Over a month-long residency, Wok the Rock and Julian Abraham “Togar” organically unfold a series of gatherings, conversations, listening sessions, jam sessions, radio broadcasts, karaoke parties, concerts, hangouts, dinners, and film screenings. How might Taiwan’s Indonesian migrant community and Indonesian musicians in Taiwan’s music scene form lasting collaborations with Taipei’s musicians, curators, organizers, and music collectors?
Wok the Rock and Julian Abraham “Togar”
Sunday, 7 January
14:00-17:00 @ Music Room
Title: Have You Ever Met Dao Ming Tse?: A Tribute to Meteor Garden (SEE MORE)
Host: ID-TW Pop Bureau
"Have You Ever Met Dao Ming Tse" is an intimate showcase that celebrates the Taiwanese boy band F4, which formed after the Taiwanese drama Meteor Garden. F4 (flower 4) is one of the most famous pop groups in Taiwan’s history, having also gained popularity in other parts of Asia, including Indonesia. Their songs has become one of the most memorable music in Taiwan by Indonesians. The success of the TV series created a vivid collective memory that carved each star’s characteristic style and fashion onto the minds of a generation. Revisiting this phenomenon, the artists will play songs from F4 and Meteor Garden, also other pop songs in the same era both in Taiwan and Indonesia. To embrace our memory is to embrace our guilty pleasures.
Sunday, 14 January
14:00-17:00 @ Music Room
Title: ORGEN+62BE (SEE MORE)
Host: Wu Ting-Kuan
ORGEN+62BE combines the Indonesian country code (+62) with the licence plate prefix ORGEN+62BE designating Indonesia’s Lampung province to address the uniqueness of Lampung-style organ music, or orgen / organ tunggal. Lampung is located in the southern edge of Sumatra, though migrants from Java also have a strong presence in its cultural scene. The orgen repertoire contains many hybrid forms, with remix beats or the group Yogi Music, made up of migrant workers from Lampung based in Taiwan. The orgen player Yogi, together with his bandmates Indra and Ubay, will present Lampung orgen music in the Music Room of Taipei Biennial 2023.
Session 1: Remix Lampung (DJ Controller)
Session 2: Javanese Pop Dangdut & Karaoke
Session 3: Remix Lampung (Orgen)
Saturday, 20 January
15.00–18.00 @ Music Room
Title: A Fly Enters. Immense Breath of the SEA. A Pack of Mice Breaks. Fearless Journey in the JUNGLE. (SEE MORE)
Host: Lo Shih-Tung (OCAC) & Lai Tsung-Yun (LSF)
The fly, as we have seen and will see again, represents the undesirable companion. Its sonic presence is heard like empty chatter, but it also incarnates in this case sound that cannot be captured—sound that is interrupted and restarts according to its own law.†—Michel Chion in Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise
The title could either suggest a theme or an idea, an implementation of gestures and feral movements. It also brings up the awareness between the environment and human existence. It invites us to pay attention to smaller things in an enormous landscape, to pick up neglected sounds in our surroundings, and to feel the boundless ocean where we are situated. It stretches as an umbrella to create a makeshift space shared between individuals, a temporary shelter allowing private exchanges. As we drift into our fragmented reality, this event attempts to create a new gravity across individuals, create new ways of experiencing sound, forming nodes between seemingly unrelated people and things: experiencing, seeing, and listening through compound eyes and ears.
Saturday, 27 January
15:00-18:00 @ Music Room / 18:00-23:00 @ Continue Music Studio
Title: Music No Borders (SEE MORE)
Host: Alica Han and Chen Wei-Lun (Suck Glue Boys)
Inspired by the slogan Music No Borders popular in the international migrant worker movement, Music No Border is the fourth week of Julian Abraham "Togar" and Wok the Rock's Hostbuster music sessions, hosted by members of the local punk collective Suck Glue Boys. Aiming to break barriers by encouraging more interaction between artists, musicians, and audiences,
Music No Border is composed of two parts. The first (15:00 - 18:00) will use the Music Room as a temporary gathering place, in which members of Sundialll will invite musicians, dancers, and audience to explore cross-cultural artistic expressions of Indo-Taiwan in the form of performances and beyond. For the second part (18:00 - 23:00), the hosts will continue the event at a music studio outside of the museum, in which the bands from the migrant worker community and the local punk scene will play together.
