Yo La Tengo has finally made it to Taiwan. The owners of the Roxy bars tried to bring them two years ago to complete a series of concerts including Superchunk and June of 44. And even then, rumors of Yo La Tengo coming were still the main buzz for many in Taipei's rock 'n' roll pubs. Tomorrow night at 9pm, the rock trio will end the anticipation when they take the stage at the Formoz Festival.
In an interview earlier this week with the Taipei Times, Ira Kaplan, Yo La Tengo's guitarist, vocalist and major creative force said that he and his band mates, Georgia Hubley (Kaplan's wife) and James McNew, have little idea what to expect of the upcoming show. At the time of the interview, he said the group had only basic knowledge of Taiwan and was unfamiliar with most of the bands at this weekend's festival. Still, they were excited about coming.
PHOTO COURTESY OF MATADOR RECORDS
Recently returned from London, Kaplan said he's picked up a guidebook he'll probably read on the plane, and is also reading a novel, Iron & Silk, in preparation for Taiwan.
For better or for worse, however, Yo La Tengo may be in for some surprises when they get here. Though the band has been playing internationally since 1987, they've only been to Asia three times, each time to Japan. Also, Iron & Silk may not be the best prerequisite reading material. It's more or less a memoir of an American English teacher in post-Cultural Revolution China of 1982.
Fortunately, a music festival is a music festival, and should offer the band less of the unexpected. Kaplan foresees that the only major constraints on the group's stage performance will be the Formoz schedule, which limits their performance to about one hour, about half the time they normally play.
"Some of our songs are long, you know, and we always try to play a variety. So the show unfolds slowly. A short set feels a little artificial at times," he said.
Once, in London, when the group was only given around 30 minutes to open up for what Kaplan called "two more popular bands," he said they filled the entire set with a single jam. "It was kind of all or nothing ? the only other thing we thought of was playing eight of our tightest, most recognizable songs, but we decided against it," he said.
For equipment, he's bringing guitars, an organ and a couple of amps. Sensing Formoz's hard rock focus, Kaplan explained the need to bring the amplifiers, saying, "All they have at the concert is Marshalls, [the preferred amp of metal merchants like Iron Maiden, Yngwie Malmsteen and Def Leopard] which is kind of the antithesis of what we're about."
The group arrived in Taiwan on Wednesday with a planned stay of at least four days, though Kaplan mentioned the possibility that he and Hubley may stay longer.
As for the group's activities after Taiwan, he said "we're not sure," commenting that they're "kind of" in a song-writing phase right now.
"What passes for songwriting with us is jamming," he explained, describing a process in which they come up with something like a 20-minute jam, then prune it and pare it until a song comes out of it.
"We're in a habit of working slowly when we write songs. A lot of times, we just wait for a song to appear."
In the end, the process generates the highly-tuned and finely-controlled compositions that appear on Yo La Tengo's albums, songs that are almost always products of some studio (most recently Nashville) even though they seldom have what would be called a standard studio feel. That's probably because, for Kaplan, the songs are never static nor fixed. He understands, on one hand, that careful control and selection are necessary to create an album. And as a sort of corollary, he realizes that live performances present something different altogether.
"There's something exciting about live performances," he said. "You do it and it's gone. It frees you up to do different things."
The reason the band has never put much live material onto albums, he said, is because it would either take an incredible amount of work to re-listen to thousands of hours of live recordings or else they'd fall into the trap of producing something "cheap and easy."
"But you know, it does make sense to do it," he said, examining the notion in retrospect. "Because the live element is different. I realize our live performances have a lot of things that you don't find on our albums, but so far, we haven't really directed our energy towards capturing that."
One direction the band has directed its energy toward, however, is cinema. Yo La Tengo's first film project, Electr-o-pura, doubled as an album in 1995. Then, last year for the San Francisco Film Festival, the group made a 90-minute soundtrack to accompany what Kaplan called "underwater documentaries" by a French director, Jean Painleve.
These days, in fact, he said, "I almost prefer watching a good movie to going out and seeing a band."
At present though, cinema is still only a vague yet perhaps imaginable future for Yo La Tengo. In the meantime, there is absolutely no question that Kaplan, a former rock critic, and his bandmates are fully invested in music. Truth be told, they know tonnes of it and can play tonnes of it. They have even filled the occasional concert and one complete CD, Fakebook, with nothing but cover songs.
Calling those covers "appropriations," as one easily could, might make it easy to get even more philosophical about Yo La Tengo, calling the band post-modern, post-structural or even post-rock. Reviewers have gone almost as far, comparing their music to a huge variety of genres and styles, describing the music as "modal," "freeform" and "improvisational" and sometimes noise, because in segments, it can be. All too often, the group is compared to groundbreaking and seminal rock bands (dare one mention the Velvet Underground) that too many other good bands are compared to.
