Published by Wind Music, Forest Rhapsody was the first album to combine Taiwan’s forest soundscape catalogue with original music composition. It documented nearly 100 species of Taiwanese natural sounds — birds, frogs, cicadas, insects, muntjacs, macaques, flying squirrels, and streams.
In 1999, Rock Music Group established Rock Network Co., Ltd. to formally enter the online business. Rock Cola was one of its ventures — discovering artists via the internet and selling their music as digital audio (MP3).
Long before the term ‘taikè’ (台客) was media-hyped, the band released Revenge of the Taikè in 1999. Its sound fused hard Western punk rock with Taiwanese rural and folk elements — reclaiming and reappropriating what they called the ‘taikè.’
In 1999, ‘Sheng Jie Live House’ was the first to incorporate the term ‘Live House’ into its name — to communicate to everyone that this space was centered on music, not the morally questionable, vice-ridden establishment the media often portrayed such venues to be.
In 1999, the Environmental Protection Administration completed amendments to the *Noise Magazine* Control Act. Beyond the original ‘decibel regulation,’ extensive new ‘behavioral regulation’ was added — prohibiting playing piano, singing, drilling, and listening to audio equipment after 10 PM in all regulated zones.
Gau Gong Band (Jiāo Gōng yuèduì) built on local traditional music, using gongs, drums, suona, and moon lutes combined with contemporary musical approaches to create new Hakka folk songs responsive to contemporary social realities. In early 1999, the members returned to Meinong to record their anti-dam album.
Napster was a search and download program for MP3 files. Using a peer-to-peer (P2P) data exchange architecture, it allowed users to share files directly from their hard drives without going through a central server.
After Wu Chung-wei, Lin Chi-wei, Ma Hui-chung, and others organized the ‘Broken Art Festival’ at Yongfu Bridge, they established the alternative urban space ‘Guishan Factory’ — a remarkable force in post-martial law Taiwan.
Mayor Chen Shui-bian attended the fourth Formoz Festival in 1998 as Taipei’s mayor. In 2004, he attended the tenth edition as head of state, noting that he had helped facilitate the very first Formoz Festival back in 1995.
*PLUR* magazine was founded in 1997 — Taiwan’s only electronic music culture magazine, published by Blue Moon Records with Zhang Yun-zhi (Monbaza) as primary writer. Covering music criticism, rave culture, fashion, and avant-garde art, with full Chinese-English bilingual text, its design captured the psychedelic futurism of electronic culture.