Jonathan Biddle – Made in Taiwan

Tag: Writing

Transitions – PDE Degree Show 2011

Transitions

Craig Whittet at the Glasgow School of Art asked me to write some words for the Product Design Engineering degree show – what an honour! The theme this year is ‘transitions’.

Change is Scary

In the time between your first day at art school, global finances have collapsed, century-old car companies and even entire countries have defaulted on their debt, and with the rise of China and India political power has shifted eastwards. Indeed, the very status of hardware design is shrinking in the face of interfaces and software. You might be feeling a little uneasy about your prospects, and I don’t blame you.

Responding to these changes will require flexibility, and people that can identify problems, form synergies with other disciplines, creatively generate solutions, and communicate with enthusiasm and energy. Strip away the sketching, software, model-making and engineering exams, and PDE gives you a nucleus of skills that will arm you for a career of uncertainty and change. The learning process has not ended; it’s only just beginning.

Change is Thrilling

Nine years ago, I graduated from a Glasgow also in the midst of a recession. My instinct told me to pick an industry area where things were changing, so I began looking for jobs in sustainable design, the medical industry (since people were unlikely to stop getting ill) and in Asia. Based on little more than gut-feel, and the desire to have a fully-paid backpacking trip to the other side of the world, I accepted a job offer working on Asus’ design team in Taipei.

The night before I left, nerves gave me a knot in my stomach so tight I was in physical pain, but before I knew it I was on the ground, right on the cutting edge of the globe’s manufacturing industry. Fast forward to today, and while I am working with some of the best designers, most capable suppliers, in one the largest industries in the world, I am still anxious about change, what it means for our customers, to Dell, and my career.

My lessons; anxiety and excitement are two sides of the same coin, be prepared to jump in feet-first, don’t be afraid to follow your gut, and whatever you do, do something that you love. What do you want your story to be?

Change is Opportunity

For me, PDE instilled a can-do-attitude and appetite for tackling sticky problems with zeal. Global problems and their potential solutions will only get broader, and call on people capable of bridging between disparate skills and previously unrelated disciplines.

Companies need people like you to make products like the iPhone, combining industrial design, software, services and manufacturing expertise, and dozens more skills. The growing elderly population needs people like you to propose sensitive solutions that allow them to continue living fulfilling lives. And the world needs people like you to stand a hope of motivating people to use fewer products, consume less energy, and dispose of less waste.

There has never been a better time to be designer.

The Glasgow School of Art – fond, fond memories.

2011/06/03
Innovation is Fracturing

The pursuit of cheaper, faster manufacturing has lead to an enormous shift in the economies of the ‘old’ Industrial nations. After losing basic manufacturing and support roles, the West is now haemorrhaging advanced development and design functions to the manufacturing companies of Asia; in many cases run by Taiwanese business owners. Most of the major technology brands now have significant development operations in the region, and their role will only develop further.

So, is Western design and innovation dead in the water?

Cultural Exports

The West (and Japan) have proven adept at innovating ‘platforms’. Technical platforms include HTML, GSM phone standards and television. ‘Cultural platforms’ are just as important, though; hip-hop, fixed-gear bikes, haute-couture fashion and social networking all started life in the West, and went on to stimulate globally influential industries around them; as evidenced on the streets of Taipei today.

Fixed gear bikes – the idea imported from Europe. The bike made in Taiwan.

Given the amount of technical expertise and knowledge on the ground in Taiwan, you would expect a similar amount of ‘platform’ innovation to be flourishing. For one reason or another, it isn’t. This innovation requires an empowered workforce, willingness to start small (rather than ramping-up to volume production), great marketing teams, access to sales channels, and amongst a multitude of other economic and cultural factors, the willingness to play – you ain’t going to invent the first MP3 player without first loving music, and you aren’t going to assemble the first mountain bike without ‘wasting’ a whole bunch of time with your friends in the hills.

But there is innovation here; just not in the ways we think about it. For example, the iPhone ‘platform’, while masterminded in California, was enabled by a dozens of Taiwanese technology vendors over many decades, and the gradual honing, optimisation and refinement of the component parts and assemblies was essential in its birth and development. It is this ‘incremental innovation’ competency that companies in the West are exporting to Asia.

Now, ‘Platform innovation’ and ‘incremental innovation’ are geographically decoupling, eliminating the ‘water-cooler’ conversations between marketeers, designers and engineers that so often lead to leaps of development.

Learning how to work with these guys in China will be increasingly important.

