Wire on Taipei experimental music

by lawrence

March issue of The Wire features new music in Taipei in the Global Ear section. My friend SHI Wenhua, who is an experimental filmmaker currently based in Boulder, Colorado, has produced a scan for us. Click on the pic to view the readable version.

Add this post to del.icio.us




17 Comments »

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

  1. “based in Boulder, Colorado”
    Do you think everybody knows where’s “Colorado” located, which reminds me last year I’ve asked a guy where’s he from, he said “Texas”, and that’s it. Maybe we are still not Americanised enough.

    Comment by a — February 25, 2006 #

  2. hi a:

    No, I don’t. But I think this is irrelavant: those who knows, well, knows; those who don’t, don’t have to know. If they’re indeed interested, the name of Shi Wenhua was not only bolded but also hyperlinked.

    Comment by lawrence — February 25, 2006 #

  3. “reminds me last year I’ve asked a guy where’s he from, he said “Texas”, and that’s it. Maybe we are still not Americanised enough.”

    his one word respone was correct.

    ask any texan.

    its an independent nation. nothing to do with the usa…

    ;-)

    Comment by zhao — February 26, 2006 #

  4. to zhao:
    oh, that’s why. thanks:)

    to lawrence and dajuin:
    “…was not only bolded but also hyperlinked.”
    sounds reasonable, it reminds me another thing(forgive me changing topic rapidly), let’s take a look at a few pages(for example: news page) of Chinesenewear, some clickable text are hyperlinked but not bolded, or decorated if you like, I understand it might be a tradeoff to keep the consistency of entire website style, but for few ppl who are a bit passive to discover suprises, those informations could be missed, anyway, thanks to dajuin’s efforts.

    Comment by a — February 26, 2006 #

  5. Neither Chinese New Ear nor Global Noise Online is commercial site, not only in the sense that we’re not making any money from them, but also in the sense that, a different kind of user-friendliness should be considered when evaluating our sites’ design. In some cases, we simply regard style-consistency as of greater importance than (passive)(lazy) users’ convenience. After all, these sites are about new things, unadventurous, non-exploratory people wouldn’t have come in the first place.

    Comment by lawrence — February 26, 2006 #

  6. a:

    thanks for reminding me about the links style! it’s something that i’m still working on (it’s always “in progress” and unfinished). i meant for the text to be “kind of grey” and the links to be full white (#FFFFFF), and there indeed should have been a distinction between linked and non-linked text. contrary to what Lawrence said above, it is indeed a site designer’s responsibility to differentiate between plain text and hyperlinks, regardless of commercial leanings or whatever - it’s just an interface design basic guideline. i’ll fix this problem soon.

    Comment by Dajuin — February 26, 2006 #

  7. Now, more importantly, this Wire article is very misleading, to say the least. Capitalizing on the current political situation in Taiwan is totally beside the point. i’ll write more if i ever find enough interest in this.

    Comment by Dajuin — February 26, 2006 #

  8. Should I laugh or should I cry?

    Comment by LiWei — February 26, 2006 #

  9. I remember a Global Ear article on Beijing from a few years ago. I don’t remember if they mentioned a single Beijing artist; they spent the whole time talking about pirated or dakou CDs being the main connection to western music. A worthy subject, I think, but it seemed to be a copout to avoid talking about actual music. (My memory is fuzzy on this; perhaps there was more than I remember.)

    Comment by Adam — February 27, 2006 #

  10. i wrote that global ear article on beijing. i mentioned a few bands. and djs. and even Wang Lei, i think… cant remember exactly…

    the reason it focused on dakou, was the editors specifically asked for an article about dakou in beijing. not a rundown of the beijing music scene (electronic or otherwise).

    i met then editor Rob Young at a music festival in rome. at breakfast with him and biosphere, we talked about how kids access music. i mentioned that dakou were a big deal before the whole soulseek download thing… and rob asked me to write a short piece about this… i hate to write, so i put it off for a bit, but then they kept bugging me, and i put some ideas down in an email. it wasnt even meant to be a global ear… but they could find no other place for it in the mag. so thats where it went…

    i think, actually, beijing shanghai and sz/guangzhou ALL need a good global ear “scene report” for the Wire. either me or steve barker can arrange to get it printed if anyone out there wants to write it…

    btw. was pangu really “exiled” for that show in taibei? i thought he came back to the mainland and i can swear ive seen him in beijing or somewhere down south after that show…

    Comment by zhao — February 27, 2006 #

  11. My mistake, Christiaan. I should know better not to trust my memory of an article I read before I knew anything about Beijing music.

