It seems that almost every DJ you meet in Taipei was once the kid in LCD Soundsystem’s ‘Losing My Edge’, to whom the song’s narrator was, well, losing his edge. Just swap out the band references to the local Taiwanese context: Forests for This Heat, Touming Magazine for Nation of Ulysses. Taiwanese American DJ Jon Du quotes James Murphy’s lyrics when he introduces himself: “I sold all my guitars, started playing synthesisers, and now I use the CDJs.”
We’re chatting at FINAL, an underground club in the middle of Taipei’s Da’an district, fumes from yesterday’s cigarettes coating the red couches around which we’ve gathered. Du, who moved to Taipei over a decade ago, has had a similar trajectory to many other DJs in the city who started out in the indie rock scene: first shoegazing with Boyz & Girl and noise rocking with Forests, these days he mostly runs with the likes of Tzusing, Lujiachi, Meuko! Meuko!, and the rest of the regulars at FINAL, playing a mix of bass music, EBM and deconstructed club over its Funktion-One sound system.
“Me, Pon [Meuko! Meuko!] and Jon all used to play in bands together,” says Lujiachi. “I remember there was a time Jon told me to come through to [now-closed club] Korner — I was just playing guitar at the time, then all of a sudden started going to Korner and started listening to electronic music.”
Korner was, in many ways, the birthplace of the current generation of clubs in Taipei: from its ashes arose the techno purism of Pawnshop and the dark eclecticism of FINAL. Located in the antechamber of live music venue The Wall, Korner was just about the only place for underground DJs to perform, catering to a mishmash of indie kids, techno heads, punks and bass junkies. Nowadays, there’s a bit more of a variety, with clubs like Studio 9 and GREY AREA filling out the ranks, but just over half a decade ago Korner was the nexus of the underground.
“A lot of people were throwing parties there and we all had different nights, but the crowd was open-minded, very mixed, and it was fun,” says Sonia Calico, a DJ and producer whose UnderU parties brought the likes of Bok Bok, Jubilee, and Air Max ‘97 to Korner in its heyday. “It would be like house events, techno events, minimal events, bass events, just a lot of different stuff. So when Korner finished, every genre kind of split off.”
