a tale of two parties
This weekend was 端午節 Duanwu, aka Dragon Boat Festival. That's one of those rebrandings that feels a bit out of left field because when most people in Taiwan think about Duanwu they don't think about canoes, they think about zongzi (aka "Chinese tamale" aka rice pyramid filled with stuff wrapped in a banana leaf).
I got zongzi by accident when i went to pick up some supplies at the market ahead of the party this weekend. My regular snack vendors had zongzi coming out of their ears and were trying to sell them at all costs, so i did them a solid. I was grateful i had them when i got hungry at the party, but that's getting ahead of myself.
The other party was about a month back. I took the train down to a village near the venue and ducked into a vegetarian eatery for a great bento with all the fixins. I needed the energy because i planned to hike up to the campsite. Looking at the map seemed like it was about an hour walk, so i started up the winding country road in the beating sun. Around the time i started questioning the wisdom of my decision, a car rolled past and offered to give me a lift up to the entrance.
It actually was only a couple more minutes up the hill by that point. The couple who picked me up had been living in Taiwan for a decade, "you haven't lived here long enough to hate the heat". Still didn't speak Chinese. Had a glamping spot booked. Needless to say, i didn't see them for the whole rest of the party.
There were so many fucking foreigners.
The downside, perhaps, of throwing a techno party where there is also stuff like a reggae band and a soul outfit and this and that is that you attract "normies". On one hand, that's how new fans of electronic music are born. On the other hand, people who don't come out of the rave scene tend to have a different imagination for what a festival should be. I almost tore my hair out Sunday morning when finally some DJ was playing decent tunes but the whole dancefloor was covered with hungover white people sitting around, talking loudly between bites of their burgers, not even hearing the music. Then the DJ played some fucking pop remix and i threw my hands in the air, shouldered my pack and left.
I stuck it out for both nights, of course. The campsite itself was awesome. Aside from being conveniently close to a train station, i could pitch my tent right next to a lake, under a tree, mountain in the background. One morning i hiked a trail to a peak where i ran into a couple of friendly mountain dogs guarding the lookout point, then on the way down i met a couple of bemused hikers from Taichung who had bypassed the festival site to take a weekend climb. We chatted for a while, and i was (again) suggested to take a bike down to Kenting National Park, which is a much beloved nature spot that i have never visited because the trains don't go there and there is no share bike service.
But back on the festival site, my woes continued. Allow me to include some of the notes i took in my phone:
-o-
Downstairs you gonna play fucking Santaria? Really?
Funk soul reggae at a techno party can bite my ass sorry
There is a specific modern techno hihat tho, it sounds like a dish
I can't explain why it sounds like a dish but that's what it sounds like
It's sort of like a ride cymbal but pitched down and up again, all swishy and annoying
Yo, if there's singing in it, it's not techno
Acid techno my ass
If there is no major 303 the fuck
Pads, singing, ughhhhh
Kai Tracid wasn't acid techno in 1998 and sure as hell isn't now.
It's somehow ... Comforting to know that music which was cheesy and boring as shit 25 years ago still is now. It wasn't just my imagination, it wasn't an underground superiority complex. It just sucked.
-o-
I was trying to console myself by the end there.
The amount of fucking vocal trance played at this party made me irrationally angry. I fucking... HATE fucking singing in my techno music. I don't care if you put house or trance or breaks underneath it, you put singing on the top, you fucking failed at electronic music. God, it still makes me mad just thinking about it. Fuck singing, fuck guitars, fuck drums. If it didn't come out of a synthesizer, get it the fuck out.
I had high hopes for this party because there was no psytrance on the menu, which meant so many more options for a diverse line-up. It was run by a promoter who's been doing it in Taiwan for 25 years - he arrived here from the UK and started throwing parties, never left. But dear lord, so much of it sounded like music from 25 years ago too. And not the good stuff. The worst stuff. Vocal trance, fucking hell.
Of course there was modern stuff too, but typical Panorama Bar pop techno, meathead Dirtybird style house music, Berghain washing machine garbage, do you really need to go to a rave to listen to Somebody That I Used To Know? No. You fucking don't. I cannot roll my eyes any harder.
But the lasers were pretty. And in the upstairs stage, nestled into a little clearing slashed out of the bamboo, there was one guy who played one set that was micro-house, and it was great. I walked back down to the village too and picked up some refreshing fruit and a delicious 飯糰 (rice ball) on Saturday morning. I met up with L and C, i chatted with the coffee nerd and jaw harp hippie from the previous gig, and some random chick called me a sunflower, so it wasn't a total bust.
