new year party, part 2
In yesterday's post i finished up looking at the sky on day two of the party. What i didn't add is that day two was the busiest day of the event. Whether it was because people were able to get free from family obligations by then or maybe folks had just settled into the vibe i'm not sure, but both dancefloors had a decent crowd, even during the daytime.
It's also the day when i started hearing more music in the vein of my recent tastes. The opening DJ in the techno room played almost but not quite a Heinz Hopper (Kater Blau main room) tech house set. On day one there had been a little bit of tech house between the oldskool/Detroit stuff and the Berghain techno. That dirtybird/hipster style with huge sawtooth basslines, vocal loops that are easy to remember and build-ups that would make Josh Wink or Fatboy Slim blush. House music for meatheads - not challenging, not subtle, not deep, but fun enough to get folks bouncing around. Day two went a bit more in the German direction with less vocals, less build-ups, more melancholy and occasional flirtations with both bummel and washing machine techno. I wrote down in my phone "first katerholzig set since leaving germany!" Little did i know what day three would have in store.
But day two still had a musical treat to share, and that was the closing DJ in the techno space who - fittingly - was named Klosing. I had seen online that he did microhouse and minimal, and was curious to see how that kind of sound would go down at a party seemingly so wedded to slamming techno and full power psytrance grooves. Amazingly, he just let the banging Berghain shit of the previous selector play out, then he kicked off a true journey into the abyss.
I feel like microhouse is where psytrance could have gone if hippies weren't so conservative.
I probably got exposed to it - unknowingly - the first time at a rave in Toronto featuring Ricardo Villalobos, who got very famous in the mid 00s and was notorious for being a drugfucked mess. After the party people online complained about how boring it was, how disrespectful it was of the people who paid to hear banging tech house and just got some meandering congas instead. They were like "hey Ricardo, you forgot to drop the bass, were you really that wasted?" But he didn't forget to drop the bass. There was only half a song to begin with. That's the point. Minimal always feels like it's missing something, including the bassline. Maybe it could go somewhere? Eventually?
Psytrance used to be like that too. You'd listen to a track expecting all those hints of an acid line to eventually mesh together and come screaming into the center, but the climax never arrived. Psytrance evolved by filling up the half of the song that was missing with another half of a song, which resulted in a dense sonic wall of missing stuff. It's got so many psychedelic noises in it nowadays that there's no room for you to anticipate the thing they're hinting at any more, which ironically makes it less psychedelic than it was when they left some negative space.
But minimal went the other way, progressively leaving out more and more.
Klosing @Kontrol Taipei (Jan. 2021)
....
Here is a big song of nothing. What's happening? Nothing is happening. This song is full of silence. And then some more nothing gets added. And you're like, what the fuck is this nothing? Is this a joke? And then some more nothing is introduced and you start to get entirely consumed by the nothing. The nothing becomes the thing.
And the song is without form, and void; and darkness is upon the face of the deep.
Tick, tick, tick, tick.
And then the miniscule click that's been used for a hi-hat gets updated to a soft chip.
Chick, chick, chick, chick.
And it's the most glorious hi-hat you ever heard.
And, wait a second, was that jazzy seventh chord going the whole time? Oh my God, it's been there the whole time!!! This is sick!
Oh, never mind, it's just a beep.
Epic.
The next morning was even better. But before i got on the dancefloor, i also went for a walk out to the local village.
In the last post i talked about how old ravers can pass for normal people, and that's how C, looking like an everyday 阿媽 (grandma) could chat with the locals. I didn't have as much luck. I was able to order some food so they knew i spoke Chinese, but when you are white you are always an outsider, even more of an outsider in a majority Paiwan/Rukai community than Han Chinese. Of course, it could also be on me being a bit more introverted. (C later introduced me to the South African gang: "oh they speak Afrikaans, you speak Dutch, you have something in common!" Who does that? Extroverts!)
After wandering a bit through the village i found a mysterious path that was unmarked on my map but headed up into the mountain so of course i took it. I thought it might be a small out-and-back trail, but it wound further and further up the mountain, occasionally giving glimpses of the pineapple fields below. I only had a liter of water on me so i made a pact with myself i would go half an hour and then turn back.
Half an hour was just enough to make it up to a road on the ridge with a lookout point that gave a view across the southern plains all the way to Kaohsiung 50km away. There were a couple of grandpas up there speaking Taiwanese Hokkien who perhaps only knew enough Mandarin to say hi and bye. There was also a Taiwanese mountain dog.
