Category: News

A bunch of my tracks from Chill Dynasty and Made in Taiwan are being used in a HD Discovery Channel series entitled Fantastic Festivals of the World currently airing in the US on Discovery’s HD Theatre. The two episodes featuring my music are 1. The Mid Autumn Lantern Festival – Hong Kong and 16. Lunar New Year – Hong Kong. I’ve been informed that a non-HD version will be going out to something like 23 countries in the near future. I do hope we get to see it here in Taiwan – I’d get quite a kick out of it, seeing as I’m a bit of a Discovery Channel junky anyways.

I was introduced to the music of Eric Truffaz whilst doing a mindless data capturing job back in South Africa drawing roads onto satellite images for GPS systems. Yawn. The single perk of the job was that you could listen to music whilst doing it; I had Bending New Corners on endless repeat…

Fast forward four years and Truffaz is playing a free gig in my new hometown at the annual Taichung Jazz Festival. I arrived tired and slightly out of it and was holding thumbs the live experience would live up to all I was hoping for. I need not have worried though, the band was awesome. At times shivers of pleasure good. Wish more people would have danced, though…

If you read French (or have a link to Babelfish handy) you can read Truffaz’ Diary entry about his visit to Taiwan. Nothing about the the gig I saw though.

Lucky number 13. Looking forward to hearing the other artists on this. Kou is my neighbor!

Anji Bee of the band Lovespirals hosts a really cool chillout podcast, entitled The Chillcast. When Anji recently contacted me regarding an interview, I was of course flattered and only too happy to accept the invitation to talk about my music. The Chillcast Special Feature: MoShang was released yesterday and kudos to Anji for doing a really professional job with it. Anji plays a whole bunch of tracks from Chill Dynasty and Made in Taiwan – since it’s an interview, I blab over most of it, though. My thanks again to Anji – this kind of exposure on the web is really invaluable to us independents.

The interview also coincides really nicely with the release of Chill Dynasty on iTunes. I was impatiently waiting for it to become available, but to be fair, iTunes must be receiving a huge amount of new material daily and some delay is understandable – definitely acceptable in this case. I mentioned CD Baby’s delivery of the album to iTunes in an earlier post, if you’re interested in how long it took…

Of course, the album remains available in CD and digital download format from The Chill Shop.

Ahhhh, back from a glorious 5 day break in which I tried to balance doing nothing (as befits a holiday) with catching up on behind schedule commitments and barbecuing. Moon Festival is the one time in the year when everyone in Taiwan barbecues – it’s fall and the weather is delightful; warm but not too hot.

I got together with Mark Forman on Monday to record our second All Noted podcast – Gone in 30 Seconds Flat. We played some world hiphop and I had a good excuse to include the new Kou Chou Ching remix, as well as a Duusman track. I described the Duusman track as an “angry young man” song; turns out we played “Maak Jou Oë Toe” and not “Op Die Eerste Van Die Maand” – I’m decidedly not angry on the former! Both these tracks received quite a bit of exposure on South African TV and, according to my former Duusman band mates, still get aired occasionally. On the shoot for “Op Die Eerste…” the director had the band running around a disused prison block and we managed to get ourselves locked into a pitch black cell…

Mark has the complete track list and links over at bbluesman.com. Just thought I’d add the download link for the complete Sichtbeton LP.

In my effort to squeeze as much fun as possible out of my short break, I visited the Janfusun Fancy World (!!!) theme park on Sunday (they claim to have the tallest Ferris wheel in Asia) and broke the ice with the G5 (pictured up top); it’s an eviscerating sheer drop from there – probably all over in less than 30 seconds, but terrifying while it lasts. I recorded the sound of this monster and thought how the noise of coasters clanking up the initial incline is probably specifically engineered to instill fear…