The party this weekend was almost diametrically opposed, music-wise. It was unapologetic psytrance and only psytrance. No singing, barely a melody to speak of, just a bunch of weird noises over a relentless three note bassline.
I already knew this party would be different when we got in. L and i took the train down and shared a taxi up to a back road without any formal campsite. I said to her "this reminds me of the bush doofs i used to go to in Australia, where a friendly farmer out in the ass-end of nowhere lets the hippies onto his property every now and then". Turned out later the farmer was a tricorn-wearing hippie himself, who with his wife decided to try to build a campsite slash arts venue catering to the traveler/psytrance/world music crowd. He apologized for the lack of hot water and i was like dude, this thing of festival campsites having electricity and showers is some yuppie-ass shit i never knew of till i came to Taiwan. Back in my day we bathed in mud and wiped with leaves, and we liked it!
It was a muddy party. It's been pissing down with rain for a couple weeks and the weather report forecast the worst. But, amazingly, the sun came out almost the entire weekend. The ground was soggy and half of the dancefloor was a literal knee-deep mud pit by the end, but nobody cared. The production values were sky-high, like nothing i've ever seen for a doof of around 300 people. It was a teaser party for one of the world-renowned festivals in Europe, though, so i can imagine there was a requirement for some high profile decor.
The installation around the main stage was absolutely bananas. It was a massive setup of wood cut-outs with all kinds of intricate shapes. The daytime look was cool, but at night they lit it with colors and strobes from behind, which created a sort of bio-organic circuitry effect, plus it had front projections perfectly aligned with each of the dozen-plus circular sections, and fucking lasers too. It was just incredible, one of the best light shows i have ever seen.
No, you don't get a night time photo. None of them came out. Trust me, it was epic.
The music was pretty good too! Yes, it was all psytrance, and as i've said way too often, psytrance - especially nowadays - is rather tedious. But it's not offensively tedious. It's not actively painful to listen to like plodding techno or girly trance. At worst you just kinda relax into the endless three note basslines and predictably "unpredictable" psychedelic noises and make peace with the fact that you are never going to hear an acid line that hasn't been wussified to shit through high pass filters or any moments of silence that aren't immediately punctuated by some dumbass vocal sample talking about how great it is to take DMT and manifest world peace by getting high, or something. It's fine.
But it was more than fine, because there was only one room. It's my first one-room party in Taiwan, and it really makes a difference. It concentrates the energy of the people in one spot, so there is less wandering between rooms trying to find your favorite song. The nights actually had a proper musical progression, within the admittedly rather rigid boundaries of modern psytrance. More jazzy and progressive at the start, minimalish toward sunset, some traditional sounds, then slipping into the dark/forest subgenres later in the night and exploding into million mile an hour hi-tech right through to sunrise when it's back to goa, prog and... well, entirely beatless ambient on Sunday morning, which was a surprise. A pleasant surprise. I prefer danceable ambient/chill obviously, but beatless ambient is almost punk in its total and utter disregard for any rhythm whatsoever. It's like... Here's a chord. Here's another fucking chord. Here's the same chord for about 3 minutes. Now here is a drip. A bird is tweeting. Third chord. White riot! I wanna riot! White riot! A riot of my own!
I talked to someone who was at the protests against the latest KMT power grab a couple weeks ago (biggest protests in Taiwan since the Sunflower protests of 2014). She came up to me: "did i meet you in Nepal last year?" Yes, that is how conversations start at psytrance parties.
I also met L (a different L) who ended up in Taiwan because there was a Rainbow Gathering here a couple months back. She likes it because it's a place where there are no leaders, no organizers, everyone comes together to help each other, people are treated equally, everything is free. I suppose it's a bit like a temporary commune. Having spent parts of my life in both the psytrance scene and the traveler scene i've met quite a few Rainbow people. They tend to have some personality quirks that could put them a bit outside what is acceptable in mainstream society, and sometimes that comes across as creepy, but other times i think about my own social awkwardness and how the rave scene felt like a place i could really be me, and i'm happy that the Rainbow people have their spaces too. She seemed happy, no plans, just flitting from place to place, camping here and there, couchsurfing across Asia... I'm not sure if i could do it, i'm too suspicious of people allegedly offering something for nothing.