Now, i don't talk much about it, but i hate dogs. More broadly i hate the idea of people keeping animals in captivity for their own pleasure. Dog-lovers are the worst of the bunch because their companions make everybody else's lives miserable by disturbing the peace, shitting all over the place and harassing passersby. But, you know, a lot of my friends are dog-lovers so i ignore it and move on with my life because this stuff really isn't worth making a fuss about.
You guys, i think i love Taiwanese mountain dogs.
They used to scare me a bit, because they're wild animals and when there's a pack of them looking threatening it can mess up my hiking plans. When i was in Taiwan 5-6 years ago i had to do a kilometers-long backtrack after being too afraid to continue along my planned route when confronted by an indignant-looking mutt and his buddies.
But this one on top of the mountain was fat and well-fed. No kids. No reason to attack. He danced around me, apparently hoping i would drop a snack, but i didn't have any food with me. I decided that instead of going back down the trail i would follow the road in a long, circuitous route back to the party. My newfound friend decided he would lead the way and protect me from all the fearsome squirrels and birds rustling in the undergrowth.
He was excitable and stupid, but he never barked, never snapped at me and once he knew i had no food to give him he stopped begging. Much better behaved than most people's pets. He scampered about, always a few feet ahead of me, and patiently waited by the side of the road when the occasional car zoomed by. I was sad to leave him behind when i got back to the village outskirts and the locals' guard dogs strained at their chains, barking and snapping, every bit the opposite of this mountain-dwelling free spirit.
But i had a party to get back to, one whose bass drums i had been grooving to throughout my walk.
I had a bit of a dance to the morning sets in the psytrance space, which were more in the tribal/progressive direction, an accessible form of psytrance that has a lot of overlap with house and techno. Then headed over to the techno space, where in theory no DJ was booked to start playing for a couple hours.
There was a woman behind the decks, busting out an eclectic mix of breakbeats, dub and slow techno. The tempo went up, the tempo went down, but always at meticulously-planned points in the track, exactly at the moment of a musical transition. This wasn't a trainwreck, it was a clean approach to playing a dynamic mix of genres, the kind of DJing that is much harder to pull off than locking in at a single BPM and keeping everything rigidly beatmatched. I haven't seen anything like it since living in Berlin, because you also need an open-minded audience for it to work. I suppose being an unbooked DJ just messing around before the official opener is the other option.
And then she dropped some ketapop. Ketapop and bummeltechno are tongue-in-cheek names that both describe a deep, quirky and minimal-ish branch of techno that's basically the best form of music in the world. It's the sound that made me want to move to Berlin, the sound they played in the Katerholzig Hütte, in Kater Blau's Acid Bogen, and during the daytime at Garbicz and other German festivals put on by the neo-hippie crews. Techno for people who like to sit in the sun and do a bunch of ketamine. Tailor-made for the Taiwan deck chair contingent!
But i was the only one there, dancing to tracks that felt oddly familiar. And tears welled up in my eyes, and i couldn't stop myself from crying, as the music spoke to my soul, and the DJ took me on the kind of journey i haven't been on in years. It was so, so good.
She ran out of the booth at the end and got me to take some photos of her and the actual opening DJ, who is a bit more of a local celebrity, also playing relatively deep house and slow techno, though not as boldly bummelig. We talked after and she was thrilled that i had been moved to tears by her set. I said it reminded me of Berlin and she said she just came back from there and had been to 3000Grad festival, where she saw Mira and Chris, and it totally changed her life. Me too, man. I asked if she went to Kater. "Oh my God, I love Kater! I can't believe someone else in Taiwan knows about it!" We exchanged hugs and became Facebook friends right there on the dancefloor.
She said she was playing an official set in the techno space at another psytrance festival next month, "but it's a night-time set so i will be playing more dub and electro/breaks". Say less. I bought a ticket as soon as i got back to Taipei. I have a new fave!
I felt i could relax then, for the rest of day three. I got to 爬山 climb mountain at dawn and then come back, have a coffee and dance to the best set i have heard in years.
