“Using music to change the world” is a slogan that appears often in the history of rock, however, in Taiwan, a man is turning it into reality. CHTHONIC lead vocalist Freddy Lim is traveling the road of music to parliament. Check out his campaign website: http://www.ivotefreddy.com/. And on December 26th, a Formosa Defenders outdoor concert will be held in place of a campaign rally.
Beyond their musical impact, CHTHONIC has also focused their interests and strengths on social and political concerns both past and present within Taiwan. The band’s in-depth lyrics have historically focused on accounts of the country’s inhabitants fighting against repressive regimes in history that textbooks refused to tell in addition to their public displays of support for social movements and human rights activities, including last year’s Sunflower Movement and this year’s student protests against the Ministry Of Education’s adjustments in high school curriculum guidelines.
Beyond CHTHONIC, Lim also serves as the lead vocalist of a band that he formed with guitarist Marty Friedman, METAL CLONE X, which has released two albums in Taiwan and Japan. He has also organized two of the most well known music festivals – the Formoz Festival and Megaport Festival.
Lim was one of the co-founders of live houses including Zeitgeist; this year, he launched the most successful crowdfunding site in Taiwan called Free Bird. In addition to music events, he has served two terms as chair of Amnesty International Taiwan, a board member of the Memorial Foundation Of 228, and has been active in human rights activities. He has been honored with the President’s Award by Taiwan’s National Cultural Association, and founded the New Power Party, a new political party in Taiwan. In less than one year of its founding, the New Power Party has become the third largest party in Taiwan besides the two major political parties. In June, he announced his bid for legislature.
Twenty years after the band’s founding and seventy years after the end of World War II, CHTHONIC has decided to hold a Formosa Defenders outdoor concert in Liberty Square in Taipei on December 26th, 2015. The concert will feature all of CHTHONIC’s classic songs, and the finest presentation of its unique oriental metal style, while blending in the ideas and spirit of anti-repression and bringing about change to the nation that CHTHONIC has always stressed in its music. It will be CHTHONIC’s largest scale outdoor concert, and fans from around the world are invited to take part.
CHTHONIC chose the Liberty Square as the venue for the Formosa Defenders concert, because it’s a temple built to worship the dictator Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Chinese Nationalist Party [KMT] who later went into exile in Taiwan after being defeated. This well-known location represents the authoritarian regime of the old times that the band references regularly in its music, and also the venue for many social movements. It is, thus, the most suitable location for CHTHONIC’s twentieth anniversary concert.