The indie scene
Although formulaic Mando-pop ballads still dominate on the airwaves and inside KTVs, indie-music acts are gaining on major-label artists. Thanks to rampant piracy, Internet downloading sites and competition from international record labels, idols like Jay Chou (周杰倫) and Jolin Tsai (蔡依林) can no longer expect to sell a million copies of each new release. Meanwhile, the talent and depth of the underground scene improves by the year. Popular college-rock groups like Sodagreen (蘇打綠) and Totem (圖騰) are mini-stars and sell out medium-sized venues like The Wall (這牆), no matter how often they perform. Still, with the exception of yearly festivals like Spring Scream and Formoz, the contemporary music listings in newspapers like the Taipei Times or Pots (破報) can look the same week in and week out. Take venue. Plug in two random local bands. Repeat.
Enter the first Antipop! tour, which visited Taipei for two shows last month before heading to Taichung. Organized by punk rock band Consider the Meek, Antipop! aims to raise the underground scene's game by establishing regular contact between local musicians and audiences and quality foreign (mostly Japanese) indie bands who otherwise would be unable to play here.
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES FILE PHOTO
Of course, the first Antipop! needed to succeed in order for it to become a regular event - and it did. At one of the Taipei shows, more than 60 people were packed into a space designed to hold significantly fewer. Hardcore punks in Mohawks and leather jackets jumped around and moshed with English teachers to The Meek's politically charged set and Japanese girl punks Akiakane's impressively loud display. And a new band, Rabbit Is Rich (兔子很有錢), served notice that a group of inexperienced local college students can share the stage with much more seasoned artists.
The reaction was overwhelmingly positive. One satisfied man in the audience waxed ecstatic about the "super-friendly" crowd and "ridiculously cheap booze." According to Meek frontman Kevin Lee, Akiakane was completely caught off guard by the audience's intensity. "They always thought of Taiwanese crowds as being shy," he said.
Expect an equally aggressive vibe for Antipop! 2, which kicks off Thursday at Taichung's Groovecity before heading to Taipei for two shows at APA Lounge 808 in Ximending (西門町). The lineup includes The Vickers, billed as one of Tokyo's best live bands, Consider the Meek, Rabbit is Rich, To a God Unknown and the Deadly Vibes. Discounted presale tickets (NT$350) can be purchased online by writing to leekrecords@hotmail.com, or by calling Kevin Lee at 0917-500-128. - Ron Brownlow
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES FILE PHOTO
Foreign bands
They came, nearly 40,000 people saw them, and they rocked.
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES FILE PHOTO
Fans of Linkin Park began lining up early in the morning for the best spots on the field and in the stands at Zhongshan Football Stadium (中山足球場), for what organizers touted as Taiwan's highest-selling foreign concert since Michael Jackson.
Despite drizzle and a start that was delayed by 40 minutes, people arrived chanting "Linkin Park, Linkin Park," and when the California nu-metal band finally took to the stage, the 38,000 mostly young fans in attendance broke into a frenzy of cheers and shouts.
The chanting continued throughout the concert, with rhythm guitarist Mike Shinoda - who was clearly the crowd's favorite - in the front, and singer Chester Bennington bouncing around the stage shouting vocals in a heavy-metal rasp. Linkin Park played electronica, rapcore and heavy metal numbers during their 100-minute show and had fans begging for more. Their stellar performance, combined with the fact that tickets sold out, will hopefully make Taipei a more enticing destination for other international acts. -Noan Buchan
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES FILE PHOTO
Literature
On Nov. 10, the winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize, a new component of the prestigious Man Booker International Prize, was announced. The prize was picked up by China's Jiang Rong (姜戎), with his novel Wolf Totem (狼圖騰). What made the run up to this announcement exciting to Taiwan residents was the fact that a local writer Zheng Qian-ci (鄭千慈), who writes under the name Egoyan (伊格言), a former medical student, made it onto the long list for the award with his book Fleeting Light (流光). While not exactly unprecedented, it was another step in putting Taiwan's literature onto the international stage.- ian bartholomew
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES FILE PHOTO
Cuisine
On a more mundane level, the 2007 Taipei International Newrow Mian Festival (2007臺北國際牛肉麵節) once again put some of Taiwan's best beef noodle chefs up against each other for the coveted title of best beef noodle chef in Taipei city and county. Prize winners over the years have routinely benefited with a massive surge in business, and competition was intense. This year, Master Hung's Noodle Shop (洪師傅麵食棧), located at 72, Jianguo N Rd Sec 2, Taipei City (北市建國北路二段72號; tel: 2500-6850), which came second at the event two years ago, took the first prize for both the beef in brown broth and beef in clear broth categories in the finals held at the Xinyi International Club (信義公民會館) on Nov. 4. Hung Chai-chan (洪財展) won for his beef brisket noodles in clear broth, while brother Hung Chin-lung (洪金龍) won for this Unique Noodles (獨當一麵).
