ex-directory is a new weekly newsletter for artists and the world’s music industry, curated by a group of friends and colleagues in cities across the world.
Our first month is dedicated to Rebirth: a look ahead of the first pandemic year to see how the music world has changed and, in some cases, stood its ground. Later this month, photographer James J. Robinson shares photos from some of Melbourne’s most exciting queer parties in a city largely untouched by lockdowns.
Today, for ex-directory #002, writer Brian Hioe is in Taiwan. Until this week, the island country had existed in a kind of alternate reality for the past year, where lockdowns had been nonexistent and social gatherings, including music festivals, raves and pop-up shows at temples on the outskirts of the capital city, were all tangible experiences. Hioe speaks to two local collectives who have formed during this period of forced insularity and uncovers the evolving state of Taipei’s underground.
This story has also been translated into Mandarin by Brien John. Read here.
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In Taiwan, over the past year, COVID-19 has always been largely under control. Clubs only had to close briefly — if at all — and the island has never seen a lockdown in any city. As of writing, there have only been a dozen deaths here due to the coronavirus. For the city’s music underground, that created a unique state of incubation.
While much of the rest of the world was closing venues, and international touring was rendered impossible, in Taipei local nightclubs and venues created new programming centered almost exclusively around local artists, renewing interest in the city’s nightlife culture. Kikiwawa and Cybermade, two exciting young crews that embody a changing spirit in Taiwan's underground, were formed just in the past year.
“The local scene has gotten strong during COVID,” members of Kikiwawa told me in April. A seven-member collective consisting of producers, DJs, promoters, graphic designers and a photographer, Kikiwawa describes itself on Soundcloud as “a Taipei-based unit which represents the intersection of localism and multiculturalism within the Taiwanese milieu.”
Kikiwawa actually owes its origins to COVID. When the pandemic put much of the world outside of Taiwan on freeze, several members of the collective returned home from overseas. “Before COVID, most people would only go out if there were artists booked from abroad,” comments Kikiwawa. The crew met through mutual acquaintances and began organizing parties, hoping to use their experiences from abroad to stimulate a new creative mindset back home.
Kikiwawa is mostly an electronic-music oriented crew, in contrast with the current moment in Taiwanese subculture, which they see as more focused on trap and hip-hop. The members commented on how their events bring together a variety of genres and influences, ranging from club and techno to hip-hop, but never confined to just one. Kikiwawa member Sandy commented, “It’s not just that we have DJs who play different genres, but that they mix together genres when they play.”
While the Taiwanese crowd has historically focused on the spectacle of performance, Kikiwawa hopes their parties will emphasize that feeling of release made possible in nightlife spaces. Since their inception, they’ve held events in Taipei’s Final and Taichung’s The Cave, with future hopes to bring their sounds to smaller cities around the island where this particular type of nightlife is mostly nonexistent.
Cybermade is a more distinctly Gen Z crew, with most members around age 18, and with a style that combines influences from hip-hop, electronic music and emo. Unlike most other hip-hop oriented groups in Taiwan, which often develop from certain neighborhoods or student groups on college campuses, they all met online, through Soundcloud, Instagram and other social media platforms — hence the name.
Though Taiwan avoided lockdowns, the members of Cybermade still attribute getting together to COVID-19. According to one member, Losty, the pandemic still led to less real-world activity in the scene and forced people online, resulting in greater attention paid to the music shared in digital spaces where Cybermade’s members were already operating.
Not just younger but newer, Cybermade has only held two parties to date. The first was at Taipei’s Pipe Live Music and titled “Cyber Palace.” They didn’t anticipate as many people to come as did, seeing as advertising took place through the Internet. In keeping with that feeling of surprise, in the future they want to emphasize that theirs is a space for emerging artists: audiences could conceivably arrive at an event without knowing any of the performers, but expect to hear something new and interesting.
For both crews, their existence is a means to a greater end: through events and music, they aim to convey nightlife as art, or the musical experience as an accepted cultural form. In the future, Kikiwawa says they hope to work with visual artists, to make design an integral element of their parties, rather than an afterthought or a “technique” without artistic value. And they imagine a natural progression to begin organizing gallery exhibitions, taking Kikiwawa beyond nightlife entirely.
“The point isn’t just to play around for a night but to enlighten Taiwan’s scene as a whole,” said Kikiwawa’s Ao Wu. Members attribute much of the character of Taiwan’s party culture to the sense of “ging” — or high — that people are pursuing. Though they feel this is a key part of party culture, they believe there’s more to the experience, and that it’s important to foster an appreciation for the music itself.
Taiwan has historically been seen as internationally marginal — overshadowed by its much larger neighbor, China, and unacknowledged as a nation-state by all but a dozen or so countries. As a result, Taiwan is often looking outward, trying to attract what’s bigger, especially when it comes to entertainment and music.
Kikiwawa’s members view the past year of the pandemic as having forced self-reflection in the scene in Taiwan. When COVID ends and Taiwan’s borders open once again, the crew says they’ll look forward to sharing the skills and unique style they’ve developed over the past year at home. Further, there will be a stronger local scene for international artists to experience.
As a group born online, Cybermade profess to feel no pressure to orient themselves towards real-world events. Nevertheless, they share with Kikiwawa the aspiration to be multidisciplinary and defy easy categorization. Perhaps this reflects something unique about the country as a whole, as a place that is a hybrid, refracting and expressing a variety of influences into something of its own. This may be true now, more so than ever before.
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