The Last of the Machinists

Consider the ‘old guard’ design houses in America and Europe; IDEO, Frog, Seymour Powell and the rest. The senior leadership of these organisations likely gained tacit hardware knowledge in an economic environment built on manufacturing and engineering expertise; it’s even possible that their own parents worked in technical or factory roles. But what happens to innovative industries when the keepers of this tacit knowledge retire? For economies that pride themselves on ‘innovation’ and design services – the UK and USA included – I believe the consequences are severe.

It’s part of the reason why, seven years ago, I decided to move to Taiwan.

Dual-Stream Innovation

Decoupling of ‘platform’ and ‘incremental’ innovation, difficulty in stimulating the ‘water-cooler effect’, and erosion of tacit knowledge, means many innovation-focused companies will struggle to do business in the way they used to.

Apple and a few others have been able to leverage a split innovation model; offloading the burden of innovating the countless component parts that individually might not contribute much to a product, but together form a synergetic whole; and retaining core competencies of layout, computer processors and mechanical aspects such as part tooling. By doing this, they are able to ride the wave of ‘incremental innovation’ provided by the immense volumes of an entire industry, push suppliers in a very targeted way, and make the platform leaps when they are ready. The result; a product like the iPad delievered to a pretty low cost for the consumer; and still a healthy margin.

Tooling in China. Supplier in Taiwan. Computer company in the USA. And a customer somewhere else entirely. Complicated!

But what about companies smaller than the Fortune 500 behemoths? For the UK at least, we need to become far more willing to invest time and effort in Asia, forge partnerships, work out what incremental improvements we can outsource, and what platforms to retain. The resultant development model is not the same as the one we learnt in university, and it is not the same as innovation process touted by the big innovation companies in the 90s. It’s a messier, more complex, interlinked model, spanning companies and international boundaries.

Western design and innovation is not dead, but it will need to become braver, more flexible and more cosmopolitan.

2011/02/02
Finding an Industrial Design Job in Asia

Leaving design school, it can be really tough to pick a career direction; let alone find a job. Believing ‘change brings opportunity’, after graduating in 2003 I decided to head east and cut my teeth in Asia. Now all I needed was a job, and a destination.

Since I had never been to Asia before (it seems ridiculous to write that now), I lacked any connections or experience in the region. What I did have was a resume that I had been building since leaving high-school that packed a solid range of work experience and internships in some well-known companies. Crucially, a design education that included engineering and management training gave me the advantage of providing something a little different. All this provided a good foundation to start the search.

Leaving Europe. The night before, I had a pain in my stomach unlike anything I had ever felt before … but since the cost of changing my ticket to come home was only €25, I tricked myself into leaving anyway; and almost seven years later, here I am.

Working remotely, it was difficult to get a grasp of the ‘landscape’ of the design industry. I naturally applied through the variety of HR web portals that larger companies maintain, but was not surprised when I did not hear anything back. I browsed design company web sites, pestered my lecturers for alumni contact information, targeted conferences and design festivals looking for speakers and sponsors, and even pored through design award books looking for names. Anything that could give me the crucial ‘@’, that allowed me to crack the e-mail code was considered.

After months of freelancing, interviewing in the UK, and more than a little frustration, I finally hit pay-dirt when an innocuous ad for Asus Computers’ design team in Taipei popped up on Coroflot.com. Phone interviews were followed by a face-to-face in Germany, and before I knew it, I had an offer. I finally hit the ground on May 14th 2004; a solid ten months after graduating. Do not underestimate the power of resourcefulness, patience and perseverance (and even a little cunning).

My first few weeks on the ground were at first a little perplexing.

I struck it lucky with that advert, but a cross-section of my international friends in the region reveals a similar picture; get stuck in with research, and don’t give up. Nothing beats getting your feet on the ground out here, so book that plane ticket (ask your school to see if there are travel or research bursaries). No-one is going to begrudge a meeting with you if you have flown half-way round the world, and it’s likely that if you do meet with other designers out here, your spirit of adventure will likely mean they are more open to help you. You’ll be surprised.

18 months on Asus’ design team was followed by almost three years in design studio, DEM. And this bring me today, working for Dell on the notebook design team, deeply ingrained in the Taiwanese ‘industrial organism’, and a full paid-up member of the Asian Industrial Design Community. More about that next time.

Taking trains to visit vendors in China.

2011/01/14
Things I Learned After Graduating Design School

“Well, they didn’t teach us this in design school”

These exchanges seem to happen with some regularity in the Dell design team. So it got us thinking, what didn’t they – or couldn’t they – teach us in design school? What do we wish we knew then, that we think we know now?