I asked L (the first L) when we were on the train back this afternoon what i bring to a party. Because even in the traditional rave scene there are lots of free distributors of good vibes. There's the guy who buys a stack of glo-sticks and then goes around offering them to people, turning the whole dancefloor into a magical glowworm cave. The one with the bubbles, the one with the water spray bottle, the painters, the jugglers, the person who just offers you some water or a banana when you are on your last leg. (To be fair, i was a banana-offerer this morning.) All these people bring something more to the party than there would have been without them, and what do i bring? "You dance," she said. "Like, you dance with a special energy, you are so into it, it makes people around you want to dance more."
And i think that might be one of the best things anyone ever said to me aside from calling me a sunflower.
So it was a good party. Even though the music was not exactly my taste, the overall journey each night was great, and i got hours of truly excellent stomping in, between the less-inspired but still enthusiastic booty-shaking. It was so nice to be at a gig with only a couple hundred people. Less people is so much better. Parties where only the real fans show up are my favorite. Not held at a commercial campsite. Far enough in the hills that there was no phone signal for 2 days. Old skool vibe with new skool music. Full power. No toilet, no shower.
I even got a morning hike in.
This stuff reminds me what attracted me to the psy scene in the first place, as a teenager just out of highschool. Yes, there is a bunch of woo, the anti-vaxxers, the tankies, all that stuff. Plus a bunch of alcoholics and druggies. But there are serious political activists too, and artists, and performers, and adventurers. Some tattooed from eyebrow to ankle, others who could be your grandma. People who love the music, and who love getting out of the city to dance to it. It's just an odd little community of misfits whose interests overlap with mine. That's neat. I've given up finding anywhere that plays my favorite style of music, especially during the day time, but that probably never existed outside of Berlin anyway. This is fine. I need this. These parties are giving me the rejuvenation i need to head back to the soul-crushing reality of work five days a week.
Yeah, work tomorrow. Let's not think about it.
Here is a new genre i discovered Sunday morning around sunrise, a fusion of hi-tech psytrance with what we used to call morning trance (cheesy and melodic). Just when you thought the fast end of psytrance was about to morph into Spiral Tribe-styled dirty crustpunk freetekno, the psytrancers get just that little bit stupider. Yes, it's completely ridiculous. If you still don't know what a three note bassline is, this packs about a zillion of them into 6 minutes.
Yatzee - Interceptor
And here's a hi-tech crossover with EDM/glitch/anime/chip music which if i ever heard it out i would laugh my ass off because it utterly takes the piss of psytrance while simultaneously reveling in its glorious silliness.
Nyankovsky - Neural Teleport
Yes, there's singing. Welcome to my journal, unreliable narration and all.
I got zongzi by accident when i went to pick up some supplies at the market ahead of the party this weekend. My regular snack vendors had zongzi coming out of their ears and were trying to sell them at all costs, so i did them a solid. I was grateful i had them when i got hungry at the party, but that's getting ahead of myself.
The other party was about a month back. I took the train down to a village near the venue and ducked into a vegetarian eatery for a great bento with all the fixins. I needed the energy because i planned to hike up to the campsite. Looking at the map seemed like it was about an hour walk, so i started up the winding country road in the beating sun. Around the time i started questioning the wisdom of my decision, a car rolled past and offered to give me a lift up to the entrance.
It actually was only a couple more minutes up the hill by that point. The couple who picked me up had been living in Taiwan for a decade, "you haven't lived here long enough to hate the heat". Still didn't speak Chinese. Had a glamping spot booked. Needless to say, i didn't see them for the whole rest of the party.
There were so many fucking foreigners.
The downside, perhaps, of throwing a techno party where there is also stuff like a reggae band and a soul outfit and this and that is that you attract "normies". On one hand, that's how new fans of electronic music are born. On the other hand, people who don't come out of the rave scene tend to have a different imagination for what a festival should be. I almost tore my hair out Sunday morning when finally some DJ was playing decent tunes but the whole dancefloor was covered with hungover white people sitting around, talking loudly between bites of their burgers, not even hearing the music. Then the DJ played some fucking pop remix and i threw my hands in the air, shouldered my pack and left.
I stuck it out for both nights, of course. The campsite itself was awesome. Aside from being conveniently close to a train station, i could pitch my tent right next to a lake, under a tree, mountain in the background. One morning i hiked a trail to a peak where i ran into a couple of friendly mountain dogs guarding the lookout point, then on the way down i met a couple of bemused hikers from Taichung who had bypassed the festival site to take a weekend climb. We chatted for a while, and i was (again) suggested to take a bike down to Kenting National Park, which is a much beloved nature spot that i have never visited because the trains don't go there and there is no share bike service.
But back on the festival site, my woes continued. Allow me to include some of the notes i took in my phone:
-o-
Downstairs you gonna play fucking Santaria? Really?
