Scaling the scene: experimental music in Taiwan

ABSTRACT

This article draws on three years of participation in the Taiwanese experimental music scene and argues that, in order to explain how different forms of sociality contribute to its construction and scaling, it is necessary to examine how musicians, organizers and audiences describe their own creative practices. After sketching a brief history of experimental music in Taiwan and contextualizing my positioning as an audience member, musician and critic, I discuss three central components of a music scene: genre, space, and circulation. By analysing the ideological, spatial and material shifts taking place around the Taiwanese experimental music scene in the late 2010s, I demonstrate how musical genres, performance spaces and material circuits are scaled up or down to specific domains of practice or to inclusive social contexts. In this article’s conclusion, I revisit scholarship on the concept of music scene and connect it to the role of scaling in the construction of Taiwan’s experimental music underground.

KEYWORDS:

• Circulation
• experimental music
• genre
• music scene
• Taiwan
• underground

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Gabriele de Seta is a media anthropologist. He is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Bergen. His research work, grounded on ethnographic engagement across multiple sites, focuses on digital media practices and vernacular creativity in China. He is also interested in experimental music scenes, internet art, and collaborative intersections between anthropology and art practice.

Notes

1 The term taike (台客), literally meaning ‘Taiwanese guest’, was initially used as a disparaging term by the Japanese colonizers to describe Taiwanese people, and later by waishengren (外省人, ‘mainlanders’ who moved to Taiwan from China after 1945) to index the uncouthness of benshengren (本省人, ‘native’ Taiwanese, not to be confused with indigenous people). In the 2000s, taike was reappropriated by benshengren to denote a stereotyped Taiwanese who enjoys local articulations of electronic dance music and the recreational use of ecstasy (Wang 2018).

2 In original, shengyin / zaoyin [literally ‘sound / noise’]. As my discussion of genre will show, terms like ‘experimental music’, ‘sound art’, ‘sound’ and ‘noise’ are at times interchangeable, at others signalling profound aesthetic judgments and boundaries.

3 Pace Alan Licht, I will henceforth use ‘experimental music’ as a general category encompassing multiple genres, including the ones described in the previous section. Following David Novak, I understand the term to indicate a ‘generalized popular vanguard’ (2008, p. 23) including noise, free jazz and free improvisation, electronic music and other genres of contemporary new music and even sound art. This decision reflects the lax use of the Chinese term shiyan yinyue as an umbrella category for these genres that I encountered across scenes in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China.

4 Experimental electronic musician Meuko! Meuko! hosts a monthly show on London-based online radio station NTS, several experimental musicians have been guests of the livestream-based event Taipei Community Radio, and an increasing number of organizers set up Facebook livestreams for their events.

5 For example, the archival exhibition Shoot the Pianist: The Noise Scene in Taipei 1990–1995, held in London throughout April 2015, revisits the transition between noise and sound art in the early years of Taiwanese experimental musicmaking in terms of local scene.