Taipei hosts the 15th Migration Music Festival (流浪之歌音樂節) this weekend, with folk musicians from a variety of cultures coming to perform.
This year features an all-female line up of 11 acts from nine countries. The theme, “I’m not in my room” is a nod to Virginia Woolf, who famously said “a room of one’s own” was a necessity for women writers to flourish. The festival celebrates creative women breaking boundaries in the world of music.
Trees Music and Art’s (大大樹音樂圖像) artistic director Chung She-fong (鍾適芳) says she knew all the artists personally and wanted to create an event where they could all gather and share their talent.
Photo Courtesy of Trees Music and Art
“We hope to encourage female artists through this event,” Chung says. “Women face more obstacles as artists.”
Many of the invited performers took the stage at a press conference yesterday. Flamenco-inspired notes emerge from the guitar of Portuguese singer-songwriter Lula Pena, as her deep, husky voice holds the audience captive.
The Norwegian and Swedish trio of Golbma Jiena sing traditional pieces in the Sami language in three-part harmony, playing with glottal stops and contorting their bodies to produce other-worldly sounds.
The festival will not only showcase music rarely heard in Taiwan, but also screen short documentaries which tell stories of women who undergo great sacrifices to make music. Open discussions and storytelling will follow each screening.
The main performance space will be Zhongshan Hall (中山堂), with performances also held in small studios and cafes around Taipei, Chung says.
This year’s line up includes acts from as far afield as Somaliland and Scandinavia, as well as Taiwan’s own Aboriginal singer-songwriter Panai Kusui.
In recent weeks the Trump Administration has been demanding that Taiwan transfer half of its chip manufacturing to the US. In an interview with NewsNation, US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said that the US would need 50 percent of domestic chip production to protect Taiwan. He stated, discussing Taiwan’s chip production: “My argument to them was, well, if you have 95 percent, how am I gonna get it to protect you? You’re going to put it on a plane? You’re going to put it on a boat?” The stench of the Trump Administration’s mafia-style notions of “protection” was strong
Every now and then, it’s nice to just point somewhere on a map and head out with no plan. In Taiwan, where convenience reigns, food options are plentiful and people are generally friendly and helpful, this type of trip is that much easier to pull off. One day last November, a spur-of-the-moment day hike in the hills of Chiayi County turned into a surprisingly memorable experience that impressed on me once again how fortunate we all are to call this island home. The scenery I walked through that day — a mix of forest and farms reaching up into the clouds
With one week left until election day, the drama is high in the race for the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chair. The race is still potentially wide open between the three frontrunners. The most accurate poll is done by Apollo Survey & Research Co (艾普羅民調公司), which was conducted a week and a half ago with two-thirds of the respondents party members, who are the only ones eligible to vote. For details on the candidates, check the Oct. 4 edition of this column, “A look at the KMT chair candidates” on page 12. The popular frontrunner was 56-year-old Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文)
“How China Threatens to Force Taiwan Into a Total Blackout” screamed a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) headline last week, yet another of the endless clickbait examples of the energy threat via blockade that doesn’t exist. Since the headline is recycled, I will recycle the rebuttal: once industrial power demand collapses (there’s a blockade so trade is gone, remember?) “a handful of shops and factories could run for months on coal and renewables, as Ko Yun-ling (柯昀伶) and Chao Chia-wei (趙家緯) pointed out in a piece at Taiwan Insight earlier this year.” Sadly, the existence of these facts will not stop the
RSS