But as for the question of genre, Kaplan, a bit Socratic at times, said simply, "we've never answered that question."
The farthest Kaplan says he's gone is calling Yo La Tengo "a guitar band, but even that leaves a lot of leeway because it encompasses so much. And then again, in most shows we'll play one or two songs without any guitar. I'll play the organ instead."
Likewise, the group doesn't dwell much on influences. "I've never accepted the equation that your favorite band influences or equals your music," he said.
Locally, however, many groups, most notably Sugar Plum Fairy (
Fortunately for such admirers, Kaplan says the band usually does things to make themselves accessible to shy or introverted fans, especially through activities like selling T-shirts and signing CDs. Though he deferred to say exactly how that might happen in Taipei, he hinted that one way or another, it probably will.FridayWood Stage
1150am Mess
1240pm Reproduction (複製人)
0130pm Editec
0220pm Snow Dance (雪舞)
0310pm Seventh Movement (第七樂章)
4pm Captain Peanut (花生隊長)
0450pm Charlie Swiggs
0540pm Curse (詛咒)
0630pm Very Ape (Japan)
0720pm The Wall Tigers
0810pm 1976
9pm Sugar Plum Fairy (甜梅號)
0950pm Out Of Control (失控)
Wind Stage
Fortune (旺福)
Hardcore Chicken Rice (強力雞腿飯)
Deliverymen (售貨員)
Bite The Fungus (噬菌體)
Tizzy Bec
Mazer (Hong Kong)
Strawberry Liberator (草莓救星)
Dark Force (黑暗勢力)
Hyponic (Hong Kong)
Cloud Panther (雲豹)
Red Nail Polish (紅色指甲油)
Obstinate (強辯)
Nipples
Psychedelic Kindergarten (迷幻幼稚園)
Pig Fight (豬打架)
Show Girls (鋼管辣妹)
SaturdayMountain Stage
>
3pm Opposition Party (反對黨, Singapore)
5pm Softball (Japan)
7pm Clippers (夾子, Taiwan)
9pm Yo La Tengo (US)
11pm Tolaku (脫拉庫, Taiwan)
Fire Stage
4pm Anarchy (無政府, Taiwan)
6pm Magane (Japan)
8pm Yellow Machinegun (Japan)
10pm Biohazard (US)
Sunday
Mountain Stage
2pm Milk (Canada)
4pm The Chairman (董事長, Taiwan)
6pm Backquarter (四分衛, Taiwan)
8pm Chthonic (閃靈, Taiwan)
10pm Megadeath (US)
Fire Stage
3pm Garlic Boys (Japan)
5pm Echo (Taiwan)
7pm Celluloid (賽璐璐, Taiwan)
9pm LMF (Hong Kong)
11pm Joy Topper (豬頭皮, Taiwan)
May 11 to May 18 The original Taichung Railway Station was long thought to have been completely razed. Opening on May 15, 1905, the one-story wooden structure soon outgrew its purpose and was replaced in 1917 by a grandiose, Western-style station. During construction on the third-generation station in 2017, workers discovered the service pit for the original station’s locomotive depot. A year later, a small wooden building on site was determined by historians to be the first stationmaster’s office, built around 1908. With these findings, the Taichung Railway Station Cultural Park now boasts that it has
Wooden houses wedged between concrete, crumbling brick facades with roofs gaping to the sky, and tiled art deco buildings down narrow alleyways: Taichung Central District’s (中區) aging architecture reveals both the allure and reality of the old downtown. From Indigenous settlement to capital under Qing Dynasty rule through to Japanese colonization, Taichung’s Central District holds a long and layered history. The bygone beauty of its streets once earned it the nickname “Little Kyoto.” Since the late eighties, however, the shifting of economic and government centers westward signaled a gradual decline in the area’s evolving fortunes. With the regeneration of the once
The latest Formosa poll released at the end of last month shows confidence in President William Lai (賴清德) plunged 8.1 percent, while satisfaction with the Lai administration fared worse with a drop of 8.5 percent. Those lacking confidence in Lai jumped by 6 percent and dissatisfaction in his administration spiked up 6.7 percent. Confidence in Lai is still strong at 48.6 percent, compared to 43 percent lacking confidence — but this is his worst result overall since he took office. For the first time, dissatisfaction with his administration surpassed satisfaction, 47.3 to 47.1 percent. Though statistically a tie, for most
In February of this year the Taipei Times reported on the visit of Lienchiang County Commissioner Wang Chung-ming (王忠銘) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and a delegation to a lantern festival in Fuzhou’s Mawei District in Fujian Province. “Today, Mawei and Matsu jointly marked the lantern festival,” Wang was quoted as saying, adding that both sides “being of one people,” is a cause for joy. Wang was passing around a common claim of officials of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the PRC’s allies and supporters in Taiwan — KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party — and elsewhere: Taiwan and
RSS