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES FILE PHOTO
In the creative category, where chef are allowed to make new interpretations for this classic dish, chef Chen Yung-you (陳永祐) of Big Brother Q's Handmade Udon Noodles (Q老大手打讚岐烏龍麵), located at 15-51 Nanyang St, Taipei City (台北市南陽街15號之51, tel: 2383-2552) took the prize for a dish of beef noodles that included eggs cooked in hot spring water and spicy pickled cabbage, served cold, offered under the name "Mad Cow Noodles" (牛也瘋狂). - Ian Bartholomew
Visual arts
The visual arts had a bumper year with the National Palace Museum playing host two major exhibitions: one from abroad and the other local. Treasures of the World's Cultures - The British Museum After 250 Years was a chance for Taiwanese to see part of the collection of one of Western Europe's great museums. This was balanced by the NPM's own Grand View series that covered rarely seen painting and calligraphy, Ju ceramics and books from the Song Dynasty. The exhibition was three years in the making and was a chance to see works that have not been on public display since the museum's inception.
- Ian Bartholomew
Contemporary dance
It wasn't really too tough to decide which was the best dance performance of the year. Akram Khan and Sidi Larni Cherkaoui's two-man, two-mannequin show, Zero Degrees, at Novel Hall in September was the hands-down winner.
Zero Degrees is a piece about crossing borders physically and mentally; it's about cultural differences and basic humanity, about life and death. I saw two out of the three performances, and given the chance, would gladly see the show again.
Khan and Cherkaoui are a study in contrasts - Khan is shorter, darker, more muscular, more intense, more tightly coiled. Cherkaoui is so loose and lanky that at times it appears that he could not possibly have any bones in his body at all - a Moroccan-Flemish acrobatic yogi hybrid. Their interactions with each other - and with the foam rubber versions of their bodies that sculptor Anthony Gormley created - were fascinating.
Just as the two men were a visual yin and yang, Zero Degrees was about shifting opposites: gentle, rhythmic movements and explosive energy. It was funny, yet it could make you cry. Above all, as the show came to an end with Cherkaoui's haunting a cappella rendition of a Hebrew song, it was a reminder that dance has the power to reach across the barriers of language, religion and culture to touch your soul.
When asked originally to pick the best and worst dance performances of the year I was stuck. It wasn't that there weren't bad shows, but I was lucky enough to have avoided seeing them. Of the shows I did see, even the ones that were disappointing had some redeeming features. So I thought of the ones that I had talked the most about to friends and realized that the top two were just that, the top two. I couldn't mention one without the other.
It helped that they appeared in Taipei just one week apart. If Zero Degrees touches the soul, Pina Bausch's Masurca Fogo makes you glad to be alive.
Incandescent was the term that kept popping up in my head as I watched the Tanztheater Wuppertal's performance at the National Theater. The eclectic selection of music complimented the series of dance/theatrical vignettes and surreal time-lapse video sequences.
The quirky world of Masurca Fogo is a far cry from the usual Bausch meditations on alienation. There is nothing earth-shaking or profound about the piece; it's just fun. But it made those who were lucky enough to have tickets to the sold-out run feel very fortunate indeed.- Diane Baker
Classical music
In the closing days of this year, Taiwan's National Symphony Orchestra (NSO) announced that someone had been found to take over at least part of the work of its former music director Chien Wen-pin (簡文彬), whose contract expired at the end of June. Gunther Herbig, born in the former East Germany but resident since 1984 in the US, will be Artistic Advisor and Principal Guest Conductor for the 2008 to 2010 seasons.
The job description carefully avoids calling Herbig the NSO's new music director. Instead, he will perform with the NSO for at least five concerts per season, the orchestra's administration said on Friday, and will also assist with artistic planning, programming, training and "general evaluation."
Gunther Herbig was heard in Taipei back in April when he conducted the NSO in two fine concerts, one featuring Richard Strauss' Eine Alpensinfonie, the other Bruckner's Symphony No 7.
Taipei can thus be seen as putting its money on a tried and trusted foreign veteran rather than risking a local newcomer. Herbig's reputation is nonetheless high, and he's widely seen as an artist of discernment and integrity. Let's hope his years with the NSO will prove to be his crowning achievement.
Many internationally-acclaimed soloists and orchestras visited this year, several in connection with the 20th anniversary of the opening of Taipei's National Theater and National Concert Hall. Mischa Maisky, Lang Lang (郎朗), James Galway, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Berlin Baroque Soloists and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra were among the most celebrated.
But one particularly memorable event was the concert of the Russian National Orchestra under Mikhail Pletnev (apparently unwell at the time, but taking the rostrum nonetheless). Their performance of Shostakovich's supposedly celebratory, but actually ironic, Symphony No. 5 will have achieved a lot if it helped familiarize Taiwanese music-lovers with the work of a composer Asian audiences sometimes take to with difficulty. The six marvelous Symphonic Poems of Liszt they also included on their tour will hopefully have served the same function.
This year, in other words, has been a rich year for classical music lovers in Taiwan. But it hasn't always been the most famous composers, or indeed artists, who have given the greatest pleasure. - Bradley Winterton
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