I needed to get my tent packed up before Tsuyoshi Suzuki came on, because my taxi back was booked at exactly the end of his timeslot. Unfortunately there was no later taxi, and i had been in two minds whether i should call in sick to work and just come back on Thursday with the hardcore groovers who were sticking it out to the end. I made the choice to be responsible on day one. There's always another party, right?
With my gear all packed up, i headed back to the psytrance stage to wait for Tsuyoshi. I had talked to several of the other oldies by then. One of the expats said he took his buddy to see Tsuyoshi in Japan a few years back and the dude pulled out a flyer from Return to the Source, a psytrance clubnight in London where Tsuyoshi was resident in the 1990s. I'm like hey, that's me, i'm old too! There are dozens of us!
Whether it was because it was the penultimate set of the party, or whether i had just adjusted my brain back into psytrance mode after three days of relentless three note basslines, i felt like Tsuyoshi brung it. He started with the kind of corny melodic goa trance that his own record label "killed" 25 years ago. It's amazing how a decades-long gap can transform music that once sounded cheesy and cliché into joyous nostalgia. All the oldies appreciated it. Then he moved into a bit more progressive stuff, then into "classic" psytrance and full-on. Most memorable track was Mad Tribe's "They Came From Uranus" whose titular vocal sample and psychedelic fart noises embody exactly the brand of silly irreverence that made psytrance so fun in the early days.
Mad Tribe - They Came from Uranus
And, before i knew it, my phone was buzzing, and i had to give a few quick goodbye hugs, then book it to the front gate. "See you at the next one!"
Amusingly i had the same taxi driver going home, although my fellow passenger was much less chatty than the women i had come up with. The train station was an utter shit-show, packed with thousands of people trying to get home on the last day of the new year break. I got a standing ticket and tried to cast my mind back to the forest as we zoomed through the rice paddies back to Taipei. First thing i did when i got home was have a shower. Second thing was cook up some dumplings. Third thing, bed.
I worked from home Thursday and Friday, and honestly Thursday i was not in great shape. I'd only had a handful of drinks over the preceding three days, but my body was thrashed and my mind was still somewhere better than the tech industry.
The Canadian hippie i met at the gig was right. Coming to these events does rejuvenate. "It's the healing energy of the earth, stamping your feet in the dust and getting your spirit back in touch with nature..." Well, i'm not sure i'll go all the way back to my teenage new age self, but there sure is something to be said for dancing it all out. Of course i'll go to the next one. This is what i have been missing.
It's also the day when i started hearing more music in the vein of my recent tastes. The opening DJ in the techno room played almost but not quite a Heinz Hopper (Kater Blau main room) tech house set. On day one there had been a little bit of tech house between the oldskool/Detroit stuff and the Berghain techno. That dirtybird/hipster style with huge sawtooth basslines, vocal loops that are easy to remember and build-ups that would make Josh Wink or Fatboy Slim blush. House music for meatheads - not challenging, not subtle, not deep, but fun enough to get folks bouncing around. Day two went a bit more in the German direction with less vocals, less build-ups, more melancholy and occasional flirtations with both bummel and washing machine techno. I wrote down in my phone "first katerholzig set since leaving germany!" Little did i know what day three would have in store.
But day two still had a musical treat to share, and that was the closing DJ in the techno space who - fittingly - was named Klosing. I had seen online that he did microhouse and minimal, and was curious to see how that kind of sound would go down at a party seemingly so wedded to slamming techno and full power psytrance grooves. Amazingly, he just let the banging Berghain shit of the previous selector play out, then he kicked off a true journey into the abyss.
I feel like microhouse is where psytrance could have gone if hippies weren't so conservative.
I probably got exposed to it - unknowingly - the first time at a rave in Toronto featuring Ricardo Villalobos, who got very famous in the mid 00s and was notorious for being a drugfucked mess. After the party people online complained about how boring it was, how disrespectful it was of the people who paid to hear banging tech house and just got some meandering congas instead. They were like "hey Ricardo, you forgot to drop the bass, were you really that wasted?" But he didn't forget to drop the bass. There was only half a song to begin with. That's the point. Minimal always feels like it's missing something, including the bassline. Maybe it could go somewhere? Eventually?
Psytrance used to be like that too. You'd listen to a track expecting all those hints of an acid line to eventually mesh together and come screaming into the center, but the climax never arrived. Psytrance evolved by filling up the half of the song that was missing with another half of a song, which resulted in a dense sonic wall of missing stuff. It's got so many psychedelic noises in it nowadays that there's no room for you to anticipate the thing they're hinting at any more, which ironically makes it less psychedelic than it was when they left some negative space.
