The music scene is getting louder, weirder, and more confident, thanks to a daring festival born from Taipei’s underground.
Sonia Calico slips into Dreamers Café like a veteran DJ sliding between tracks, her effortless motion carrying quiet intensity. Dressed in a cropped tee and loose pants, her bare expression belies someone who’s just pulled off Taipei’s most audacious electronic music festival. She collapses into a leather chair with the hard-won satisfaction of pioneering a local revolution where electronic music isn’t just beats and basslines — it’s a cultural manifesto.
“We dreamed of a festival with a true global café sound from the beginning,” she says, stirring her coffee with the same precision she uses to curate Glowball’s genre-defying lineups. “Not EDM. Not just one thing. Electronic music migrates, mutates — it picks up new accents everywhere it travels.”
She’s right. Taiwan’s electronic music landscape in 2024 was a sprawling, borderless ecosystem — UK bass morphing with baile funk and Afrobeats, and house music flirting with traditional Taiwanese instruments.
At the center of that vast, ever-evolving scene was Glowball, a festival reflecting the fluidity of the music it celebrated. Fittingly, it embraced “round shapes” (the “ball” referenced in its name) with large, well-lit orbs hovering over dance floors, and an oversized inflatable ball looming behind an enormous purpose-built Formosa Sound System for characteristic flair.
This year’s most talked-about attraction? Taking “ball” to another level, an absurd ping pong tournament replaced traditional paddles with frying pans, mosquito rackets, and kitchen spatulas. Before each match, players drew lots to discover their ridiculous implements. At the same time, a veteran Taipei ballroom emcee (more accustomed to judging vogue battles than sports) provided running commentary that blurred the lines between competition and performance art.
“We wanted to give people something instantly familiar yet completely unexpected,” Calico explains with a grin. “Where else can you watch serious athletes play ping pong with a frying pan while a drag queen emcee shouts commentary?”
The tournament became a vivid expression of Glowball’s ethos — an exuberant collision of global club culture, queer performance, and distinctly Taiwanese irreverence.
The evolution of a scene
The festival draws much of its talent from Taipei’s vibrant and unapologetic LGBTQ+ community—not just DJs and dancers, but performers who command the crowd’s full attention.
Last year, Glowball hosted a full-fledged vogue ball — the pinnacle of queer performance competitions, showcasing elaborate performances, fashion, and dance — inviting local houses (think sports teams, but far more glamorous and just as competitive) to face off across a range of categories. Earning a perfect score in a category like “realness” brings praise from razor-sharp emcees and exacting judges, awarded to those who best embody a character or theme.
This year, staffing and time constraints forced Calico to scale back. “A ball requires 15-20 people to organize, and we just didn’t have the resources,” she says. But the spirit remained — voguing workshops and performances by Taipei’s Kiki Houses brought the same frenetic energy to an indoor stage complete with a towering catwalk made from scaffolding.
“We told them not to get their heels caught in the scaffold,” she says. The overhead walkway proved a resounding success, offering the crowd an unobstructed view of marquee performers, including beloved drag queen Taipei Popcorn. “Taiwan has a vibrant queer culture, and Glowball is part of that.”
This year, Glowball also hosted “He She They,” a UK-based collective advocating for gender-fluid dancefloor liberation.
Nearly two decades ago, a young Sonia Calico (born Sonia Lai) was sparking mosh pits across Taipei as the synth-wielding force behind Go Chic, Taiwan’s pioneering electro-punk provocateur. At a time when the music landscape consisted of either sterile club DJs or Mandopop producers, her band carved out a third path, where guitars collide with bouncing synth, creating an awakening of Taipei’s underground.
Go Chic’s meteoric rise saw it sharing stages with Canadian electroslash musician Peaches, becoming one of the first Taiwanese acts at Japan’s Summer Sonic music festival, and bringing its chaotic live show to South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, proving Asian artists could compete in global alternative circuits without compromising their identity.
The group’s 2014 sophomore album We Ain’t Home made history by winning Taiwan’s Golden Indie Music Award for Best Electronic Album. Go Chic is still the only punk-leaning act to ever claim the honor.
By 2016, however, the band’s centrifugal force had begun to unravel. Where others might have stepped back, Calico forged ahead — reinventing herself as one of Taiwan’s most visionary cultural architects. She scored films, produced music for emerging indie acts, and quietly studied how electronic communities flourished from Berlin to Bangkok.
She has also hosted beatmaker classes, encouraging young people to compose and — most importantly — share their music among each other for critique.