Somewhat inspired by the list penned by Architect Michael McDonough, this is what the team came up with. What else would you add?

1. It’s not about design.

Working away in the school studio, you’ll have more time and ability to focus on a single task than at any time in your professional design career. Savour this luxury. Instead, you’ll be facing a constant barrage of vague briefs, irrational clients, opaque politics, moving goalposts and suppliers that suddenly can’t deliver. It will be the ability to hop, skip and jump between these obstacles that will keep you sane, and help you thrive.

You’ll discover that the world does not revolve around your final sketch. Compared to the amount invested in your beautiful little scribble, actually getting it to market will take technical, marketing and logistical resources many orders of magnitude greater. You’ll discover you have to develop the ability to speak the tongues of business, of engineers and of countless other functions if you want to keep the little germ of your idea alive. And you will, but before that …

Glasgow School of Art in Scotland where I studied Product Design Engineering … photo borrowed from Flickr user 2plus2is5

2. Your ideas will die, often horribly.

The pain of seeing something beautiful rejected by a client is beaten only by seeing it mutate into a hideous zombie, out of your control, and yet entirely your responsibility. You’ll physically revolt as you complete the umpteenth round of revisions, at the behest of someone wearing far worse shoes than you. You’ll mutter under your breath, willing it to die, and loaf around like a teenager, high on hormones that have lain dormant since puberty. If it makes it to market (as these zombie projects inevitably do), the shock of seeing it in the flesh will make you wonder whether you are really cut out for design. Take consolation in the fact that complete annihilation of an idea means potential resurrection.

The hit-rate of products making it all the way will be considerably lower than your expectations. Working in a consultancy, you might see 5% of your projects making it past the finish line. If you are lucky or working somewhere with comically low levels of risk, you might be seeing 50% of your work prevail. Just be ready for constant and repeated failure; but it’s from failure that victory takes flight.

Marketoonist Tom Fishburne nails it in his pithy cartoons.

3. You are not as good as you want to be.

Not in a bad way, it just means you have not yet fulfilled your potential.

As Ira Glass points out in these magnificent videos, the reason you got into design (or any creative profession) is because you have taste. You’ll float through school, get that first job and have this faint, nagging sensation that what you are working on is not all that good. This will continue for years, until that impeccable taste you have been nurturing is finally matched by your blossoming abilities. I began to feel confident after four or five years, and this perhaps matches Malcom Gladwell’s theories that it takes about 10,000 hours of work to really get good at something – but it’s no race, and some days it feels like I have regressed back to the start.

So be aware that you suck a little bit, use it as fuel to improve, but don’t let it get you down. In fact…

4. Be patient.

Getting your first full-time design job can be a total pain. I graduated, went traveling for a couple of months, came back and started looking for employment. Amid phases of freelancing, job searches, twiddling my thumbs and interviewing, I ate up about ten months until I started on my first day at grown-up work. But once you are in, you are in, and you will be surprised how quickly you develop networks and relationships to take you to the next level.

Waiting to get something you are proud of in your folio may also take an age. See #2. Some of the work you are doing will be helping to set a direction, which will then turn into real projects with lead-times about the same length as your entire professional career; cell phones and other electronic equipment typically take 9 months to a year to flow from ID model to the shopfront. Factor in aforementioned failures, and you could easily be waiting several years before you get your first product on sale.

So, slow down. Be realistic. And be thankful you don’t work in the pharmaceutical industry where development times can be measured in decades. Unless you are working in the pharmaceutical industry, that is.

Never stop pushing. Write, take photos, sketch, make models; pick your poison and hone your skills. At the same time, don’t be afraid to chase people, hunt for e-mail addresses and generally ignore signs to give up. Nothing worth fighting for ever came easily.

5. You will hate it.

Perhaps because you do something that you love, when things go wrong (and they will) you will hate it. Not just ‘I hate Tuesdays’, or ‘my boss is annoying’. No, this is unfocused rage, ignited by feelings of injustice at a project being canceled, or disconsolation when your software skills mean the 3D model breaks down at midnight before the presentation. You’ll probably become more philosophical with age, and pass the baton of frustration onto some other unsuspecting junior, but don’t completely lose the ability to hate things. It means you care, and this energy will be what spurs you on to greater heights of quality and delivery.

But sorry, if you want a nice, stable job without any troughs, get a job in a bank. Just don’t expect as many peaks either.