    Comment by Adam — February 28, 2006 #

  12. no worries man. you are right, in fact, that it focused more on dakou and bootlegs than the actual artist… which is why it would be nice if someone wrote a proper global ear… although, its hard to do with the diversity in beijing these days… but maybe someone can do it about shanghai, or gz/sz or even hangzhou where there are very thriving music communities…

    Comment by zhao — February 28, 2006 #

  13. I think it’s no mystery that the Wire likes to steer articles, and this definitely happened with Taipei - I wrote it - but I don’t think I have anything to apologize for either.

    Yes, Pangu really did get exiled. After the 2/28/2004 Taipei gig, they were on their way back to China when they got a cell phone call in the Bangkok airport. A friend was telling them their house was under surveillance and not to come back. One Beijing government official was even quoted in the HOng Kong press (Ming Bao, I think) saying they would be “reeducated” if they returned. I’ve been in touch with Ao Bo several times, even spoken to him on the phone in Sweden, and he’s definitely in exile.

    Dajuin, I’m guessing you would have wanted a Taipei article focusing more purely on music, and I think with the experimental electronic end of the scale, politics are not an issue. But with concerts like Say Yes to Taiwan (changed this year to East Core Asia, which happened last week, and Pangu was there) where bands are not allowed in if they don’t take certain political positions, the Taiwan-China politics question is something many many Taiwan bands and record labels have to deal with. They wish they didn’t have to, but they do. I’m personally against music getting too political because I think it’s better at building bridges, and I hope it can do that here. A few Taiwanese bands (BB Bomb, Fire E.X.) have done short China tours, but unfortunately no Chinese bands are coming to Taiwan - due to both governments.

    Anway, initially, this article was just about Pangu - but the Wire folks didn’t think it appropriate, so we bargained it into a story that also included WIMB and Varo. I even brought up the point that this was a bit of a Frankenstein approach, but they were into it and let it run like that. Sure there were other things to write about, but you can’t cover everything. Feel free to let me know what you think I missed.

    Comment by dave — March 2, 2006 #

  14. these global ears are quite difficult to deal with. every time a city is written about, friends in that city either gloat that they were in the wire, or complain cos the article didnt mention their scene.

    i think the brief is too wide. for beijing, if someone like jon campbell wrote the article perhaps he would prefer to focus on the new generation of live acts that play the traditional “rock” venues. others would focus on the DJs who are making their own music, yan jun would write about waterland kwanyin and the quiet improv group. then there are the folkies, the death metal guys and those holdout punks…

    global ear works best for me when it focuses on a single event in a city. like the electronic music fest in istanbul. or even a performance by Wang Lei and IZ at the transmusicales in Rennes, France.

    i know nothing about the various taibei scenes. but FM3 have been invited a few times to play gigs there. that it never happened was not a government or transit problem. that was easy to sort out. it was more that the promoters we were dealing with didnt want us once they realised that “rock star” dou wei wasnt a member of FM3!!!

    oh well, maybe someday zhang jian will marry someone famous and we can play in taiwan!

    Comment by zhao — March 2, 2006 #

  15. […] This usually comment-free blog has seen a surge of discussion lately, do read Christiaan Virant (ID: zhao)’s defense of FM3 and Buddha Machine as well as the bicker about randomness/control in laptop performance between him and Zbigniew Karkowski (ID: zbigniew) here. Also not to be missed is this “what is a valid Global Ear article (on The Wire)” discussion. And perhaps now it is helpful to remind you, dear readers, that there is a feed for the comments of GNO available for subscription. The URL of the feed is: […]

    Pingback by Global Noise Online » Something’s going on in the comments — March 2, 2006 #

  16. This article showed us that:
    we should start and end up with politics, in between, make some art.

    Comment by a — March 2, 2006 #

  17. With my experience of rock festivals in recent years, most of the Taiwan musicians/bands (any genres) don’t have any political stance (of course, they may have different opinion.) Yes, the festivals are funded by the government, some organizers (like TRA of Formoz & Say Yes to Taiwan) may have strong political agenda, but the participants of the festivals don’t need to agree to (or even express any of) them to get permission. Unless, unless you only go to the political festivals like SYtT, or only take a political view to these music.

    Comment by wolfenstein — March 2, 2006 #

Leave a comment

XHTML: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

times.
Entries and comments feeds. Valid XHTML and CSS.