with one of Taiwan's major recording labels, Rock Records. Rolling with the beers and blunts, he raps in Mandarin, while his home boy Jerry kicks the rhymes in Taiwanese. And like all good rappers, they have t message -- "teachers suck" and the record industry is wack.
Psychedelic Kindergarten
(
They paint their faces like dapper zombies, wear black, and do all that other goth stuff. Yeah, tortured minds are cool. The band, influenced they say by Siouxie and the Banshees, has three women and one man and will release its first CD on Crystal Records sometime around Spring Scream.
Sasquatch Alternative Folk and Modern Dance Troubadours (folk, groove)
In the past Sasquatch has mostly been folk singer Scott Ezell by himself, creating a soul-searching sound stripped down to voice and guitar. But for this Spring Scream he's added five more musicians -- two hand drummers, a bass and a mandolin -- for a fuller and more groove-centric set. There will also be modern dance accompaniment. Most of the songs are new compositions that Ezell will release on his second Sasquatch CD later this year.
Sugar Plum Fairy (
If Taiwan were to have its poster child for a college rock band it would have to be Sugar Plum Fairy. But that isn't to say their music is contrived or simple. Rolling distortion a la My Bloody Valentine sweeps into complex post-rock guitar arrangements overlaid with incomprehensibly mumbled lyrics. The four-man lineup also sticks to the tried-and-true college rock song formula of verse, chorus, verse, chorus, then a wild, flailing crescendo. Their show at Spring Scream last year was one of the festival's highlights, with a projected visual display consisting of wacked-out photography.
LTK (
LTK continues to be one of the best bands in Taiwan, and not just on account of their music. In past stage shows, they've dressed in drag, destroyed chairs with hammers and performed countless politically charged skits. At Spring Scream 1999, they acted a scene in which a Taiwanese Aborigine rapes and sodomizes a Chinese Taiwanese tourist. When they're just playing, as they often do, drums and bass come down like sledge hammers and the guitar ups the power even more. LTK will release its third CD later this year.
Clippers (夾子電動大樂隊: nakashi, stand up comedy)
Often called "taxi music," nakashi is a kind of Japanese organ music that Clippers creator, lead vocalist and keyboardist Hsiao Ying (
Dribdas (jamboree gulash)
Back together for a rare reunion, Spring Scream organizers Jimi Moe and Wade Davis will reunite with their long lost drummer to take to the stage as Dribdas, filling gleeful ears with their never-ending funk and non-sensical lyrics. The appearance could very well reopen the debate as to whether the group's name is simply "sad bird" spelled backwards.
Vic (modern rock)
The four-member band works with a slow, moody tempo, allowing the voice of female lead vocalist April Chen (陳昱穎) to float in and across lines of bass, drums and two guitars. Musical parts tend to overlap in interesting ways, and the lead guitar goes for a penetrating, clawing sound, somewhat similar to Radiohead.
Anarchy (
A very tight group of political rockers, they advocate a pro-Taiwan stance with their lyrics and hold high the flag of punk rock nihilism with their lifestyles. In a way, they serve as leaders for Taiwan's young agnostics. Their first CD, Anarchy, sold its entire 2000-copy print run within two months of its Dec. 31, 2000 release. Still, their music occasionally sounds a little too much like Rage Against the Machine.
Taipei Times staff writer Max Woodworth contributed to this article.Spring Scream Tickets
Four-day concert passes for Spring Scream will not be available at the concert site and must be purchased in advance. The passes cost NT$1,000 and are necessary for those who want to camp at the concert site. One-day passes cost NT$500 and may be purchased at the door. Advance tickets are available at the outlets listed below.
Taipei
Zeitgeist (
Taichung
Napoli, 424 Hwamei St. (
Tainan
Armory Pub (
Kaohsiung
DNA, 77 Minsheng 1st Rd., 4F
Transportation
Spring Scream will be held at the Liufu Ranch (
Spring Scream will also charter buses to Kenting, leaving from Taipei and Taichung late on the evening of Wednesday, March 4. Bus tickets cost NT$500 and may be purchased at Apa and Zeitgeist in Taipei and Bhoom and Napoli in Taichung. For additional information on Spring Scream, check http://www.springscream.com.Raving around the
clock in Kenting
For those who simply must have their dance music fix, there will be at least two raves being held in or near Kenting next week. One is a six-day party ending a day before Spring Scream and the other will be held on the same dates as the music festival. Both raves have a fairly standard line-up of DJs from around the country.
WHAT International Moonlight Party
WHEN & WHERE Long Beach, Kenting
TICKETS NT$1,500 for 6-day pass or NT$350 per day, available at Rock Candy in Taipei,
tel: (02) 8773-8578;
View Pub in Hsinchu, tel: (03) 521-9909;
O No Cafe in Taichung, tel: (04) 2327-8610;
Music Church in Kaohsiung, tel: (07) 282-9101
WHAT Kenting Tribal Massive 2001
(2001
When & where Kenting South Ocean
Camping ground (
from April 5 to April 7, 9pm to dawn.
TICKETS NT$1,000 for 3-night pass (presale only) or
NT$450 per night at the site, available at
Tower Records in Taipei, tel: 2389-2025;
Blue Records in Taichung, tel: (04) 375-6114;
Music Church in Kaohsiung, tel: (07) 282-9101;
X-Large in Tainan, tel: (06) 282-4140; and
The Fan U.S.A. in Pingtung, tel: (08) 737-5337|
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