6. Making things that look easy is difficult.

It’s easy to look at the single-piece rubber base of a Macbook, the striking interface simplicity of a Flip, or the bold silhouette of Dr. Dre’s headphones and think ‘I could do that’. Masked behind this apparent simplicity are technical challenges, organisational ‘feature creep’ inertia and battles over risk and cost. 90% of good quality is design is in the execution, but sadly this will be out of your control unless you start doing more legwork. From the moment your idea hits paper, it will try its damnedest to become as ugly as possible by the time it first greets customers; you’ll discover that some obscure country requires its regulatory logo to be as large as a postage stamp, that in order to meet recycling criteria it will need to be assembled with large screws, and that the white plastic you wanted to use has been bought-up by Nintendo for the Christmas Wii rush. Facing these these problems, all you can do is draw on your creativity, manage the damage, and learn for the next time.

Like it or not, the ultimate quality of your product will be decided by factors potentially out of your control, often in another part of the world. Get good at speaking in the language of Engineers, suppliers and the people paid to execute your product. Even better, relish the opportunities to dive into technical problems.

7. Things change.

When I started university, Minidisc was the ‘in’ music format. When I graduated, we spent the last few weeks together frantically filling Zip drives (ask your Dad about them) with MP3s and staring at the rows of CDs we had all splurged our student loans on. The point is, things change quickly, and the world will be a different place when you graduate. Luckily for you, you are a designer and you will adapt, all while scaring yourself silly.

This also means that the things your lecturers are teaching you in first year become irrelevant by the time you leave. So, focus on learning how to learn, and don’t get too wrapped-up in software and the latest widgets – you can learn that from a book or on the job.

Zip disks once held unimaginable amounts of data, and using one at art school seemed awfully professional. Less so now. Photo from Flickr, by Runs with Scissors.

8. Your friends will earn more than you.

But you’re not in this for the money, right? Whatever, it will still irk you that while you are beavering away at trying to score a non-paying internship, your friends will be recruited by management consultancies, lured by the bright lights and Audi A4s of accounting, and generally earning a hell of a lot more than you. While this is not likely to change, what I hope you discover after a few years (see #4), is that you are developing a true career for something you love (see #5). And that is worth more than money.

9. The bum job is never the bum job.

It’s all too tempting to huff and puff at the jobs you deem dull and boring. You want to design the TVs, when all I get to design is the stupid power supply. Poor you!

But here’s the thing; do the so-called bum jobs and you will gain respect amongst your peers, carve new relationships for the role of design, and discover that it’s often these parts that turn up in multiple other areas of the company. Suddenly, the power supply that you originally made for a TV also pops up in other products, and you have planted the seed. So, get in the habit of jumping in with both feet, and people are very likely to take notice.

A friend of mine working at a big European electronics company once took on the challenge of redesigning all their remote controls. What started out in music equipment and televisions, eventually ended up with him building relationships in Medical Devices, and throughout the organisation. Enthusiasm is infectious. Photo by Crouching Badger.

10. There is no one career path.

Looking at the designers that comprise the Dell design team, you see a surprising span of disciplines and cultures. While there are those where the design job followed a path set by the design school, there are just as many with backgrounds in architecture, engineering and medical products; there is no one route. What we share, regardless of background, is a set of attitudes, aptitudes and experiences that enable us to deliver world-class products and experiences. As a designer emerging from school, it’s your job to build these blocks and learn how to combine them.

Good luck!

Jonathan Biddle is Lead Industrial Designer at Dell, based in Taipei, Taiwan.

2011/01/10
Taipei Times – Dictionaries for Learning Chinese

This month, I review two electronic learning aids developed for people learning Chinese. This time, however, they are produced by Asian companies.

Read the reviews here:

XCome Dictionary for Asus EeePC & Dr Eye Han Easy (html page) (pdf)

Enjoy!

The story of a British Industrial Designer in Taiwan…

2008/08/06
Taipei Times – Chinese Learning Technology 2

Taipei Times – Chinese Learning Technology

It’s two in two weeks, as I am introducing the mobile section of my Chinese language review series.

I do aim to catch up with developments in my new job but I have barely had a moment to think thus far – it is making DEM seem like a holiday, so far. Enjoy.

The story of a British Industrial Designer in Taiwan…

2008/05/28
Taipei Times – Chinese Learning Technology

Taipei Times – Chinese Learning Technology

It’s been a wee while, but I am back on the writing bandwagon after a ‘sabbatical’ – or rather, a break while I got my head around changing jobs and going on holiday.

