About

The first art-based music festival in Taiwan

TheCube Forum Music Festival－Sonic Shaman is the flagship program of TheCube’s three-year project A Madeleine Moment. The festival is not only an in-depth international exchange that resumes in the post-pandemic era, but also the transdisciplinary creative practice that treats “art-based music festival” as its curatorial concept.

Orchestrated in a new hybrid form, this “music festival” features the performances delivered by 27 artist groups from home and abroad (Egypt, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea). During the four-day event, we will spare no effort to offer the visitors an unprecedented listening experience through wide collaborations in four highly heterogeneous venues in southern Taipei.

These venues will ignite the collective imagination about sound and performance. The venues include “The Wall Live House” (the best known venue for indie music performance in Taipei), the 49.4-channel stereo space developed collaboratively by the IRCAM and C-LAB Taiwan Sound Lab, the “AUSPIC PAPER” (a plant oozing the industrial charm in a corner of Taipei City), and the “Guling Street Avant-Garde Theatre” (an important redoubt of avant-garde experiments in Taiwan based in a historic building of the Japanese colonial period).

 

The music festival as a new curatorial concept

The first TheCube Forum Music Festival addresses the theme “Sonic Shaman” and treats the performers as the shamans who convey transcendental messages and engage in ritual-like exchange with the visitors through the mediation of sound wave/audio frequency. The curatorial team invites first-rate creators of experimental or electronic music, artists, and scholars to make a bold use of sound, frequency, language, and lecture performance, insofar as to open up a spiritual space that renders the visitors amazed, delirious, and even lost in contemplation.

This music festival exhibits a perfect fusion of sound, lecture performance, and live art, ranging from the integration between avant-garde and traditional poetry, chant and sound experiment to the “sound-making” creativity in algorithmic creation, DJ performance and sound system.

 

About the Project A Madeleine Moment

The three-year project A Madeleine Moment draws its inspiration from Marcel Proust’s masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu. In this novel, the taste of a madeleine dipped in black tea not only evokes the protagonist’s old memory and awareness, but also arouses his emotions that do not emerge through “recalling” in his daily life. Treating this twist as its theme and clue, the project A Madeleine Moment, in its flagship program—the music festival, regards sound wave as a medium for awakening the senses, transmitting messages, and receiving sentimental experiences. The musicians, performers and artists employ the technics/medium as the invokum to create, and to reflect on “the making of” our collective emotions and experiences in the hearing and sounding process.

Four-day festival line-up:

12.08 (Thu) 19:00-1:40　@ The Wall Live House
(B1, No. 200, Section 4, Roosevelt Rd, Wenshan Dist., Taipei City)

Hassan Khan (Egypt)、The Observatory (SG), dj sniff (JP), Social Dis Dance (TW)、dINO (TW), Katrina (TW)

Special Feature： Formosa Sound System

 

12.09 (Fri) 18:30-22:20　@ C-LAB Taiwan Sound Lab
(No. 177, Section 1, Jianguo S Rd, Da’an Dist., Taipei City)

Olivier Pasquet (FR), Mong Tong (TW), Hassan Khan (Egypt) (talk)

 

12.10 (Sat) 14:00-23:20　@ AUSPIC PAPER
(No. 9, Ln. 130, Minquan Rd., Xindian Dist., New Taipei City)

Lim Giong (TW), Seething Mass (PH), Island Futurism (TW), Dayang Yraola (PH), Lee Kit (HK), Candy Bird (TW), the SiyuLand Pj. (TW), Flyinsnow (TW), Xu Chia-Chun (TW), Cheng Daoyuan (TW)

 

12.11 (Sun) 13:30-22:00　@ Guling Street Avant-Garde Theater
(No.2, Ln. 5, Guling St., Zhongzheng Dist., Taipei)

Summer Lei (TW), HAEPAARY (KR), Prairie WWWW (TW), Au Sow-Yee (MY), Wang Yujun (TW), Chang Wen-Hsuan (TW), KK Yeh (TW), Nine Eight Seven Fate Engineering (TW), Formosa Sound System (TW) (talk), dj sniff (JP), (talk)