Born in South London in 2002 as an amalgamation of UK garage, Jamaican dub, and two-step, dubstep’s bass heavy sound has been making waves here over the past two years. Tomorrow a party aptly named Strictly Dubstep will be the first event in the country to focus solely on the music that makes speakers wobble.
One of tomorrow night’s DJs is a new face on the music scene. Radio Ra (known as Eoghain Bellamy on his ARC), explained why dubstep is his music of choice: “To me, dubstep represents a contemporary and ever-evolving branch of electronic dance music. If drum and bass is the bastard electronic child of hip-hop, then dubstep is the bastard electronic child of reggae and dub.”
When pressed to pinpoint exactly what it was he enjoyed about one of the most popular up-and-coming styles of music, Ra said, “I like the tempo and the power. I love the sci-fi sounds in some of the newer dubstep. I’ve always loved reggae and I’ve always loved robots. Somehow, the two are married in this genre.”
Photo Courtesy of Eoghain Bellamy
Another newbie who will be dropping big tunes tomorrow is Syko (birth name Nick Sykes), a hip-hop and dubstep DJ. He says dubstep “represents what, as a kid, I imagined music from the future would sound like. Unlike so many modern forms of dance music, dubstep is full of complex, syncopated rhythms and innovative sounds, and of course, soul-shaking bass lines. A good dubstep track has everything I look for in a dance track.”
Rob M, another selector at Strictly Dubstep, has always been into drum and bass, so he wasn’t impressed with dubstep in the beginning. “I didn’t really like the first forms of dubstep because they lacked a real energy and never really got me going,” he said in an e-mail interview. “After about two years, when drum and bass producers switched to making dubstep, it all changed for me. Dubstep became much more musical and had harder hitting, using bass lines that you would expect to here in drum and bass tracks.”
Over the past few years, pop artists such as Britney Spears, Rihanna, LMFAO and Flo Rida have added elements of dubstep to their hit singles. Once an underground genre rises to a certain level of popularity, an inevitable backlash follows. It seems that Skrillex, the posterboy for dubstep, is loathed by as many people as love his aggressive sounds.
Rob M can understand why clubbers in Taiwan, who are accustomed to electro-pop remixes played at peak hours at 125 beats per minute, don’t quite get dubstep yet. “Some people still find it hard to dance to since it’s only 70 beats per minute,” he said.
Radio Ra, who prefers harsher sounding dubstep, thinks that the genre is for everyone. “I’m sure most electronic dance music lovers could find some tracks they find palatable,” he said. “The stuff I like, I would compare it to heavy metal insofar as it hits you hard and is dissonant. People get scared off with a common reaction being, ‘What the fuck is this?’”
Syko’s style runs the full range of the dubstep spectrum from melodic, progressive remixes of popular tracks to hard-hitting dance floor shakers. “Because dubstep is the coming together of so many different genres of music and really pushes the boundaries of how we define music, it’s bound to induce a strong reaction from listeners,” Syko said. “Some people just ain’t ready for it!”
Strictly Dubstep is tomorrow from 11pm to 5am at Revolver 1-2, Roosevelt Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市羅斯福路一段1-2號). On the Net: www.revolvertaipei.com. Admission is NT$250, which includes a drink.
In 2020, a labor attache from the Philippines in Taipei sent a letter to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs demanding that a Filipina worker accused of “cyber-libel” against then-president Rodrigo Duterte be deported. A press release from the Philippines office from the attache accused the woman of “using several social media accounts” to “discredit and malign the President and destabilize the government.” The attache also claimed that the woman had broken Taiwan’s laws. The government responded that she had broken no laws, and that all foreign workers were treated the same as Taiwan citizens and that “their rights are protected,
A white horse stark against a black beach. A family pushes a car through floodwaters in Chiayi County. People play on a beach in Pingtung County, as a nuclear power plant looms in the background. These are just some of the powerful images on display as part of Shen Chao-liang’s (沈昭良) Drifting (Overture) exhibition, currently on display at AKI Gallery in Taipei. For the first time in Shen’s decorated career, his photography seeks to speak to broader, multi-layered issues within the fabric of Taiwanese society. The photographs look towards history, national identity, ecological changes and more to create a collection of images
The recent decline in average room rates is undoubtedly bad news for Taiwan’s hoteliers and homestay operators, but this downturn shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. According to statistics published by the Tourism Administration (TA) on March 3, the average cost of a one-night stay in a hotel last year was NT$2,960, down 1.17 percent compared to 2023. (At more than three quarters of Taiwan’s hotels, the average room rate is even lower, because high-end properties charging NT$10,000-plus skew the data.) Homestay guests paid an average of NT$2,405, a 4.15-percent drop year on year. The countrywide hotel occupancy rate fell from
March 16 to March 22 In just a year, Liu Ching-hsiang (劉清香) went from Taiwanese opera performer to arguably Taiwan’s first pop superstar, pumping out hits that captivated the Japanese colony under the moniker Chun-chun (純純). Last week’s Taiwan in Time explored how the Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) theme song for the Chinese silent movie The Peach Girl (桃花泣血記) unexpectedly became the first smash hit after the film’s Taipei premiere in March 1932, in part due to aggressive promotion on the streets. Seeing an opportunity, Columbia Records’ (affiliated with the US entity) Taiwan director Shojiro Kashino asked Liu, who had
RSS