June 26, 2005
News | Taiwan Chronicle #4: Coffee with Wan-ting Huang |
Towards the end of my trip, I interviewed Wan-ting Huang. I'd first met her by chance in Chicago a few years ago. Two bands we were playing in were sharing a bill at Schuba’s and we'd started talking. I was excited to find out that she was not only from Taiwan, but was the guitarist and a founding member of Ladybug, the trailblazing punk band. Ladybug was a fun band, but perhaps more important to their success, they were an all-female punk band that emerged just as the late-90s “riot grrl” trend caught fire in the States. Two U.S. tours ensued and the band played with indie luminaries June of ’44 and Yo La Tengo.
In 2000, Wan-ting broke with Ladybug to study sound engineering in Chicago, where studios like John McEntire’s Soma were perfecting the pristine organic/electronic hybrid that “post-rock” had become. She’s back in Taipei now, but the sonic imprint of those Chicago years can be found in the work of Varo, an instrumental project which highlights her skills in the studio and on a laptop more than her guitar work.
At a time when Taiwan seems awash with three-chord indie girl bands, Wan-ting, now 30, seems to neither want nor receive any credit as a pioneer. She’s moved on, making sophisticated new music that has gotten little attention at home, but has raised the eyebrows of tastemakers at BBC Radio and the Wire abroad. Blazing her own trail has meant not only recording her own music, but releasing it. Her 7” Vinyl label puts out CDs by Varo and other bands from Taiwan and Japan.
We met up at Wan-ting’s favorite Taipei coffee house and had a wide-ranging conversation about indie music in Taiwan. She began by telling me why she does everything herself...
READ FULL ENTRY...June 21, 2005
News | Taiwan Chronicle #3: Karaoke Radio |
In this instalment, we travel to the betel nut-red heart of Taiwan. It's a little wild south of Taipei, with beautiful mountains and girls in glass boxes. And in the little town of Puli, a favorite old folks’ pastime is singing telephone karaoke on the radio. In fact, it’s so popular that it’s practically the only thing on. Play the mp3s as you read the travelogue in the full entry. It doesn’t get any more Formosan than this…
Puli FM-1: reverb chit-chat | Puli FM-2: caller sings | Puli FM-3: radio host sings | Puli FM-4: host-caller duet | Puli FM-5: passionate grandpa sings an epic
READ FULL ENTRY...June 11, 2005
What better way to take a break from documenting my trip to Taiwan than to read about another Asian oldies lover's recent trip to Japan. Sheila is the New York-based editor of Cha Cha Charming (a global girl group site), a freelance writer and former intern at Sony Japan. She went back to Japan for a visit in April and attended a CD release party for the "Moodsville Presents Shouwa Dance Party" compilation (something I'd love to get my hands on).
As Sheila explains it,
Shouwa is technically the term for Emperor Hirohito's reign (1926-1989), but it is more commonly used as a reference to '60s-'70s Japan. The Shouwa era marked the introduction of kayoukyoku (Japanese popular songs), an umbrella term that covers '60s beat girls (Linda Yamamoto, Jun Mayuzumi), Group Sounds (The Tigers, The Carnabeats), and countless pop idols (Mieko Hirota, Ayumi Ishida). I'm a Shouwa girl- a little too obsessed with '60s Tokyo, which is why this dance party turned out to be one of the greatest nights of my life.
Looks like it was a hell of a party, featuring Pizzicato Five's Konishi, Moodsville Records' Hirabayashi, and Ballroom Records' Uchimon, who got naked (see photo).
June 06, 2005
News | Taiwan Chronicle #2: Hunting Vinyl among Ghosts & Owls |
For used vinyl hunters, the rainy, semi-tropical isle of Taiwan can seem like an arid desert. My own efforts are illustrative: though I came equipped for the hunt with the Mandarin Chinese phrase “second-hand records” (er shiow chang pien), two weeks of its frequent use reaped only a bounty of earnest head scratching. People understood what I was asking for, but had no idea where to find such a thing.
The explanation for the lack of vintage LPs is simple: the Taiwanese don’t like anything old. When an object has outlived its usefulness in the cramped condo or apartment of the average Taiwanese family, it quickly finds itself out in the alley for garbage pickup. (And as a minor unintended consequence, foreign, tail-chasing miscreants—er, visiting teachers of English as a Second Language—are able to furnish their apartments for free.) But it’s not simply an economy of high disposable income vs. low personal space that sends lao dongxie (old things) to the alley. Despite being a sophisticated population and unsung heroes of the silicon age, the people of Taiwan do honestly—and fearfully—believe in ghosts. In fact, during my stay, a newspaper survey of college students confirmed my years of anecdotal experience: 90% admitted a belief that spirits roam the island.
READ FULL ENTRY...June 03, 2005
News | The Taiwan Chronicles |
Your faithful editor is back from a three-week trip to Taiwan, the island nation/renegade Chinese province (take your pick) where I lived for nearly four years. It was ten years ago that I left Taiwan, but that distinctive Taiwan vibe was still there when I returned--crowded, lively, warm, friendly, fearlessly high-tech, surprisingly traditional. I'll chronicle my journey in five or so entries, each focusing on a different aspect of pop music:
There will be an overview of the Taiwanese soundscape, a report on the challenges of hunting vintage vinyl in a place where no one keeps anything old, an audio journey to the heart of the island in search of old people singing karaoke on the radio, a look at indie rock in Taiwan and a wide-ranging interview with one of the genre's most interesting artists. I've also accrued over fifty Taiwan LPs and CDs on this trip, so there's lots of Taiwan goodness to come...
On a sad note, one of my cameras broke right before I left and the other got lost, so please pardon the lack of pics.
News | Taiwan Chronicle #1: Taipei’s Sonic Ecosystem |
I kick off the series with impressions of aural culture shock (the experience a pair of foreign ears is likely to undergo upon arrival in Taiwan's capital city) and a general description of the island's current mainstream and indie music trends...
The ears too must bear their burden in the sensory barrage that greets the visitor to Taipei, Taiwan, one of the most densely populated places on Earth. Certainly it seems at first that the eyes and nose catch the brunt of things, a dizzying array of sights and smells: movement and neon, food and incense, but first and foremost the human throngs that Taipei-ers call people mountain/people sea. But the ears must adapt to another kind of volume intensity. Truth be told, the Taiwanese don’t much care for quiet, which is good because it’s in very short supply.
Taipei’s sleek and efficient underground rail system means it’s no longer in danger of unseating Bangkok as Asia’s Greatest Traffic Cluster-Fuck, but the city still teems with busses, cars and motorcycles. These set a humming, whooshing, squealing, beeping soundstage upon which a myriad other noises vie for lead actor: cell phones, sidewalk barkers, karaoke emanations from who-knows-where, political sound trucks, the electric-entrepreneurial wails of cart-pushing bun vendors and knife-sharpeners, the amplified snake-charmer reeds and wailings of paid mourners in funeral processions… and from every shop (which essentially means "every doorway" in this most thoroughly mercantile metropolis), music, music, music.
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