At first the Formoz Festival looked like it was going to be the slightly poor Japanese cousin of next week's Ho-Hai-Yan Rock Festival with the lineup's heavy tilt toward Japanese bands that you wouldn't know unless you were somehow really into Japanese rock. But that was before the organizers -- Taiwan Rock Alliance (TRA) -- finalized their roster and made a surprise confirmation that American folk-rock legend Michelle Shocked will be playing the festival's first night on Friday, July 30.
"Michelle Shocked actually approached us to be part of the Say Yes to Taiwan concerts, but it didn't work out. But we managed to secure the budget and work out the schedules for Formoz," said Freddy Lin (
There have also been additional last-minute confirmations that have filled up the roster considerably, with more local and foreign bands and even DJ Aki, the Japanese drum `n' bass master who will join local electronica artists like DJ Noodle, Lim Kiung
PHOTO COURTESY OF TRA
TRA further announced this week that Mr Funky, one of Korea's most popular pop rock acts, will be playing the festival as well. In total, 20 foreign bands are scheduled to play the festival, most of them from Japan, Korea and Hong Kong.
The addition of Michelle Shocked, though, brings some unprecedented star power to the annual festival that has been held in progressively larger forms for 10 years.
Michelle Shocked surprised even herself when she first appeared on the rock scene in the mid-1980s with her blend of gritty east Texas folk tunes and radical politics nurtured in squatter settlements in the US and western Europe.
She's been a credible voice of left-wing political rock for almost two decades now and thanks to her having bargained to keep the rights to her releases on Mercury Records, a lot of her music is being re-released. Her albums have jumped erratically in style with each release, so it's hard to predict what she'll play in Taiwan, but she'll probably use the occasion for a little poltical commentary, which should be interesting.
Lin said three-day passes for the festival will cost about NT$1,000, which is less than most one-off shows for major international bands that pass through Taipei. The entire lineup of the festival, including the dozens of local bands that will play, can be seen at the festival's Web site: http://www.formoz.com.
March 24 to March 30 When Yang Bing-yi (楊秉彝) needed a name for his new cooking oil shop in 1958, he first thought of honoring his previous employer, Heng Tai Fung (恆泰豐). The owner, Wang Yi-fu (王伊夫), had taken care of him over the previous 10 years, shortly after the native of Shanxi Province arrived in Taiwan in 1948 as a penniless 21 year old. His oil supplier was called Din Mei (鼎美), so he simply combined the names. Over the next decade, Yang and his wife Lai Pen-mei (賴盆妹) built up a booming business delivering oil to shops and
Indigenous Truku doctor Yuci (Bokeh Kosang), who resents his father for forcing him to learn their traditional way of life, clashes head to head in this film with his younger brother Siring (Umin Boya), who just wants to live off the land like his ancestors did. Hunter Brothers (獵人兄弟) opens with Yuci as the man of the hour as the village celebrates him getting into medical school, but then his father (Nolay Piho) wakes the brothers up in the middle of the night to go hunting. Siring is eager, but Yuci isn’t. Their mother (Ibix Buyang) begs her husband to let
In late December 1959, Taiwan dispatched a technical mission to the Republic of Vietnam. Comprising agriculturalists and fisheries experts, the team represented Taiwan’s foray into official development assistance (ODA), marking its transition from recipient to donor nation. For more than a decade prior — and indeed, far longer during Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) rule on the “mainland” — the Republic of China (ROC) had received ODA from the US, through agencies such as the International Cooperation Administration, a predecessor to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). More than a third of domestic investment came via such sources between 1951
The Taipei Times last week reported that the Control Yuan said it had been “left with no choice” but to ask the Constitutional Court to rule on the constitutionality of the central government budget, which left it without a budget. Lost in the outrage over the cuts to defense and to the Constitutional Court were the cuts to the Control Yuan, whose operating budget was slashed by 96 percent. It is unable even to pay its utility bills, and in the press conference it convened on the issue, said that its department directors were paying out of pocket for gasoline
RSS