Founded for musical performance
Tucked away in a back street near the Taipower Building in Taipei’s Gongguan area, Riverside Music Café is known to music fans as “Little Riverside” to distinguish it from the Red House performance hall (“Big Riverside”), in the city’s Ximen area, which was founded in 2008. Although Little Riverside offers only a small basement space, famous bands and artists including Mayday, Wu Bai, Peggy Hsu, Won Fu, and Tizzy Bac have all performed here. It has been 20 years since the venue opened in 2000, during which time the venue has been a major promoter of Taiwan’s indie music.
After graduating from university, Riverside founder Geddy Lin went to the Musicians Institute in Los Angeles for further study. Having been to live houses in America, he says: “Bars in the US with live performances all have a door charge; people have to pay for the music.”
After returning to Taiwan, he took note of music performance spaces on the island at that time. Folk music restaurants held fewer than 100 people, and there was an absence of performance spaces at the next level, meaning that performers lacked the training and experience to be able to handle large events. “Singers must first have done at least 300 or 500 shows to be able to handle a performance at Taipei Arena.” Lin points to the example of Broadway in New York, which is backed up by the off-Broadway scene, so that a theater company progresses from venues with 100 people to those with 1000 and then 10,000, providing a gradual training process unavailable in Taiwan at that time.
“Riverside was founded for the purpose of live performances,” says Lin proudly. He carefully crafted the sound quality of the space. “We needed to build a performance venue that is up to standard: the monitors on stage have to be high-end ones and the speaker system has to be carefully calibrated. This trains musicians in the sounds they should be hearing when doing a show.”
“Little Riverside is a starting point for dreamers.” But dreams cannot come true all at once; people have to advance one step at a time. “The role that live houses play is to assist artists in getting adequate performance training to help them prepare for future concerts.”
In 2008, bands that had developed during the early period after the founding of Little Riverside urgently needed a larger stage, and Lin founded the Red House performance space in Ximen.
“Little Riverside” is a starting point for dreamers, providing a friendly environment to people just entering the music industry. (courtesy of Riverside Music Café)