Dub has been around since Osbourne “King Tubby” Ruddock and Lee “Scratch” Perry developed it in the late 1960s, but the sound is relatively new for Taiwan.
Taimaica Soundsystem — its name is a combination of Taiwan and Jamaica — wants to establish this Jamaican reggae/dub sound here. The band’s music is an organic hybrid of live sound with electronic manipulation. Membership has grown from three musicians to nine over the last couple of years.
“We like dub music and lots of other music genres — that’s why we have nine members,” Taimaica member Dahu Hu said in an interview on Tuesday. “We all have different music backgrounds and it’s good for us ’cause we like people to dance with our music.”
PHOTO COURTESY OF TAIMAICA SOUNDSYSTEM
The band has both electronic and live musicians, with founding members Allen Liu (劉培倫), aka DJ @llenblow, and Liu Ru-lin (劉儒霖) on bass and guitar respectively, Shorty Liu (劉力予), aka DJ Shorty, on dub control and sampling, guitar player Angus Chen (陳俊安), Dahu Hu (胡汶其) on synthesizer, and drummer Agoo Lwi (呂思緯). The horn section is John Du (杜則翰) on trumpet and saxophonist Jaco Cheng (張朝凱). The sole female artist and the band’s newest member, Bambam Lin (林以樂), plays the organ.
Dub has an emphasis on bass that the band adheres to. Hu said: “The song usually starts from bass, and when the bass line is clear, then we start to jam.” The beat must be manipulated to drive the rhythm, and Hu said that drummer Lwi is “a robot — he can maintain our BPM [beats per minute] in a certain speed so we can sync our DJ stuff and the laptop’s BPM.” The band also uses a lot of delay effect. The result is reggae-dub with elements of funk and drum ’n’ bass.
Taimaica appears tomorrow night at Underworld with danceable, soulful reggae artists High Tide and ska band Skaraoke; on May 24 at an outdoor benefit concert for Myanmar Cyclone Relief; and at the Peace Festival, Hoping for Hoping, in June.
Nov. 11 to Nov. 17 People may call Taipei a “living hell for pedestrians,” but back in the 1960s and 1970s, citizens were even discouraged from crossing major roads on foot. And there weren’t crosswalks or pedestrian signals at busy intersections. A 1978 editorial in the China Times (中國時報) reflected the government’s car-centric attitude: “Pedestrians too often risk their lives to compete with vehicles over road use instead of using an overpass. If they get hit by a car, who can they blame?” Taipei’s car traffic was growing exponentially during the 1960s, and along with it the frequency of accidents. The policy
Hourglass-shaped sex toys casually glide along a conveyor belt through an airy new store in Tokyo, the latest attempt by Japanese manufacturer Tenga to sell adult products without the shame that is often attached. At first glance it’s not even obvious that the sleek, colorful products on display are Japan’s favorite sex toys for men, but the store has drawn a stream of couples and tourists since opening this year. “Its openness surprised me,” said customer Masafumi Kawasaki, 45, “and made me a bit embarrassed that I’d had a ‘naughty’ image” of the company. I might have thought this was some kind
What first caught my eye when I entered the 921 Earthquake Museum was a yellow band running at an angle across the floor toward a pile of exposed soil. This marks the line where, in the early morning hours of Sept. 21, 1999, a massive magnitude 7.3 earthquake raised the earth over two meters along one side of the Chelungpu Fault (車籠埔斷層). The museum’s first gallery, named after this fault, takes visitors on a journey along its length, from the spot right in front of them, where the uplift is visible in the exposed soil, all the way to the farthest
The room glows vibrant pink, the floor flooded with hundreds of tiny pink marbles. As I approach the two chairs and a plush baroque sofa of matching fuchsia, what at first appears to be a scene of domestic bliss reveals itself to be anything but as gnarled metal nails and sharp spikes protrude from the cushions. An eerie cutout of a woman recoils into the armrest. This mixed-media installation captures generations of female anguish in Yun Suknam’s native South Korea, reflecting her observations and lived experience of the subjugated and serviceable housewife. The marbles are the mother’s sweat and tears,
RSS