But minimal went the other way, progressively leaving out more and more.
Click to viewKlosing @Kontrol Taipei (Jan. 2021)
....
Here is a big song of nothing. What's happening? Nothing is happening. This song is full of silence. And then some more nothing gets added. And you're like, what the fuck is this nothing? Is this a joke? And then some more nothing is introduced and you start to get entirely consumed by the nothing. The nothing becomes the thing.
And the song is without form, and void; and darkness is upon the face of the deep.
Tick, tick, tick, tick.
And then the miniscule click that's been used for a hi-hat gets updated to a soft chip.
Chick, chick, chick, chick.
And it's the most glorious hi-hat you ever heard.
And, wait a second, was that jazzy seventh chord going the whole time? Oh my God, it's been there the whole time!!! This is sick!
Oh, never mind, it's just a beep.
Epic.
The next morning was even better. But before i got on the dancefloor, i also went for a walk out to the local village.
In the last post i talked about how old ravers can pass for normal people, and that's how C, looking like an everyday 阿媽 (grandma) could chat with the locals. I didn't have as much luck. I was able to order some food so they knew i spoke Chinese, but when you are white you are always an outsider, even more of an outsider in a majority Paiwan/Rukai community than Han Chinese. Of course, it could also be on me being a bit more introverted. (C later introduced me to the South African gang: "oh they speak Afrikaans, you speak Dutch, you have something in common!" Who does that? Extroverts!)
After wandering a bit through the village i found a mysterious path that was unmarked on my map but headed up into the mountain so of course i took it. I thought it might be a small out-and-back trail, but it wound further and further up the mountain, occasionally giving glimpses of the pineapple fields below. I only had a liter of water on me so i made a pact with myself i would go half an hour and then turn back.
Half an hour was just enough to make it up to a road on the ridge with a lookout point that gave a view across the southern plains all the way to Kaohsiung 50km away. There were a couple of grandpas up there speaking Taiwanese Hokkien who perhaps only knew enough Mandarin to say hi and bye. There was also a Taiwanese mountain dog.
Now, i don't talk much about it, but i hate dogs. More broadly i hate the idea of people keeping animals in captivity for their own pleasure. Dog-lovers are the worst of the bunch because their companions make everybody else's lives miserable by disturbing the peace, shitting all over the place and harassing passersby. But, you know, a lot of my friends are dog-lovers so i ignore it and move on with my life because this stuff really isn't worth making a fuss about.
You guys, i think i love Taiwanese mountain dogs.
They used to scare me a bit, because they're wild animals and when there's a pack of them looking threatening it can mess up my hiking plans. When i was in Taiwan 5-6 years ago i had to do a kilometers-long backtrack after being too afraid to continue along my planned route when confronted by an indignant-looking mutt and his buddies.
But this one on top of the mountain was fat and well-fed. No kids. No reason to attack. He danced around me, apparently hoping i would drop a snack, but i didn't have any food with me. I decided that instead of going back down the trail i would follow the road in a long, circuitous route back to the party. My newfound friend decided he would lead the way and protect me from all the fearsome squirrels and birds rustling in the undergrowth.
He was excitable and stupid, but he never barked, never snapped at me and once he knew i had no food to give him he stopped begging. Much better behaved than most people's pets. He scampered about, always a few feet ahead of me, and patiently waited by the side of the road when the occasional car zoomed by. I was sad to leave him behind when i got back to the village outskirts and the locals' guard dogs strained at their chains, barking and snapping, every bit the opposite of this mountain-dwelling free spirit.
But i had a party to get back to, one whose bass drums i had been grooving to throughout my walk.
I had a bit of a dance to the morning sets in the psytrance space, which were more in the tribal/progressive direction, an accessible form of psytrance that has a lot of overlap with house and techno. Then headed over to the techno space, where in theory no DJ was booked to start playing for a couple hours.
There was a woman behind the decks, busting out an eclectic mix of breakbeats, dub and slow techno. The tempo went up, the tempo went down, but always at meticulously-planned points in the track, exactly at the moment of a musical transition. This wasn't a trainwreck, it was a clean approach to playing a dynamic mix of genres, the kind of DJing that is much harder to pull off than locking in at a single BPM and keeping everything rigidly beatmatched. I haven't seen anything like it since living in Berlin, because you also need an open-minded audience for it to work. I suppose being an unbooked DJ just messing around before the official opener is the other option.