Her first major curatorial experiment, 2022’s Synergy Festival, was a revelation—a government-backed spectacle at Songshan Cultural and Creative Park where avant-garde electronic music converged with immersive visual art. Although the pandemic curtailed its momentum, the event crystallized her philosophy: Festivals should be living ecosystems, not just lineups.
Nowhere is that vision more vividly realized than at Glowball, Calico’s magnum opus, held at the Taipei Music Center in Nangang. This year’s edition unfolded as a 50-artist manifesto, spanning the glitchy catharsis of Korean producer Kirara to the psychedelic electronics of local alchemist Mong Tong, who wove Javanese gamelan into his sonic palette.
“Originality isn’t optional here,” says Calico, her gaze sharpening like a gallerist hunting for the next icon. “I want artists who’ll rewrite the rules, not just follow them.”
It’s a movement
As both artist and curator, Sonia Calico demands something radical from electronic music: authentic cultural DNA. Whether it’s field recordings of bamboo forests whispering in Taiwan’s mountain breezes or the metallic shimmer of temple gongs repurposed as percussion, she insists artists root their sounds in place and heritage.
When pressed to define her sonic allegiance, she grins.
“You can call me a bass head,” she says. This philosophy materialized when she brought London’s Lady X — a pioneer of the bass movement — to Taipei, pairing her with Taiwanese DJs experimenting with local sounds.
“UK bass was just the starting point,” notes Glowball promoter Ash Lin. “Now artists across Asia are having their turn. It’s cultural reinvention by the global working class.”
Glowball’s lineup reads like a geopolitical soundclash, with features like Lady Shaka (Māori rhythms meets broken beat), Howie Lee (Tibetan chanting mixed with theremin), and Mong Tong (Taiwanese temple music mixed with psychedelia). Even Taiwan’s mainstream is evolving, with Golden Melody winners like Abao transforming Paiwan folk songs into dancefloor anthems.
At Glowball, the future doesn’t echo a homogenized global beat so much as a raucous dialogue between cultures — one in which Taiwan’s voice rings unmistakably clear.
“UK bass was huge, but now artists from Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia are making their bass music,” says Lin. “It’s blue-collar music, rooted in local sounds.”
Struggles to stay alive
Running an independent festival in Taiwan is not a walk in the park. Funding is scarce, the weather is unpredictable (this year’s edition was beset with rain and muggy heat), and the audience is still growing. “We barely break even,” Calico admits. “Most of the budget comes from my pocket.”
The inaugural edition, held during the pandemic, benefited from government grants and a Jägermeister sponsorship. This year, Glowball aimed for 1,500 attendees. It’s a meaningful turnout, but not enough to attract major sponsors. And while public funding helps, it doesn’t shield organizers from the bureaucratic hurdles that nearly derailed the festival.
“The government still has a stigma surrounding electronic music, often equating it with drug use,” Calico says. “We even had to beg a consultant at the Taipei Music Center to vouch for us to use the venue.”
Still, she refuses to compromise. Unlike Ultra and other corporate EDM festivals, Glowball isn’t powered by marquee headliners or pyrotechnics designed to attract funding and official approval. Instead, it rests on the belief that electronic music should reflect the diversity of its creators — even when that means embracing artists and aesthetics that fall outside the mainstream’s comfort zone.
“I don’t see myself as a curator,” Calico says. “I’m just a promoter who loves music.”
Bigger, weirder, more Taiwanese
So what’s next? Calico is already planning Glowball’s offshoot events — smaller parties, workshops, maybe even a return of the ball. She’s also eyeing pursuing her music with upcoming tours in China and Europe.
But her real mission is deeper. “The scene isn’t just about nightlife,” she says. “It’s about creativity. I want to see more people producing, more weird ideas, more risks.”
In a world where electronic music often plays it safe, Calico is a necessary disruptor — an artist proving that the future of beats isn’t in Berlin or London, but maybe, just maybe, in the heart of Taipei.
“Sonia is the most successful electronic artist in Taiwan, and Glowball was the best curated festival I have attended here,” says Jesse Warren, founder of Mettāsonic Sound, a drum and bass record label based in Shenzhen. He recalls drifting from stage to stage, each turn revealing something fresh and unexpected.
“Sonia chooses music that is urgent and authentic,” says Warren. “Twenty minutes at Glowball exposes you to more innovation than some festivals manage in three days.”
Glowball doesn’t resemble a conventional festival so much as the spiritual heir to Taipei’s underground. At its core is a stubborn conviction that Taiwanese electronic music shouldn’t merely mirror global trends, but cultivate its own distinct language shaped by local sensibilities and soundscapes.