But here it is – and this is something I want to make regular – a focus on learning Chinese technology for those of us not blessed by having Chinese parents.

Tune in next week for mobile products!

The story of a British Industrial Designer in Taiwan…

2008/05/21
Jack Magazine

I was contacted by the good people at Jack Magazine in Italy last year – they look for ‘influential bloggers’ in obscure locations around the world to contribute articles. The angle is in the T3/Stuff orientation, featuring a flotilla of gadgets, babes and other manly things … and I was rather surprised and flattered to have five full pages dedicated to me, and a mention on the cover!

… it’s all quite surreal to not be able to understand the final version in Italian though!

Update: I have added the English text below for the people who have asked me for a translation. I am also assured that the Italian is a direct translation of the original.

“Made in Taiwan”

Jonathan Biddle

16th November 2007

Somewhere off the coast of China, floating at the far end of the Eurasian subcontinent is the small Pacific island of Taiwan. Dubbed ‘Formosa’ by Portuguese sailors as they passed by, the island had an inauspicious early history, inhabited by little more than a few tribes of Polynesian settlers. Indeed, the Portuguese did not even think to stop.

Since then, the island has been run by the Dutch, Chinese and Japanese, and in the melee after the Second World War, no one was quite sure who owned the place. Sadly for the Taiwanese, the situation persists to this day, and its identity is still hotly disputed; especially by their old friends across the water. Depending on who you ask, it’s either the most lively, dynamic democracy in Asia, or the dangerous ‘renegade province’ of southern China.

As a result of this rather turbulent history, the island has an entirely unique set of cultural characteristics. Nowhere else in the world can you find a blend of South Pacific, Chinese and Japanese cultures, topped up with influences from Europe and America. Travelling around the country you’ll be confronted with Buddhist temples and transported on Japanese bullet trains, all set against a backdrop of lofty four thousand metre high mountain peaks, shrouded in mist.

And it’s this amazing set of features that punctuates the country at its most northern point in the capital city of Taipei. Nestled in a bowl of mountains and dormant volcanoes, home to the world’s tallest building and the epicentre of the globe’s high-tech industry, Taipei is wealthy, hard-working and developing with a pace that would leave any European city out of breath by comparison.

Tourism is hardly big, and perhaps it is a little unfair that the island shares a similar name with the more well-known Thailand. Most people who do arrive come for the huge technology trade shows, usually in the cavernous halls surrounding the ‘Taipei 101’ skyscraper. From there, they are shuttled to shopping malls, hotels and plazas that seem to come from the same Lego set of any other Asian downtown municipal ‘urban’ area, sporting the usual brand names from Milan, Paris, London and New York.

It’s a shame, because Taipei offers some of the warmest people you are likely to meet, astonishing scenery, and food that offers the best of Japanese and Chinese elements. Moreover, as Chinese culture becomes increasingly dominant, and the tide of Globalisation turns, it will be places like Taipei, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing that increasingly inform Western popular culture. With every year that passes, the city becomes more and more relevant.

The kids in Taipei are fluent in global urban style, and happily absorb, assimilate, re-mix and restyle other countries’ trends just as they breathe. This often results in all too naive fads as they spew out hip hop without the attitude, rock and roll without the rebellion and see punk as a mere tartan blip in the Vivienne Westwood boutiques. It’s unfair to judge too harshly, however, as The West has been cultivating an underground culture for many decades, with a foundation built on centuries of ‘bucking the system’. In many ways, the youngsters in Taiwan are the first, or perhaps second generation of teenagers, and as such sometimes the uncool enthusiasm on display is more akin to a British youth in the late 1950s hearing Elvis Presley for the first time.

Where it really gets interesting is when they begin formulating their own cultural concoctions. Wait at a traffic light near one of the universities on a Friday night and within a couple of minutes the front box will have filled up with dozens upon dozens of scooters, guys desperately attempting cool on the front, impossibly hot girls hanging precariously off the back, all the while chatting away into their cell phones – themselves a testament to the invention of the LED.

Any time you stop at lights it feels like a steroid-enhanced Vespa owners club rally, and it’s no secret that the highest motorcycle ownership per capita in the world is on the roads of Taiwan. The scooter is where young families of five are transported, dogs surf with tongues flapping in the air, gas tanks are delivered to the restaurants, and the old guys go to die, cigarette forever burning and firmly glued between withered lips.