And then she dropped some ketapop. Ketapop and bummeltechno are tongue-in-cheek names that both describe a deep, quirky and minimal-ish branch of techno that's basically the best form of music in the world. It's the sound that made me want to move to Berlin, the sound they played in the Katerholzig Hütte, in Kater Blau's Acid Bogen, and during the daytime at Garbicz and other German festivals put on by the neo-hippie crews. Techno for people who like to sit in the sun and do a bunch of ketamine. Tailor-made for the Taiwan deck chair contingent!
But i was the only one there, dancing to tracks that felt oddly familiar. And tears welled up in my eyes, and i couldn't stop myself from crying, as the music spoke to my soul, and the DJ took me on the kind of journey i haven't been on in years. It was so, so good.
She ran out of the booth at the end and got me to take some photos of her and the actual opening DJ, who is a bit more of a local celebrity, also playing relatively deep house and slow techno, though not as boldly bummelig. We talked after and she was thrilled that i had been moved to tears by her set. I said it reminded me of Berlin and she said she just came back from there and had been to 3000Grad festival, where she saw Mira and Chris, and it totally changed her life. Me too, man. I asked if she went to Kater. "Oh my God, I love Kater! I can't believe someone else in Taiwan knows about it!" We exchanged hugs and became Facebook friends right there on the dancefloor.
She said she was playing an official set in the techno space at another psytrance festival next month, "but it's a night-time set so i will be playing more dub and electro/breaks". Say less. I bought a ticket as soon as i got back to Taipei. I have a new fave!
I felt i could relax then, for the rest of day three. I got to 爬山 climb mountain at dawn and then come back, have a coffee and dance to the best set i have heard in years.
I needed to get my tent packed up before Tsuyoshi Suzuki came on, because my taxi back was booked at exactly the end of his timeslot. Unfortunately there was no later taxi, and i had been in two minds whether i should call in sick to work and just come back on Thursday with the hardcore groovers who were sticking it out to the end. I made the choice to be responsible on day one. There's always another party, right?
With my gear all packed up, i headed back to the psytrance stage to wait for Tsuyoshi. I had talked to several of the other oldies by then. One of the expats said he took his buddy to see Tsuyoshi in Japan a few years back and the dude pulled out a flyer from Return to the Source, a psytrance clubnight in London where Tsuyoshi was resident in the 1990s. I'm like hey, that's me, i'm old too! There are dozens of us!
Whether it was because it was the penultimate set of the party, or whether i had just adjusted my brain back into psytrance mode after three days of relentless three note basslines, i felt like Tsuyoshi brung it. He started with the kind of corny melodic goa trance that his own record label "killed" 25 years ago. It's amazing how a decades-long gap can transform music that once sounded cheesy and cliché into joyous nostalgia. All the oldies appreciated it. Then he moved into a bit more progressive stuff, then into "classic" psytrance and full-on. Most memorable track was Mad Tribe's "They Came From Uranus" whose titular vocal sample and psychedelic fart noises embody exactly the brand of silly irreverence that made psytrance so fun in the early days.
Mad Tribe - They Came from Uranus
And, before i knew it, my phone was buzzing, and i had to give a few quick goodbye hugs, then book it to the front gate. "See you at the next one!"
Amusingly i had the same taxi driver going home, although my fellow passenger was much less chatty than the women i had come up with. The train station was an utter shit-show, packed with thousands of people trying to get home on the last day of the new year break. I got a standing ticket and tried to cast my mind back to the forest as we zoomed through the rice paddies back to Taipei. First thing i did when i got home was have a shower. Second thing was cook up some dumplings. Third thing, bed.
I worked from home Thursday and Friday, and honestly Thursday i was not in great shape. I'd only had a handful of drinks over the preceding three days, but my body was thrashed and my mind was still somewhere better than the tech industry.
The Canadian hippie i met at the gig was right. Coming to these events does rejuvenate. "It's the healing energy of the earth, stamping your feet in the dust and getting your spirit back in touch with nature..." Well, i'm not sure i'll go all the way back to my teenage new age self, but there sure is something to be said for dancing it all out. Of course i'll go to the next one. This is what i have been missing.