A performance with legendary Okinawan musician Takashi Hirayasu back in 2003 brought Ken Ohtake to Taiwan, later contributing to his long-term collaboration with folk musician Lin Sheng Xiang. Now most of his activities are in Taiwan.
Golden Melody Awards is to Mandarin-speaking world as Grammy Awards is to English-speaking world. The annual awards ceremony reflects the growth of the music industry. Other than the Golden Melody Awards, there are also some long-running awards worth noticing. In this article, music industry professional Kuang-Ping Tso introduces the most important awards ceremonies and how they influence the music we listen to in Taiwan.
The Canadian music writer Joe Henley came to Taiwan 12 years ago for no serious reason. Now he’s been involved so deeply in the local underground music scene that he even wrote a Taiwanese punk novel Bu San Bu Si.
How did a cuisine restaurant located in Chaozhou Street become the crossing point of Taiwanese and Japanese independent music scenes? Budha Terao, the manager of Moon Romantic Taipei, shared his love and insights of music as a promoter in-between.
While the crate digging culture of rare groove originated in the UK, the younger generation of Taiwanese music fans started to take the same path along with the revival of vinyl records in Taiwan.
The history of Taiwan’s indie music scene has stretched across three decades. In this article, the bass player of the band Sorry Youth, Giang-Giang, summarizes its development from local performance spaces to politically involved movement.
Coming out from reality show “Super Star Avenue”, Sharon Kwan released her debut album “Homegirl” in 2012. After four years, “Blossom 2.0” is Kwan’s new work that demonstrates her change after challenging the stage that was “The Voice of China”.
Crowd Lu’s changed. Not just in terms of his image, he no longer persists in wearing short shorts, and has taken back that signature smile. Even his new songs do not just have a pure sense of happiness; the way he sings and the tools he uses to create have become noticeably introverted.
In June this year, Eve Ai released her third album “Talk about Eve”, this is a musical work which is almost entirely self-composed by Eve, with her writing the lyrics for 8 songs, and over a half of the songs. Instead of facing the label of ‘singer-songwriter’, Eve seems to be a little unused to such titles.
Su Yun Ying’s left arm has a tattoo of a cloud, with rainwater trickling down to accumulate into a river which fuels the growth of a tree. It even flows onto her right art where flowers bloom; she has planted a serene garden on her body.