It was during the last song by Monkey Insane (
Monkey Insane edged out 10 other bands that competed through the sweltering Saturday afternoon heat to walk away with the top honors in Taiwan's only music awards to recognize amateur bands that have yet to release an album.
PHOTO: MAX WOODWORTH, TAIPEI TIMES
The competition was hard fought, according to the judge panel, with exceptional sets put in by the other participating bands, especially Mango Runs, Spunka, Relax One (
Stone ended up walking away with the Jury's prize, while Mango Runs and XL together shared the Indie Music Award.
The competition is held as part of the three-day Ho-Hai-Yan festival, which began on Friday and continued yesterday with a lineup of bands from Taiwan and abroad.
"There are far more people this year than any previous year," said Zhang 43, head of Taiwan Colors Music, which organized the first two days of festivities. "We've never seen this many people out here for a show before."
Indeed, the popular beach-side town of Fulong took on a carnival atmosphere throughout the weekend as thousands of concert-goers flooded in from Taipei and beyond for the annual event. Students, young office workers and even families with grandparents and tots in tow flooded the beach, turning it into a patchwork of towels and pick-up games of beach volleyball.
In previous years the bands performing on both stages tended toward the garage-band style that could impress with their raw energy if not their musical abilities. This year, however, the bands were of remarkably higher caliber.
"All the bands are really tight compared with last year. They can all really play their instruments and put together a set of solid music," Zhang said.
The music was set to get even better yesterday when MTV took over the reins of the festival "to put on its own lineup of groups from Taiwan and abroad. By yesterday afternoon crowds were swelling on the beach again to catch local favorites Sticky Rice (糯米團) and to see the headliners Jaurim from Korea and the Perishers from Sweden.
By any measure the festival was judged by organizers and concert-goers alike to be a smashing success. Even traffic was kept under control in the town as a heavy police force restrained crowds from swarming the coastal highway and extra trains carried the throngs into and out of town without much hassle.
When 17-year-old Lin Shih (林石) crossed the Taiwan Strait in 1746 with a group of settlers, he could hardly have known the magnitude of wealth and influence his family would later amass on the island, or that one day tourists would be walking through the home of his descendants in central Taiwan. He might also have been surprised to see the family home located in Wufeng District (霧峰) of Taichung, as Lin initially settled further north in what is now Dali District (大里). However, after the Qing executed him for his alleged participation in the Lin Shuang-Wen Rebellion (林爽文事件), his grandsons were
A jumbo operation is moving 20 elephants across the breadth of India to the mammoth private zoo set up by the son of Asia’s richest man, adjoining a sprawling oil refinery. The elephants have been “freed from the exploitative logging industry,” according to the Vantara Animal Rescue Centre, run by Anant Ambani, son of the billionaire head of Reliance Industries Mukesh Ambani, a close ally of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The sheer scale of the self-declared “world’s biggest wild animal rescue center” has raised eyebrows — including more than 50 bears, 160 tigers, 200 lions, 250 leopards and 900 crocodiles, according to
They were four years old, 15 or only seven months when they were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald and Ravensbruck. Some were born there. Somehow they survived, began their lives again and had children, grandchildren and even great grandchildren themselves. Now in the evening of their lives, some 40 survivors of the Nazi camps tell their story as the world marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most notorious of the death camps. In 15 countries, from Israel to Poland, Russia to Argentina, Canada to South Africa, they spoke of victory over absolute evil. Some spoke publicly for the first
I am kneeling quite awkwardly on a cushion in a yoga studio in London’s Shoreditch on an unseasonably chilly Wednesday and wondering when exactly will be the optimum time to rearrange my legs. I have an ice-cold mango and passion fruit kombucha beside me and an agonising case of pins and needles. The solution to pins and needles, I learned a few years ago, is to directly confront the agony: pull your legs out from underneath you, bend your toes up as high as they can reach, and yes, it will hurt far more initially, but then the pain subsides.
RSS