Funk soul reggae at a techno party can bite my ass sorry
There is a specific modern techno hihat tho, it sounds like a dish
I can't explain why it sounds like a dish but that's what it sounds like
It's sort of like a ride cymbal but pitched down and up again, all swishy and annoying
Yo, if there's singing in it, it's not techno
Acid techno my ass
If there is no major 303 the fuck
Pads, singing, ughhhhh
Kai Tracid wasn't acid techno in 1998 and sure as hell isn't now.
It's somehow ... Comforting to know that music which was cheesy and boring as shit 25 years ago still is now. It wasn't just my imagination, it wasn't an underground superiority complex. It just sucked.
-o-
I was trying to console myself by the end there.
The amount of fucking vocal trance played at this party made me irrationally angry. I fucking... HATE fucking singing in my techno music. I don't care if you put house or trance or breaks underneath it, you put singing on the top, you fucking failed at electronic music. God, it still makes me mad just thinking about it. Fuck singing, fuck guitars, fuck drums. If it didn't come out of a synthesizer, get it the fuck out.
I had high hopes for this party because there was no psytrance on the menu, which meant so many more options for a diverse line-up. It was run by a promoter who's been doing it in Taiwan for 25 years - he arrived here from the UK and started throwing parties, never left. But dear lord, so much of it sounded like music from 25 years ago too. And not the good stuff. The worst stuff. Vocal trance, fucking hell.
Of course there was modern stuff too, but typical Panorama Bar pop techno, meathead Dirtybird style house music, Berghain washing machine garbage, do you really need to go to a rave to listen to Somebody That I Used To Know? No. You fucking don't. I cannot roll my eyes any harder.
But the lasers were pretty. And in the upstairs stage, nestled into a little clearing slashed out of the bamboo, there was one guy who played one set that was micro-house, and it was great. I walked back down to the village too and picked up some refreshing fruit and a delicious 飯糰 (rice ball) on Saturday morning. I met up with L and C, i chatted with the coffee nerd and jaw harp hippie from the previous gig, and some random chick called me a sunflower, so it wasn't a total bust.
The party this weekend was almost diametrically opposed, music-wise. It was unapologetic psytrance and only psytrance. No singing, barely a melody to speak of, just a bunch of weird noises over a relentless three note bassline.
I already knew this party would be different when we got in. L and i took the train down and shared a taxi up to a back road without any formal campsite. I said to her "this reminds me of the bush doofs i used to go to in Australia, where a friendly farmer out in the ass-end of nowhere lets the hippies onto his property every now and then". Turned out later the farmer was a tricorn-wearing hippie himself, who with his wife decided to try to build a campsite slash arts venue catering to the traveler/psytrance/world music crowd. He apologized for the lack of hot water and i was like dude, this thing of festival campsites having electricity and showers is some yuppie-ass shit i never knew of till i came to Taiwan. Back in my day we bathed in mud and wiped with leaves, and we liked it!
It was a muddy party. It's been pissing down with rain for a couple weeks and the weather report forecast the worst. But, amazingly, the sun came out almost the entire weekend. The ground was soggy and half of the dancefloor was a literal knee-deep mud pit by the end, but nobody cared. The production values were sky-high, like nothing i've ever seen for a doof of around 300 people. It was a teaser party for one of the world-renowned festivals in Europe, though, so i can imagine there was a requirement for some high profile decor.
The installation around the main stage was absolutely bananas. It was a massive setup of wood cut-outs with all kinds of intricate shapes. The daytime look was cool, but at night they lit it with colors and strobes from behind, which created a sort of bio-organic circuitry effect, plus it had front projections perfectly aligned with each of the dozen-plus circular sections, and fucking lasers too. It was just incredible, one of the best light shows i have ever seen.
No, you don't get a night time photo. None of them came out. Trust me, it was epic.
The music was pretty good too! Yes, it was all psytrance, and as i've said way too often, psytrance - especially nowadays - is rather tedious. But it's not offensively tedious. It's not actively painful to listen to like plodding techno or girly trance. At worst you just kinda relax into the endless three note basslines and predictably "unpredictable" psychedelic noises and make peace with the fact that you are never going to hear an acid line that hasn't been wussified to shit through high pass filters or any moments of silence that aren't immediately punctuated by some dumbass vocal sample talking about how great it is to take DMT and manifest world peace by getting high, or something. It's fine.
