The eighth Migration Music Festival (流浪之歌音樂節) gears up this weekend with a series of lectures and workshops to lay the groundwork for its big opening concert at Bitan (碧潭) in Taipei County next Friday, which will be followed by two days of concerts at Taipei City’s Zhongshan Hall (台北市中山堂).
This year, the theme of the festival is “South.” According to project coordinator Alice Lin (林怡瑄), this theme evolved from the development of Growing Up Wild (野生), the most recent album by Golden Melody winner Lin Sheng-xiang (林生祥) published by Trees Music & Art (大大樹音樂圖像).
Lin is an artist based in Meinung (美濃), Kaohsiung County, and got his start with the creation of the protest band Labor Exchange (交工樂隊). The cover art for his new album features wood-block prints by Cantonese artist Wang Liang (王亮), whose work will also feature in an exhibition associated with the festival (tomorrow until Thursday at Taipei Artist Village).
“Both these artists are from the geographic south of their countries ... In many countries the south tends to be more culturally diverse and have more complex ethnic interactions. In Taiwan, we in the north often talk about ‘southerners’ and see them as somewhat different ... so we wanted to explore this idea of a southern perspective,” Lin said.
One of the international groups that will be visiting is Filipino band Nityalila, which blends together classical Indian music with Filipino folk music and the environmental concerns of sing-songwriter Nityalila Saulo. Lo Cor de la Plana comes from Marseilles and seeks to revive Occitan culture and language, which was once widely spoken in parts of southern France. Also from Marseilles is Sam Karpienia, who brings together rebetiko (a kind of Greek urban folk), flamenco and Provencal musical traditions. Kol Oud Tof draws on the musical traditions of Israel, Morocco and memories of the Arab expansion into the Iberian peninsula to create its own unique sound, while Habib Koite from Mali is noted for a “pan-Malian” musical sound. Along with Lin Sheng-xiang, these artists will perform at the Grand Opening on Oct. 2, and give individual concerts at Zhongshan Hall on Oct. 3 and Oct. 4.
Another part of the festival that will take place in Chiayi has been titled Project South (南計畫). It includes a collaborative project between Taiwanese artists in the beiguan (北管) group Qing He Xuan (慶和軒) and pipa (琵琶) specialist Chung Yu-feng (鍾玉鳳), with Japanese guitarist Ken Othake and Finnish folk musician Pekko Kappi, who have all been living in the town of Budai (布袋), Chiayi County, for the last month working on a musical fusion that will be presented at the concert in Chiayi on Sunday and at the final concert in Taipei on Oct. 4.
Migration Music Festival is largely the result of the efforts of Trees Music & Art founder Chung She-fong (鍾適芳) to promote world music in Taiwan. It achieved significant success with free concerts in Da-an Park.
After the 2007 festival was catastrophically disrupted by bad weather, the festival has been struggling to recreate its earlier success in a more reliable indoor environment. This has necessitated replacing the hugely popular free outdoor concerts with indoor performances. “It has been difficult to overcome the expectation that the shows should be free,” Lin said, but through the use of preliminary lectures and demonstrations, as well as the sale of cheap one- and two-day concert passes, she hopes that this hurdle can be overcome.
Lin said that the Migration Music Festival, while primarily designed as a way of introducing the rich variety of non-mainstream music to Taiwan, also takes an active part in promoting greater multi-cultural awareness in Taiwan. “This is particularly the case with the increasing presence of foreign brides and domestic help,” Lin said. Nityalila’s performance has been scheduled for the afternoon of Oct. 4, when organizers hope that Filipino domestic workers might be best able to attend. Special ticket prices of NT$150 for Filipino nationals will be available for that concert.
Taiwanese chip-making giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) plans to invest a whopping US$100 billion in the US, after US President Donald Trump threatened to slap tariffs on overseas-made chips. TSMC is the world’s biggest maker of the critical technology that has become the lifeblood of the global economy. This week’s announcement takes the total amount TSMC has pledged to invest in the US to US$165 billion, which the company says is the “largest single foreign direct investment in US history.” It follows Trump’s accusations that Taiwan stole the US chip industry and his threats to impose tariffs of up to 100 percent
From censoring “poisonous books” to banning “poisonous languages,” the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tried hard to stamp out anything that might conflict with its agenda during its almost 40 years of martial law. To mark 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the anti-government uprising in 1947, which was violently suppressed, I visited two exhibitions detailing censorship in Taiwan: “Silenced Pages” (禁書時代) at the National 228 Memorial Museum and “Mandarin Monopoly?!” (請說國語) at the National Human Rights Museum. In both cases, the authorities framed their targets as “evils that would threaten social mores, national stability and their anti-communist cause, justifying their actions
In the run-up to World War II, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, began to fear that Hitler would launch a war Germany could not win. Deeply disappointed by the sell-out of the Munich Agreement in 1938, Canaris conducted several clandestine operations that were aimed at getting the UK to wake up, invest in defense and actively support the nations Hitler planned to invade. For example, the “Dutch war scare” of January 1939 saw fake intelligence leaked to the British that suggested that Germany was planning to invade the Netherlands in February and acquire airfields
The launch of DeepSeek-R1 AI by Hangzhou-based High-Flyer and subsequent impact reveals a lot about the state of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) today, both good and bad. It touches on the state of Chinese technology, innovation, intellectual property theft, sanctions busting smuggling, propaganda, geopolitics and as with everything in China, the power politics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). PLEASING XI JINPING DeepSeek’s creation is almost certainly no accident. In 2015 CCP Secretary General Xi Jinping (習近平) launched his Made in China 2025 program intended to move China away from low-end manufacturing into an innovative technological powerhouse, with Artificial Intelligence
RSS