After bursting onto Taipei’s live music scene in 2012, La Cumbia del Sol quickly became one of the country’s go-to party bands, which was not exactly expected, considering there was virtually no audience for cumbia music at the time.
Cumbia was born as a mix of African drum rhythms and indigenous flute music in Colombia. When it was adapted to big band in the 1930s and 40s, horns — especially the clarinet — took over the melodic lead. By the 60s, cumbia had gone international, with regional variations appearing in Argentina, Mexico and elsewhere.
Local bands dabbling in Latin rhythms usually played to niche audiences at Sappho, Bobwundaye or other clubs featuring jazz, folk or acoustic music. But La Cumbia played everywhere, packing rock live houses like Revolver and Pipe and drawing a diverse crowd that included night clubbers, rockers, office types and teetotaling salsa dancers.
Photo courtesy of Jamie MacTography
La Cumbia del Sol has just released its second album, Pachamama, which includes seven original songs plus a cover of an old Italian folk tune they have made their own, Bella Ciao. The band will tour around Taiwan in the coming weeks to promote the release, starting with a gig at Bobwundaye in Taipei tomorrow night.
The band is led by Fabian “Fao” Torres, a multi-instrumentalist from Colombia who has lived in Taiwan since 2009. His musical journey has been truly diverse. Torres, 38, started with rock ‘n’ roll in high school before going on to serious study of classical music and music theory in university. He has studied cumbia in his native country, the tabla in India, traditional percussion in Turkey and the shamisen (a three-stringed lute) in Japan.
As a performer, Torres has taken these traditional forms in even more interesting and sometimes postmodern directions, mixing noise with African drumming while in Japan, electronics and live percussion in the legendary Goa dance party scene in India and now developing a new cumbia hybrid in Taiwan. In La Cumbia del Sol’s current lineup, he plays bass, though he truly shines when on percussion.
In 2012, with other musicians he met while drinking in Shida Park (師大公園), Torres formed the band La Cumbia Balkanska, a startling fusion of the traditional acoustic dance music of South America and Central Europe. Players hailed from Serbia, Colombia, Guatemala, France and elsewhere.
After a lineup shuffle in 2013, the group moved to a purer cumbia sound and rechristened itself La Cumbia del Sol. A core of players emerged, including Torres, Guatemalan bass player Carol Avila, French clarinetist Emmanuel Brotte, American trombone player Andy Francis and Taiwanese Alicia Lin (林亞蒨) on percussion, with other players cycling through on guitar, drums and horns. (Avila left the band and returned home earlier this year.)
“It’s very hard to find musicians that can play this music,” Torres says. “It’s not rock and it’s not jazz, but somewhere in between. You need someone who can really give it this certain kind of punch.”
The new album features punchy, upbeat horns, group choruses and cumbia’s steady driving downbeats. All original tracks are at least six minutes long, because “that’s the length of the compositions I have,” Torres says. “I don’t need to do a short song for radio, so why do that?”
The final tune, Bella Ciao, is thought to date to the 18th century and served as an anthem for Italy’s anti-fascist movement around the start of World War II. La Cumbia frequently uses it to close concerts, or as an encore.
Torres says there has been heavy metal versions of the song, but never a cumbia one. The band was able to record the song in one take.
“People connect us with that song … With that, the album feels really rounded, really complete,” he says.
The band’s upcoming performances are as follows:
Tomorrow at 10pm with Red Cliff and Peaks at Bobwundaye (無問題), 77, Heping E Rd Sec 3, Taipei City (台北市和平東路三段77號). Admission is NT$500 with one drink, or NT$400 with a “proper Halloween costume.”
Nov. 7 at 10pm with High Tide, Skaraoke and DJ @llenblow at Triangle, 1 Yumen St, Taipei City (臺北市中山區玉門街1號). Admission is NT$300 with one drink.
Nov. 14 at 10:30pm at Rocks, B1, 219, Juguang St, Kaohsiung City (高雄市莒光街219號B1). Admission is NT$300 with one drink.
Details of a Tainan show the weekend of Nov. 13 has yet to be announced.
The arithmetic is straightforward and uncomfortable. By the end of 2025, Taiwan had committed itself to a 50-30-20 electricity mix — half natural gas, 30 per cent coal, 20 per cent renewables. The Ministry of Economic Affairs’s (MOEA) own monthly energy reports tell a different story. Natural gas reached 47.8 per cent of generation last year. Coal stood at 35.4 per cent, comfortably above its target ceiling. Renewables came in at 13.1 per cent, well short of the 20 per cent Taipei had pledged a decade earlier. Installed renewable capacity reached roughly half of the 12 gigawatts (GW) the government
There are shadowy cabals plotting to sell out Taiwan to be annexed by China, by invasion if necessary. Fortunately, they are buffoons. In 2019, former Bamboo Union gangster and founder of the China Unification Promotion Party (CUPP), Chang An-le (張安樂, colorfully known as “White Wolf”), led a protest at the Legislative Yuan against comments made by then-premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) that in the event of an attack by China, he would never surrender, but would protect the nation by fighting to the end, even if he only had a broom. Chang had party members bring a wooden casket that they
It seems every few days one bumps into one of those “real man” comments in which Taiwan is urged to “face reality” or similar, and “make a deal,” with the speaker implying that soon it will be too late. “Deal” advocates always present themselves as having a superior grip on reality, and the manly ability to make the “hard choice.” Their testosterone-laden language often echoes that of Taiwan sellout advocates. Note that such commentary always specifies a process (“make a deal, work with, make progress”), never the end state of what occupation by a violent authoritarian colonialist state will entail. In
Taiwan’s drone exports are taking off, fuelled by the war in Ukraine, as Taiwanese companies seek a stake in the fast-growing global market for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). Low-cost drones used for reconnaissance and strikes are in high demand as governments around the world boost defense spending in the face of intensifying conflicts. A relative new player in the increasingly competitive industry, Taiwan’s pitch is to be an “Asian hub” for the production of UAVs and components free of Chinese materials, or “non-red.” That means its UAVs can be up to three times more expensive than their Chinese competitors, like the world’s biggest
RSS