How is it that a Taiwanese indie band has recently recorded with one of the biggest stars in J-pop and no one has heard about it? Koda Kumi is a Japanese R&B singer who’s sold more than 15 million CDs in Japan, her music lately directed towards glitchy dance floor anthems. She’s been packaged as something like Japan’s Rhianna — at least lately — and her latest album, Bon Voyage hit Japan’s domestic Oricon charts at number one in February. One track on that album, Crank tha Bass, which stretches her EDM sound into the more hardcore territories of digital hardcore and dubstep, features Taiwan’s OVDS, a band which just put out its first album last weekend at The Wall.
OVDS has actually been around since 2004. They started out as the nu-metal band Overdose, then two years ago lead guitar Wang Sheng-fang (王聖方), who goes by the stage name Ki:Trust, started programming beats and pushing the sound into dubstep and dancefloor electro. The group rebranded themselves as OVDS (they want you to pronounce all the letters, O-V-D-S), and things have been happening quickly.
Last May, OVDS won a band competition on a Japanese TV program, Asia Versus on Fuji TV, and were then invited to tour Japan later in the year. Kumi spotted them at one of those gigs.
Photo Courtesy of OVDS
“She just saw us at the show and was interested in our music,” says Wang. “Later her company e-mailed us and asked us to collaborate on a song. They sent a demo with the basic song structure, then we finished it and mailed it back. Later we went to Tokyo and were in the studio with Koda Kumi for a full day to do the recording. After it was over, she invited us back to her apartment — a really expensive Tokyo apartment — and cooked us all a steak dinner.”
Kumi is set to play a concert for 10,000 or more fans in Taipei in August, and OVDS will make a guest appearance at the show. In Taiwan, this kind of opportunity is almost unheard of.
“In Japan, there are links between mainstream music and non-mainstream music. That really surprised us, because you don’t have that in Taiwan,” says OVDS drummer Stanley Liu (劉宣成), who also spent much of the last three years drumming with the electro-rock band Go Chic.
In shifting from Overdose to OVDS, the group has added a VJ, Pocky, as a full-time member of the band. While they prefer to call themselves “electro” or “electro-rock,” they are also not afraid of mainstream trends like EDM, nu-metal or dubstep. Their vocals are split between the polar opposites of Giorino, a blond elf who sings emotive melodies and is just one fashion consultant away from visual rock, and Kalis, who brings street style with rapid-fire MCing. It’s a sort of nu-metal formula for the dance floor, and it’s hard not to think of Japan’s Boom Boom Satellites. The backing music comes from a mix of programmed beats and live drums, guitar, bass and synth. Songs are built up like long-play dance tracks, with lots of synth builds, EDM drops and wobbing dubstep hooks bookending the vocal parts.
For OVDS’s new album, Heartbreak Resistance, this was all slickly realized by Amsterdam Mastering, a Dutch studio with links to the UK’s bass music scene.
“We really love this DJ called Noisia, who does everything there,” said Wang. “So we contacted the studio and asked them to do the mastering. They had never worked with any groups from Taiwan before, and were interested in the music, so they offered to do it. We were really psyched.”
Last month, OVDS also completed a two-week, eight-stop tour of the US east coast, including small gigs in rock bars in Boston, New York and Philadelphia. Drummer Liu has done this before. For the last several years, he doubled as drummer in Go Chic, playing multiple tours of Europe and select shows in the US.
“A lot of Taiwanese indie bands have taken government subsidies for touring, but not much has come of it,” says Liu. “I saw what we did with Go Chic, and I now I want to use that and see if we can take this farther.”
OVDS has its sights set on SXSW in 2015 and, in the short term, getting the album out on iTunes, Soundcloud and other international platforms. For the rest of the summer, they will be playing all around Taiwan, as well as the Peaceful Love Rock Festival in Okinawa, Japan. Upcoming local gigs include June 22 at Tada in Greater Taichung and June 5 at Pipe in Taipei. For full details, go to: www.ovds.com.
WARNING SHOTS TO EXPAT MUSICIANS?
On Tuesday, I got word that two Taipei live performance venues had recently received letters from a Taipei City labor office informing them that they are under investigation because “your business regularly organizes or allows performances by foreign nationals.” Follow-up calls to the Taipei City Department of Labor (DOL) could not confirm whether this is simply coincidence or a shift in enforcement policies. The office has however offered to meet and clarify certain issues. Keep an eye on this column for updates.
The DOL’s warning letters ask for the names of bands, names of band members, ID copies of band members, contracts with performers and publicity materials related to performances held within the last six months. If the venues fail to comply, they could be fined between NT$60,000 to NT$300,000.
Generally speaking, it is illegal for a foreign national to perform music (or DJ) in Taiwan without a special work permit, which most people refer to as a “performance permit.” Applications cost about NT$500 and take about a month to be processed.
The problem is that a performance permit is only good for one show, or at best a short series of performances. Arranging a gig in two or three weeks may not be possible, especially if you have to change the drummer at the last minute, or add an extra horn player.
It is possible to be deported for performing on a stage, or possibly even sitting on a stool in front of a few people in a bar, without a performance permit. This has happened before. American Scott Ezell, working as a translator for a local music label, had his ARC cancelled in 2004 for playing folk songs in front of a few dozen people in a cafe in Taitung. He was video-taped by the cops and found to be “working” without a permit, so the valid work permit he already had was cancelled. After months of appeals, he was deported and blacklisted from returning to Taiwan for a five year period. (He has not been back.)
And yet Taiwanese authorities have largely ignored the performance permit rule since at least the end of martial law, at least for small scale gigs. The rule itself was designed to end Filipino domination of music pubs in the 1980s and at the same time make sure foreign pop stars were paying taxes when they played to local stadium crowds.
If the government is worried about tax revenues, that is one thing. But treating this as a labor issue is idiotic and will do no good for Taiwan. By attacking a few music pubs, where foreigners mix freely with local musicians and occasionally perform for little or no money, the Department of Labor is in effect attacking both the foreign community and the indie music community.
Perhaps church choirs will be next. Remember, volunteering is also considered “work” according to Taiwan’s labor laws. Maybe the DOL would also like to go after expatriate involvement in community centers and charity groups. Just think how that would boost Taipei’s competitiveness and reputation as an international city.
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