But it was more than fine, because there was only one room. It's my first one-room party in Taiwan, and it really makes a difference. It concentrates the energy of the people in one spot, so there is less wandering between rooms trying to find your favorite song. The nights actually had a proper musical progression, within the admittedly rather rigid boundaries of modern psytrance. More jazzy and progressive at the start, minimalish toward sunset, some traditional sounds, then slipping into the dark/forest subgenres later in the night and exploding into million mile an hour hi-tech right through to sunrise when it's back to goa, prog and... well, entirely beatless ambient on Sunday morning, which was a surprise. A pleasant surprise. I prefer danceable ambient/chill obviously, but beatless ambient is almost punk in its total and utter disregard for any rhythm whatsoever. It's like... Here's a chord. Here's another fucking chord. Here's the same chord for about 3 minutes. Now here is a drip. A bird is tweeting. Third chord. White riot! I wanna riot! White riot! A riot of my own!
I talked to someone who was at the protests against the latest KMT power grab a couple weeks ago (biggest protests in Taiwan since the Sunflower protests of 2014). She came up to me: "did i meet you in Nepal last year?" Yes, that is how conversations start at psytrance parties.
I also met L (a different L) who ended up in Taiwan because there was a Rainbow Gathering here a couple months back. She likes it because it's a place where there are no leaders, no organizers, everyone comes together to help each other, people are treated equally, everything is free. I suppose it's a bit like a temporary commune. Having spent parts of my life in both the psytrance scene and the traveler scene i've met quite a few Rainbow people. They tend to have some personality quirks that could put them a bit outside what is acceptable in mainstream society, and sometimes that comes across as creepy, but other times i think about my own social awkwardness and how the rave scene felt like a place i could really be me, and i'm happy that the Rainbow people have their spaces too. She seemed happy, no plans, just flitting from place to place, camping here and there, couchsurfing across Asia... I'm not sure if i could do it, i'm too suspicious of people allegedly offering something for nothing.
I asked L (the first L) when we were on the train back this afternoon what i bring to a party. Because even in the traditional rave scene there are lots of free distributors of good vibes. There's the guy who buys a stack of glo-sticks and then goes around offering them to people, turning the whole dancefloor into a magical glowworm cave. The one with the bubbles, the one with the water spray bottle, the painters, the jugglers, the person who just offers you some water or a banana when you are on your last leg. (To be fair, i was a banana-offerer this morning.) All these people bring something more to the party than there would have been without them, and what do i bring? "You dance," she said. "Like, you dance with a special energy, you are so into it, it makes people around you want to dance more."
And i think that might be one of the best things anyone ever said to me aside from calling me a sunflower.
So it was a good party. Even though the music was not exactly my taste, the overall journey each night was great, and i got hours of truly excellent stomping in, between the less-inspired but still enthusiastic booty-shaking. It was so nice to be at a gig with only a couple hundred people. Less people is so much better. Parties where only the real fans show up are my favorite. Not held at a commercial campsite. Far enough in the hills that there was no phone signal for 2 days. Old skool vibe with new skool music. Full power. No toilet, no shower.
I even got a morning hike in.
This stuff reminds me what attracted me to the psy scene in the first place, as a teenager just out of highschool. Yes, there is a bunch of woo, the anti-vaxxers, the tankies, all that stuff. Plus a bunch of alcoholics and druggies. But there are serious political activists too, and artists, and performers, and adventurers. Some tattooed from eyebrow to ankle, others who could be your grandma. People who love the music, and who love getting out of the city to dance to it. It's just an odd little community of misfits whose interests overlap with mine. That's neat. I've given up finding anywhere that plays my favorite style of music, especially during the day time, but that probably never existed outside of Berlin anyway. This is fine. I need this. These parties are giving me the rejuvenation i need to head back to the soul-crushing reality of work five days a week.
Yeah, work tomorrow. Let's not think about it.
Here is a new genre i discovered Sunday morning around sunrise, a fusion of hi-tech psytrance with what we used to call morning trance (cheesy and melodic). Just when you thought the fast end of psytrance was about to morph into Spiral Tribe-styled dirty crustpunk freetekno, the psytrancers get just that little bit stupider. Yes, it's completely ridiculous. If you still don't know what a three note bassline is, this packs about a zillion of them into 6 minutes.
Click to viewYatzee - Interceptor
And here's a hi-tech crossover with EDM/glitch/anime/chip music which if i ever heard it out i would laugh my ass off because it utterly takes the piss of psytrance while simultaneously reveling in its glorious silliness.
Nyankovsky - Neural Teleport
Yes, there's singing. Welcome to my journal, unreliable narration and all.