Chaz Bundick — who performs under the stage name Toro Y Moi — is one of those musical wunderkinds who could have only been produced in the Internet age. Sort of like the Timberland of producing music in your own bedroom, he’s a musical chameleon who learned to be a producer first, making glitchy sampladelic beats on his own as a young 20-something in Columbia, South Carolina, and has only gradually, on account of his success, come to play music “afk” (away from the keyboard) with other musicians, though his backing band is really only recreating the music that he first composed, sung and performed on various instruments and recorded himself. Bundick has produced seven albums and mixtapes, with his most recent studio product What For? breaking into the Billboard 200 and even including a few songs that could be considered hits on alternative radio.
He performs at The Wall on Monday in his second visit to Taiwan.
Bundick’s music has gone from chillwave (circa 2009) to abstract glitch (think Prefuse73 or Aphex Twin) to songs inspired by French and Italian film composers of the 1960s and 70s. Last year, he released two albums of completely different genres — What For?, released in January on the seemingly ancient pay-for-music record label model, was psychedelic guitar rock with vocals, and Samantha, released in August for free download on Souncloud.com, was a mixtape of abstract hip hop featuring rappers Washed Out, Kool A.D. and Nosaj Thing.
Courtesy of Icon Promotions
To be honest, I cannot wholeheartedly recommend this show, and I say this having already seen Toro Y Moi perform live at a large music festival. Toro Y Moi is one of those acts who might inspire me to investigate the anthropology of indie music, or to download one of his mixtape albums after hearing it pleasantly fill the background at a hipster cafe. It’s intriguing that he feels the need to adopt a moniker that makes it sound like there are at least two people involved — “the bull and me” is what you literally get if you translate the band name from Spanish and French. Millennials are not very Freudian, so I would guess that he made this choice not because he’s thinking about some alter ego, but rather because he’s worried people will think less of him if there is only one guy in the band.
But the facts are that, despite his cool haircut and hip glasses, Bundick can’t sing. He has a timid and under-trained voice that makes me lose interest. I suppose the amateurish delivery may be part of the appeal to some, as his fans are no doubt making music in their own bedrooms as well, but where he really gets into trouble is in his inability to convey any emotions as he sings, despite the fact that much of his music is essentially an homage to pre-90s R&B.
Playing live, usually with a drummer, bass player and guitarist behind him, one low key song follows another. While the musical ideas are jumping all over the map of human possibility, the emotional impact just sort of flatlines. It’s more like his fans are there to admire his “technical genius” than to embark on any sort of emotional ride. So grab a couple of Xanax and enjoy. Bundwick might not really like the label chillwave — in the post-modern school of indie rock, rule number one is to always deny any genre label anyone puts on you — but this is chillwave to the max.
Toro Y Moi performs Monday at 8pm at The Wall with opening band Sunset Rollercoaster (落日飛車). Tickets are NT$1,500, or NT$1,200 in advance through Famiport or http://kktix.com.
It is barely 10am and the queue outside Onigiri Bongo already stretches around the block. Some of the 30 or so early-bird diners sit on stools, sipping green tea and poring over laminated menus. Further back it is standing-room only. “It’s always like this,” says Yumiko Ukon, who has run this modest rice ball shop and restaurant in the Otsuka neighbourhood of Tokyo for almost half a century. “But we never run out of rice,” she adds, seated in her office near a wall clock in the shape of a rice ball with a bite taken out. Bongo, opened in 1960 by
Common sense is not that common: a recent study from the University of Pennsylvania concludes the concept is “somewhat illusory.” Researchers collected statements from various sources that had been described as “common sense” and put them to test subjects. The mixed bag of results suggested there was “little evidence that more than a small fraction of beliefs is common to more than a small fraction of people.” It’s no surprise that there are few universally shared notions of what stands to reason. People took a horse worming drug to cure COVID! They think low-traffic neighborhoods are a communist plot and call
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
Over the years, whole libraries of pro-People’s Republic of China (PRC) texts have been issued by commentators on “the Taiwan problem,” or the PRC’s desire to annex Taiwan. These documents have a number of features in common. They isolate Taiwan from other areas and issues of PRC expansion. They blame Taiwan’s rhetoric or behavior for PRC actions, particularly pro-Taiwan leadership and behavior. They present the brutal authoritarian state across the Taiwan Strait as conciliatory and rational. Even their historical frames are PRC propaganda. All of this, and more, colors the latest “analysis” and recommendations from the International Crisis Group, “The Widening
RSS