Bitter Party is a Los-Angeles-based ghost pop band inspired by war-era music and the melancholy of life. Immersing themselves in the rich repertoire of folk, pop, and obscure tunes from Asia, their performance references the music in each of their pasts through dusty tapes, songbooks, vinyls, and YouTube channels. They re-animate these transmigrated sounds with megaphones, sanshin, and chiptune aesthetics. Pinball disco, electro enka, postcolonial ethnographic pop.
After I moved to Los Angeles, I started playing music with a group of close friends. In Bitter Party, I arrange and compose songs based on source materials from 20th century Taiwan, particularly in War-era periods. I was also inspired by Nakashi, an itinerant music practice that started in the Japanese Occupation era in Taiwan.
I embrace the technological intervention in this repertory. I sample acoustic instruments like sanshin, ghostly riffs from analog recordings that I have discovered from my nakashi research, and borrow from the whimsical MIDI song arranging techniques from nakashi musicians and their cassette/vinyl recordings.
Bitter Party’s full length album Ghost Pop can be streamed via our Bandcamp page. The album is released with a book with stories about the songs, translations of lyrics, and production notes. Read more about the album-book.
More:
Bitter Party website
Bitter Party on Bandcamp
Bitter Party’s album-book Ghost Pop