A pure person

Lim Giong's electronic contrasts as a reflection of Taiwanese identity

Millennium Mambo (2001) by Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien opens with a woman, ethereal, on a fluorescent-lit bridge at night. The music, by Lim Giong, starts with pulsing static and bell-like synths. A warm electric guitar enters, like a hug, accented with a steady kick drum, like a heartbeat. Then a man’s voice echoes in Taiwanese Hokkien: siān-liông (kind) / pîng-huân (ordinary) / khuài-lo̍k (happy) / tan-sûn ê lâng (a pure person). Artifice with sincerity, metronomic with flowing, new textures with an old language; it’s not obvious that these elements should all sound good together. Yet they do.

林強 (Lim Giong), a Taiwanese pop singer turned electronic composer¹, has a style characterized by contrasts. Following classic Taiwanese 90s pop, his early music was sentimental melodrama influenced by Western disco and rock. Later, he moved toward electronica, and one of his first mostly-electronic albums (Insects Awaken, 2005) contains spoken and sung Taiwanese, Mandarin, English, and French, as well as sounds of mahjong tiles, a funk track, and his rendition of a Taiwanese folk song. He’s also composed dozens of film soundtracks for Chinese and Taiwanese filmmakers, and won the Cannes Film Festival Soundtrack Award in 2015. His new record 别境 (The Realm of Otherness) combines sounds of nature — waves on a rocky beach, wind in a bamboo forest — with almost any electronic sound you can think of. His versatility is clear, but one thing has remained constant: the nostalgic Taiwanese language, sung, spoken, and sampled.

It’s perhaps not a coincidence that Taiwanese culture and history is also characterized by contrasts. Though best known internationally for semiconductors, Taiwan’s subtropical wildlife and scenery are also famous across Asia². Throughout its history, the island has been colonized or occupied by southeastern Chinese immigrants, the Dutch and Spanish, the Japanese Empire, and Kuomintang from mainland China. After financial assistance and democratic reforms of the 20th century, Taiwan rapidly developed into what it is today: a mix of southeastern Chinese (where Hokkien comes from) and Japanese culture, democratic yet not recognized as a country, progressive yet steeped in Taoism and tradition, agricultural and food-centered yet technology-focused. Throughout Taiwan’s multiple governing entities and industrialization, Taiwanese Hokkien and Taiwanese Mandarin, distinct from their mainland origins, have developed and persisted.

Lim Giong’s music constantly hints at these themes: outside influences, nostalgia, the power of nature, contrasts and tension, and the Taiwanese identity. But more than anything else, the musical worlds he builds are unique and endlessly fun to listen to.

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A few years ago in the winter time, I came across the creaking of a windy bamboo forest outside of Tainan, in southern Taiwan. I had never heard anything like it, so I recorded it.

You can hear something similar at the end of 冬風竹 (Winter Windswept Bamboos).

And 石貝 (Stone Shell) is my favorite from the new record: a dance club on a stone beach.

There is a surreal quality to much of Lim Giong’s music that makes it well-suited for certain types of cinema. This scene from Bi Gan’s 地球最後的夜晚 (Long Day’s Journey Into Night, 2018), for example.

Here’s the opening of Millennium Mambo.

I’ll leave you with a playlist of my favorite Lim Giong.

1. According to an interview (in Mandarin and French, but there’s another English written one here), his full path was singer and guitarist → actor → film composer → DJ → electronic composer.

2. The unique climate at high altitudes so close to the sea allows cultivation of the best oolong teas in the world.