For indie-music fans, the usual bands will be playing at this weekend’s Megaport Music Festival 2010 (大港開唱), but in a not-so-usual locale.
The festival, which started last weekend and was organized by Taipei venue The Wall (這牆), takes place at Kaohsiung’s Pier 2 Art District (高雄駁二藝術特區), an area of Kaohsiung Port that has been converted into a public space with three outdoor stages.
Concertgoers get to enjoy harbor-side sea breezes while watching performances by more than 40 acts, including beloved folk-rock artist Deserts Chang
(張懸) and garage rockers The White Eyes (白目樂團). Megaport’s main stage located in a former warehouse will host performances by American group The Secret Machines and pop sensation Sodagreen (蘇打綠).
The festival is a homecoming for musicians in groups like LTK Commune (濁水溪公社), The Peppermints (薄荷葉), Aphasia (阿飛西雅) and The Hindsight (光景消逝), bands that are based in Taipei, but all of which have members who grew up in Kaohsiung.
“Many of these bands feel a strong connection to their hometown,” said The Wall’s Orbis Fu (傅鉛文), who is overseeing the festival. “For everyone involved, this is something that they’ve always wanted to do.”
Fu, who grew up in southern Taiwan but now lives in Taipei, hopes Megaport will provide a boost to the indie-music scene outside of the capital. “The music coming out of Tainan, Kaohsiung and Taichung — this kind of diversity is really important for [Taiwan’s overall] indie-music scene,” he said. “A lot of bands from the south think: ‘We’re from the south, no one knows about us.’ I think this is wrong.”
A few hometown favorites feature prominently at Megaport. Grunge band koOk and pop-punks FireEx (滅火器) played headlining shows last weekend. Indie-rock outfit Orange Doll (橘娃娃) and ska group Shy Kick Apple (害羞踢蘋果) appear this Sunday.
Fu, who also works as FireEx’s promoter and manager (the group is signed to The Wall’s affiliated label, Uloud Music), said the Kaohsiung band’s growing success offers an encouraging example for local musicians.
“Bands like them will have an effect on other Kaohsiung bands, who will think ‘Yes, I have a chance to make it big. We can be like them, we can be more successful, we can gain the acceptance of a larger audience,” he said.
In addition to Megaport, The Wall has been active in the city for the past year, using the Pier 2 space to hold concerts by bands with widespread followings such as 1976 and Tizzy Bac.
Several notable international acts are also part of this weekend’s lineup: The Secret Machines is a trio that combines electronica with 1970s rock guitar riffs and Led Zeppelin-esque drum beats, and Rebuilding the Rights of Statues (重塑雕像的權利) is a Beijing-based indie-electronica band that gained international attention after an appearance at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas. The group also caught the ear of renowned electronic musician and composer Brian Eno, who contributed keyboard tracks on the band’s debut EP Cut Off!.
With three other stages, dubbed Star, Dawn and Aurora, Megaport brings to mind another festival organized by The Wall, Taipei’s now defunct Formoz Rock Festival, Taiwan’s equivalent of Japan’s Fuji Rock.
But where Formoz drew in crowds of young revelers and die-hard rock fans, Megaport has attracted “lots of students and even families,” said Spykee Fat, a DJ in the underground scene who is working for The Wall as the festival’s promoter. “[The bands] really like this place because it’s very close to the port and it’s close to Kaohsiung City.”
Located just five minutes from Kaohsiung MRT’s Yanchengpu Station (鹽埕埔站,O2站), Pier 2’s easy access and harbor setting adds to the festival’s appeal, said Fu. “You can walk around the city ... and then go see a show. It’s very relaxing.”
Jan. 6 to Jan. 12 Perhaps hoping to gain the blessing of the stone-age hunter-gatherers that dwelt along the east coast 30,000 years ago, visitors to the Baxian Caves (八仙洞) during the 1970s would grab a handful of soil to bring home. In January 1969, the nation was captivated by the excavation of pre-ceramic artifacts and other traces of human habitation in several caves atop a sea cliff in Taitung County. The majority of the unearthed objects were single-faced, unpolished flake tools fashioned from natural pebbles collected by the shore. While archaeologists had found plenty of neolithic (7,000 BC to 1,700
Famed Chinese demographer Yi Fuxian (易富賢) recently wrote for The Diplomat on the effects of a cross-strait war on demography. He contended that one way to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is by putting the demographic issue front and center — last year total births in the PRC, he said, receded to levels not seen since 1762. Yi observes that Taiwan’s current fertility rate is already lower than Ukraine’s — a nation at war that is refusing to send its young into battle — and that its “demographic crisis suggests that Taiwan’s technological importance will rapidly decline, and
In 1990, Amy Chen (陳怡美) was beginning third grade in Calhoun County, Texas, as the youngest of six and the only one in her family of Taiwanese immigrants to be born in the US. She recalls, “my father gave me a stack of typed manuscript pages and a pen and asked me to find typos, missing punctuation, and extra spaces.” The manuscript was for an English-learning book to be sold in Taiwan. “I was copy editing as a child,” she says. Now a 42-year-old freelance writer in Santa Barbara, California, Amy Chen has only recently realized that her father, Chen Po-jung (陳伯榕), who
When the weather is too cold to enjoy the white beaches and blue waters of Pingtung County’s Kenting (墾丁), it’s the perfect time to head up into the hills and enjoy a different part of the national park. In the highlands above the bustling beach resorts, a simple set of trails treats visitors to lush forest, rocky peaks, billowing grassland and a spectacular bird’s-eye view of the coast. The rolling hills beyond Hengchun Township (恆春) in Pingtung County offer a two-hour through-hike of sweeping views from the mighty peak of Dajianshih Mountain (大尖石山) to Eluanbi Lighthouse (鵝鑾鼻燈塔) on the coast, or
RSS