Taiwan has been making things for other people for fifty years ago now. Of course, it has become synonymous with the phrase ‘Made in Taiwan’ and the association of poor quality and knock-off goods, but this is rapidly becoming a faded memory. The fact is, Taiwan is losing its jobs to the main land and has exactly the same anxieties about manufacturing and innovation as we have in The West.

As companies such as Apple and Sony come to Taiwan for their manufacturing, so the expertise and knowledge has filtered across. The iPod may have been designed by Apple in California, but the accumulated innovations of a thousand Taiwanese technology vendors has allowed it to become ever more thin and dense. Bicycle companies too come to Taiwan for their skill in manufacturing world-class frames and components. Visit the carbon fibre production facility of Giant in the middle of the island and you’ll see frames from the very best of Italy and America passing by. For a cyclist like me, it is like being a child in a (very expensive) sweet shop.

Taiwan is the first and last stop for those creating the latest innovative gadgets. Indeed, in my role, running the industrial design team at DEM (www.dem.com.tw), we work with clients such as Intel, Sony and Motorola to access and exploit this local expertise, and we assist local companies like Giant access global markets with products that are tuned for Western tastes.

Walk through one of the bustling technology markets in the city and you can sense the shift from purely Wes
tern companies providing the advertising spaces. Taiwanese companies are now also becoming increasingly ambitious themselves, and their brand recognition is growing rapidly, as companies like HTC, Acer, Asus and Mio take on rivals in Europe and America. They are increasingly leveraging their potent mixture of Chinese, Japanese and Western cultures to make devices that taking on the very best in the world.

People back home often ask me what I think about the threat of China. Of course, it is ever present, and the thought of hundreds of cruise missiles aimed at my back yard is of course a little disconcerting. However, while the two countries continue to make money – Taiwan is the biggest foreign investor in China, after all – the threat of conflict is slim. In many ways, the posturing between Japan, Korea and China is more worrisome.

Taipei, capital city of the country that at once refuses to fit in, and yet yearns for recognition and ‘normal’ status is a thrilling, bustling, multi-cultural hub that stubbornly remains off the radar of even the most hardened traveler. Don’t make the same mistake as the Portuguese traders; come, and you’ll pleasantly surprised.

The story of a British Industrial Designer in Taiwan…

2008/02/16
Taipei Times – Asus Eee PC & HTC Touch Dual

Here’s the latest installment of my monthly technology review for the Taipei Times. This month, I take a peek at the Asus Eee PC and the HTC Touch Dual. Take a look here!

Taipei Times – Technology Review – Asus Eee PC and HTC Touch Dual

The story of a British Industrial Designer in Taiwan…

2008/01/17
Coldcut in Taipei

Coldcut came to Taiwan as part of HP’s ‘Art in Motion’ tour, and totally blew me away. I was asked to provide the write-up for the Taipei Times, so rather than say the same thing again, here are my words from the newspaper:

Taipei Times ‘Weekender’

Last night saw the Taipei instalment of the HP-sponsored ‘Art in Motion’ tour at Luxy, featuring British legends Coldcut, Jurassic 5’s DJ Nu-Mark and VJ support from Berlin crew Pfadfinderei. Ostensibly a fusion of music and live visuals, early on the show seemed like an extended advert for HP’s personal computers, and with guidance from the most irritating emcee in Asia was beginning to unfold into some kind of hip-hop-themed ‘wei-ya’ end of year party.

However, things began to improve quickly when Nu-Mark took to the decks and wowed the crowds by mixing sampled beats with a selection of increasingly unlikely musical children’s’ toys. Innovative, and unlike the local beat-boxing warm up act, not a bit self-indulgent, the crowd responded with a mixture of laughter and butt-on-the-floor boogying.

With the audience now suitably warmed up, Coldcut entered stage right and took no prisoners with a ballistic delivery of hip-hop, dub and electronic beats, all synchronised with nine projectors beaming video and images around the room in an awesome display of digital showmanship. Jumping from the more obscure references of their own back-catalogue, they never allowed themselves to alienate the newcomers and regularly dropped in samples from sources as diverse as Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf”, Run DMC and AC/DC. Taipei barely knew what hit them.

With Nu-Mark resuming control, the entire room bounced the rest of the night away to the sounds of a thousand house parties, and the best music Taipei has heard in several years.

Colcut – to the limit

Nick keeps it nice and sleazy

And some other words from Tom, as featured in ‘The Vinyl Word’ last week:

Taipei Times – ‘The Vinyl Word’

The story of a British Industrial Designer in Taiwan…

2007/12/03