What is music? To most, the parameters are well-defined. This is a pop song, that is rock. This is metal, and that is classical. But then there is the kind of music that rages and claws so vehemently against anything our collective conscious might call musical, it threatens the very definition of music. This is what noise artist Merzbow makes.
Born in Japan in the mid-1950s, the man also known as Masami Akita started out playing drums in high school bands. He and his band mates crafted an already well-worn style shaped by the likes of Cream and Jimi Hendrix. Before long, Akita’s tastes drifted toward improvisation and free jazz, before he lost all interest in what might be defined as music in a traditional sense.
It was then that his infatuation with noise began. “I quit playing and tried other things like tapping the floor of the studio or rattling the chairs,” Akita says of his early forays into the genre that would consume him for the next four decades to the present day.
Photo courtesy of Galneryus
From 1973 onward, Masami never glanced back at his early classic rock leanings. Leaving music and throwing himself into the virtually limitless void of noise was nothing but liberation, says Akita.
“Quitting something is so thrilling to me because it tells me what’s important. At the time, I was struck by Pierre Schaeffer’s Symphonie pour un homme seul and the poetry of Surrealism and Dadaism. All this led me to making music only by noises and sounds generated solely by non-instruments.”
Nowadays, Akita mainly takes his inspiration from the world of beasts, with themes of animal rights dominating his creative output in both the abstract and concrete sense. His latest album Takahe Collage, which was released in April, is devoted entirely to the birds of New Zealand.
Photo courtesy of Galneryus
Merzbow performs Saturday night at The Wall, B1, 200, Roosevelt Rd Sec 4, Taipei City (台北市羅斯福路四段200號B1). Doors open at 7:30pm and the show begins at 8pm. Supporting acts are Fujui Wang (王福瑞), Betty Apple (鄭宜蘋), Dino (廖銘和) and Wolfenstein (謝仲其). Tickets are NT$800 in advance, NT$1,200 at the door.
■ Moving on to things slightly more accessible. Japan’s Galneryus will be at Legacy in Taipei on Sunday night, bringing their brand of European-flavored power metal to a city that has long favored the genre over metal’s more extreme sub-categories. You can expect lots of galloping beats and soaring leads along with those testicles-in-a-vice falsetto vocals that have been hallmarks of power metal since the early eighties. The band, the members of which prefer to go by single names only, was founded in 2001, and has become just as well known for its original studio output as it has for its penchant for releasing cover albums.
Galneryus’ latest album, the verbosely titled The Ironhearted Flag Vol. 1: Regeneration Side, is actually a cover of themselves: They’ve rework their earlier material. For guitarist and band founder Syu, it is a way of commemorating the band’s history, and also a means of marking an important milestone in Galneryus’ career.
“We wanted to do it to celebrate our 10th anniversary,” Syu explains, “and we wanted to honor the sound and the members of our previous era. That’s the main reason we decided to do it.”
Syu’s classically trained fingerprints are all over the album’s tracks, spanning the band’s entire history. Though now known for his fleet work on the fretboard, Syu began his musical training on the violin at the age of six, and then moved on to the piano. He even took up the drums in fourth grade. The multi-instrumentalist counts global superstars X-Japan among his biggest influences, and their sound is readily apparent in Galneryus’ style, minus the visual kei elements in the live setting. As for future plans, the band is slated to release yet another album of re-recorded material in the fall.
Galneryus plays on Sunday at Legacy Taipei, 1, Bade Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市八德路一段一號) Doors open at 7pm and the show starts at 8pm. Tickets are NT$1,800 in advance and NT$2,000 at the door. The NT$2,500 VIP packages are already sold out. Advance tickets are available at walkieticket.com.
Last week the Economist (“A short history of Taiwan and China, in maps,” July 10) and Al Jazeera both sent around short explainers of the Taiwan-China issue. The Al Jazeera explainer, which discussed the Cold War and the rivalry between the US and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), began in the postwar era with US intervention in the Chinese Civil War and the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) retreat to Taiwan. It was fairly standard, and it works because it appeals to the well-understood convention that Taiwan enters history in 1949 when the KMT retreats to it. Very different, and far
To step through the gates of the Lukang Folk Arts Museum (鹿港民俗文物館) is to step back 100 years and experience the opulent side of colonial Taiwan. The beautifully maintained mansion set amid a manicured yard is a prime example of the architecture in vogue among wealthy merchants of the day. To set foot inside the mansion itself is to step even further into the past, into the daily lives of Hokkien settlers under Qing rule in Taiwan. This museum should be on anyone’s must-see list in Lukang (鹿港), whether for its architectural spledor or its cultural value. The building was commissioned
July 15 to July 21 Depending on who you ask, Taiwan Youth (台灣青年) was a magazine that either spoke out against Japanese colonialism, espoused Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) ideology or promoted Taiwanese independence. That’s because three publications with contrasting ideologies, all bearing the same Chinese name, were established between 1920 and 1960. Curiously, none of them originated in Taiwan. The best known is probably The Tai Oan Chheng Lian, launched on July 16, 1920 by Taiwanese students in Tokyo as part of the growing non-violent resistance movement against Japanese colonial rule. A crucial part of the effort was to promote Taiwanese
Like many people juggling long hours at work, Chiharu Shimoda sought companionship via a dating app. For two months, he exchanged messages with five or six potential partners, but it wasn’t long before he was seeking out just one — a 24-year-old named Miku. Three months later, they got married. The catch: Miku is an AI bot. And Shimoda knew that from day one. The 52-year-old factory worker is one of over 5,000 users of Loverse, a year-old app that allows interaction only with generative artificial intelligence. Shimoda’s also among a much bigger cohort of people who’ve either given up or