Dispatch from Formoz: Day I - 爽．到．暴!!!

4PM @ Formoz Rock Festival 2007, Taipei, Taiwan

Opening act -- Dean & Britta, former lead singer and members of seminal '80s shoegaze bands Galaxie 500 and Luna. Few people can catch the opening act at such hours and under such a tropical sun. The stadium is dusty and only half-filled, but a lot of the people who fill the half are sporting vintage Galaxie and Luna shirts. Some of them whisper to each other about how they can't believe D&B are finally here.

Britta: "Should we just start?"
Dean: "I think so, Britta."
Britta: "Uhm."
Audience: [silent, sweating, unresponsive and shy with their English]
Sonny, who's standing beside me and sweating like a sponge: "[Goddammit] YES!!!"
Britta: "...Was that a yes? Do I hear a yes?"
Audience: [still comatose; some of them turn around to stare at Sonny while they fan themselves with concert pamphlets]
Britta: "I guess that's a yes?? Okay, 1. 2. 3-ah-one-two-threee-four--"

The crowd of loyal indie fans go crazy. I joke to Sonny that he officially kick started the 2007 Formoz Festival.



The time finally came when I traded my three-day Formoz Festival ticket for a flimsy wristband that allows me to enter concert grounds. I am strictly warned not to take this wristband off for the next few days, or else it's trouble. It's supposedly water-proof, but sweat and manhandling has already made it wrinkly.

Oh my god was it a good day.

So I arrived at the festival with Sonny around noon. For Taiwan's most high-profile indie music festival, it seemed awfully untrafficked. Nothing like the sweltering shoulder-rubbing crowd at Hohaiyan Festival. But then you look around and everyone's wearing their fav band shirts. You feel your lack of music nerd-cred. No red-faced and shirtless revelers around you, either. The crowd is different.

Dean & Britta were kinda irked for their performance since (A) it was hot as BALLS and their New York balls cannot take such hot; and (B) soundcheck took FOREVER. It's unfortunate that D&B had to fly dozens of hours to Taipei just to be soundcheck guinea pigs. So even for New York indie smartasses, they were acting kinda cold. But they were good anyway. They played their Galaxie 500 and Luna songs obligingly, though they obviously seem tired of being asked to play the classics all the time.

Now D&B performed in a relatively shabby and empty stadium. But Formoz has 7 stages and hundreds of bands, and the other stages are located in an adjoining cultural park, which, as you can see below-



-is the classiest outdoor concert venue I've seen in quite some time. It's all built on a leafy, labrynthine hill too. The architecture is traditional Taiwanese -- lots of tiled walls and staircases to sit on and courtyards to crowd. Too bad the bigger international acts (Yo La Tengo, Testament, QURULI, Anna Tsychiya, TERIYAKI BOYZ) will not have the pleasure of playing at the cooler stages. OK GO will get to play on the "Mountain Stage", though, and that's one of the neater ones as I'll show you in a bit.



We let D&B go without an encore and headed to the other stages to see Sugar Plum Ferry, one of Taiwan's most famous post-rock bands. And holyshit were they the best thing to happen in the already-awesome day. I've seen them play at The Wall, but the claustrophobic bar setting doesn't do them justice since they (being the post-rock weirdoes that they are) don't waste words chatting with the audience in between songs. The bassist is even famous for playing with his back facing the audience. Truly eccentric people they are, but wow did they dominate today.



We sat down in the traditionally-built courtyard at around sunset. Their music crescendoed while airplanes zoomed by (we're close enough to the military airport) and a brilliant sunset exploded overhead. Then the full moon rose over the ornate tiled roof right over their heads as they played. How any concert can be so painfully perfect escapes my mind.

Then we headed to the Mountain Stage to check out The Shine & Shine & Shine & Shine, crossing traditional Chinese castle walls on the way. They had a big table in the middle of the band formation which the lead female vocalist was dancing on top of in between keyboard solos and turntable manipulations. She's just about as sane as Helena Bonham-Carter on crack-laced shrooms -- and that made them entirely deliciously enjoyable.



The lead vocalist would randomly scream "爽!!!" in the middle of her songs, then pick up a wand from the table and twirl it around before pelting it at the guitarist and banging her microphone on the drummer's cymbals. Then she'd take swigs of whiskey and molest the guitarist some more. It was epic. Her strategy for selling their EP was: "I have 6 EPs on my table. They cost too much and we only recorded one song on each. On some of them we didn't record at all! Ho-hah -- 爽!!!"

The stage itself was at the top of the hill and had a full view of Taipei 101 and Shinkong Tower as well as the full moon. The tiled walls around the stage were entangled in old tree roots.

After The Shines x4, we went to check out Testament, a supposedly proto-Metallica San Francisco band. I'm not a metalhead by any stretch of imagination, but they were one of today's headline acts, so I figured why not. Sonny has seen Tool and other metal bands perform, but I didn't know what to expect from a metal concert.

Mike, I think you'd totally dig them.

So we headed back to the big stadium. By this time it was no longer sun-drenched and dustry, but quiet and completely dark. We wondered what the hell was up, where the band was, etc. A tightly packed group had already gathered in front of the stage, holding their breaths. Then the stage lit up and the audience turned into a full-fledged cult. People were not so much crowd surfing as they were being tossed around.



True to the genre's reputation, Testament made a hugely theatrical stage entrance and seemed genuinely excited to be on stage. I found that I enjoyed them a lot more than I'd expected.



Pretty good song (token metal-band ballad, I'm told):



Well, shit, it's 3AM now. I need to catch tomorrow's shows! We also caught this band of art students/indie animators who screened their trippy animated MVs while they performed. One of them involved re-animating Van Gogh's portraits and sunflower paintings. On their last song, people with deer masks and antlers charged onstage and attacked the lead vocalist with firecrackers.

Anyway, just wanted to say that all the bands I've seen so far have been pleasantly surprising in some way. I'll keep yall updated for day 2!