If you want to hear good techno, you go to Korner. But sometimes, independent promoters step in and shake things up. Ultra Dance Society (UDS) is a not so new initiative by local promoter Tan Yuan-chun (譚元淳), who is best known by his alias Disk0kidz. Tan is also known for taking the much-loved basement venue and brightening it up by throwing parties whose music direction caters to more than just hardcore electronic music fanatics.
Instead, UDS embraces a variety of music and artists, Tan said in an interview with the Vinyl Word, because he never wants his parties to be specific to any one genre. Nu-disco, funk, house, electronica, hip-hop, techno, breaks and UK bass are all styles of sound that he explores when looking for artists to book. The diversity is apparent in past bookings like Breakbot, Jupiter, Adam Freeland, Evil Nine, Surkin and French Kiwi Juice, which UDS has all turned into household names in Taiwan.
“UDS in Taiwan is labeled as underground music, and as the EDM scene rose so fast in Taipei, less clubs and venues were willing to cooperate with us because of our different environment — this really frustrated me for a while,” Tan said.
Photo Courtesy of Ultra Dance Society
He added that he hopes mainstream clubs become more open to all kinds of music and promoters, no matter what music they bring, so long as the quality is good.
“After all, the music is the main thing on the dance floor,” Tan said.
It’s hard sometimes, however, to draw people to your dance floor when the DJs you book are relatively obscure. Well, obscure by local standards but quite the opposite to the rest of the world. So Tan goes about promoting UDS parties in a way that teaches people about the musical culture. First, his music policy puts quality over any sort of quantity, and in doing that he has built himself a solid reputation as a promoter with impeccable musical taste who doesn’t necessarily care about how many fans he draws. Then, instead of repeatedly blasting his event on social media, he takes the time to blog on various forms of social media about his artists, promoting their backgrounds and their musical catalogues, and blasts that instead. It helps him educate while spreading the word.
His latest discovery is Cherokee, a French house duo from France. When asked why his bookings tend to usually hail from France, Tan said that he finds French dance music samples a lot of music from the 70s and 80s, when music had a more melodic groove. Compared to other dance music genres, it’s music that can be played anytime and anywhere.
Cherokee, made up of DJs Darius and Hana Yori Kichou Na, bring their interpretation of French house to Korner tonight, which Tan describes as being a cutting edge rare and re-edit of disco blended with a lot of sexy sounds. To get an idea, listen to their slow and sultry remix of Daft Punk’s Something About Us, which garnered over 40,000 plays in the first few days of release. It now sits at over one million. It perfectly captures the essence of the French house movement and who Cherokee is, and especially what Ultra Dance Society wants to be.
■ Cherokee plays tonight from 11:30pm to 5am at Korner (inside The Wall, 這牆), B1, 200, Roosevelt Rd Sec 4, Taipei City (台北市羅斯福路四段200號B1). Tickets are NT$800 at the door, and admission includes one drink.
Taiwan, once relegated to the backwaters of international news media and viewed as a subset topic of “greater China,” is now a hot topic. Words associated with Taiwan include “invasion,” “contingency” and, on the more cheerful side, “semiconductors” and “tourism.” It is worth noting that while Taiwanese companies play important roles in the semiconductor industry, there is no such thing as a “Taiwan semiconductor” or a “Taiwan chip.” If crucial suppliers are included, the supply chain is in the thousands and spans the globe. Both of the variants of the so-called “silicon shield” are pure fantasy. There are four primary drivers
The sprawling port city of Kaohsiung seldom wins plaudits for its beauty or architectural history. That said, like any other metropolis of its size, it does have a number of strange or striking buildings. This article describes a few such curiosities, all but one of which I stumbled across by accident. BOMBPROOF HANGARS Just north of Kaohsiung International Airport, hidden among houses and small apartment buildings that look as though they were built between 15 and 30 years ago, are two mysterious bunker-like structures that date from the airport’s establishment as a Japanese base during World War II. Each is just about
Two years ago my wife and I went to Orchid Island off Taitung for a few days vacation. We were shocked to realize that for what it cost us, we could have done a bike vacation in Borneo for a week or two, or taken another trip to the Philippines. Indeed, most of the places we could have gone for that vacation in neighboring countries offer a much better experience than Taiwan at a much lower price. Hence, the recent news showing that tourist visits to Pingtung County’s Kenting, long in decline, reached a 27 year low this summer came
The female body is a horror movie waiting to happen. From puberty and the grisly onset of menstruation, in pictures such as Brian De Palma’s Carrie and John Fawcett’s Ginger Snaps, to pregnancy and childbirth — Rosemary’s Baby is the obvious example — women have provided a rich seam of inspiration for genre film-makers over the past half century. But look a little closer and two trends become apparent: the vast majority of female body-based horror deals with various aspects of the reproductive system, and it has largely been made by men (Titane and The First Omen, two recent examples
RSS