Indie electronica duo NyLas will perform at Legacy Taipei (傳音樂展演空間) on Sunday as part of a festival organized by indie label A Good Day Records. Producer and songwriter Kay Huang (黃韻玲) will also join the performance.
The duo is comprised of vocalist and songwriter Labi Wu (吳嘵萓) and ARNY Ing (吳穎然), who is the group’s programmer and plays the keyboards. Both are members of the indie post-rock group We Save Strawberry (草莓救星) but have decided to venture out under a different moniker.
“We wanted to try out different sounds under a different group,” Wu said. He added: “This gives us the freedom not to be confined by one definitive sound.”
Photo credit: A Good Day Records
The duo’s 2004 EP Where Are You My Dear Uncle K is a delirious electronica outing that contemplates how people can find peace and contentment without the use of alcohol.
Wu’s fascination with fables led to their first full-length album NyLas (2009), a concept album that treats each song as a fairytale for grown ups. Conceiving the album as an illustrated book, Wu wrote and illustrated a short story for each of the album’s tracks.
Among them, Sun Circus (太陽馬戲班) takes a jibe at the horror element in Two Tigers (兩隻老虎), a familiar children’s song in Taiwan. Broken Crayon (幽魂腊腊) describes the fear of insomnia. The group’s eponymously titled debut album won them a nomination in the Best Duo category at Golden Melody Awards.
“With this adult storybook album, our fan base has broadened from literary youth (文青) to include children and mothers,” said Wu.
NyLas’s concert with Kay Huang will be based on “word of blessing,” a concept celebrating those things in life worth living for and cherishing.
The US war on Iran has illuminated the deep interdependence of Asia on flows of oil and related items as raw materials that become the basis of modern human civilization. Australians and New Zealanders had a wake up call. The crisis also emphasizes how the Philippines is a swatch of islands linked by jet fuel. These revelations have deep implications for an invasion of Taiwan. Much of the commentary on the Taiwan scenario has looked at the disruptions to world trade, which will be in the trillions. However, the Iran war offers additional specific lessons for a Taiwan scenario. An insightful
The problem with Marx’s famous remark that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, the second time as farce, is that the first time is usually farce as well. This week Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chair Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) made a pilgrimage to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) “to confer, converse and otherwise hob-nob” with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials. The visit was an instant international media hit, with major media reporting almost entirely shorn of context. “Taiwan’s main opposition leader landed in China Tuesday for a rare visit aimed at cross-strait ‘peace’”, crowed Agence-France Presse (AFP) from Shanghai. Rare!
What is the importance within the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) of the meeting between Xi Jinping (習近平), the leader Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), the leader of the KMT? Local media is an excellent guide to determine how important — or unimportant — a news event is to the public. Taiwan has a vast online media ecosystem, and if a news item is gaining traction among readers, editors shift resources in near real time to boost coverage to meet the demand and drive up traffic. Cheng’s China trip is among the top headlines, but by no means
Sunflower movement superstar Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆) once quipped that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) could nominate a watermelon to run for Tainan mayor and win. Conversely, the DPP could run a living saint for mayor in Taipei and still lose. In 2022, the DPP ran with the closest thing to a living saint they could find: former Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中). During the pandemic, his polling was astronomically high, with the approval of his performance reaching as high as 91 percent in one TVBS poll. He was such a phenomenon that people printed out pop-up cartoon
RSS