Taking it back to the old school
The local aspects of Kou Chou Ching's music go beyond the simple matter of multilingualism; they also present a variety of elements of traditional Taiwanese music in their tracks, including nanguan, beiguan, Taiwanese Opera, traditional Hakka music, mountain songs, and quanshi-ge.
fishLIN says that when he had just started trying to compose tracks, he found a lot of traditional music forms to be very rhythmically "heavy," making them very suitable for adaptation to hip hop. One example is the first song the two wrote together, "Diudiu Sixiang Qi," which started when the two were practicing the Ilan folksong "Diudiu Tong" and starting mixing in the Hengchun folksong "Sixiang Qi"; then they began increasing the tempo and mixing in sound effects from games like Super Mario Brothers and Street Fighter, creating a song brimming with nostalgia.
Another song, "Against Nature," starts with a Puyuma song in praise of nature, and is built on a melody from late folksong master Chen Ta's "Workers' Song." The original yueqin sound is mixed with a strong bassline running through the track and a sorrowful suona solo, creating a mournful song about the destruction of Taiwan's natural environment.
In "Your Name is Taiwanese," a Taiwanese Opera singer's singing of the word "Taiwan" is sampled, cut up, and mixed in a chaotic fashion to create the opening to the track, resulting in something that raises a smile from listeners. "Raise the Red Envelope" contains lots of old court music, including the yangqin, bamboo flute, sanxian, and drum, used in an ironic fashion to mock today's greed-driven "red envelope culture."
Their album name, Fuke, means "revival" in Chinese, and they chose this particular name to represent their attitude toward old music: they didn't want to simply use the original music, but instead hoped to inject these "old goods" into a modern context, giving them a new lease on life.
As well as using the common hip-hop technique of sampling, taking pieces of traditional tracks and remixing them for use in their own pieces, Kou Chou Ching also counts among their number two skilled traditional musicians, who play instruments such as the suona, bamboo flutes, reed pipes, and yueqin, which take pride of place in the band's music.
Melding the ancient and the modern, Kou Chou Ching's music has taken them across Taiwan, from the "Earth" music festival in Miaoli, to the "Respect to ChthoniC" concert in Taipei, and eventually to a studio in the renovated Meinung tobacco factory.