{"id":403737,"date":"2026-02-02T11:09:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-02T11:09:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/403737\/"},"modified":"2026-02-02T11:09:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-02T11:09:07","slug":"%e7%a0%b4%e5%9c%b0%e7%8d%84-scattered-purgatory-%e6%b3%a2%e5%9c%b0%e7%8d%84-post-purgatory-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/403737\/","title":{"rendered":"\u7834\u5730\u7344 \/ Scattered Purgatory: \u6ce2\u5730\u7344 \/ Post Purgatory Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

In January 2021, unassuming clubbers looking for a Saturday night out at Taipei\u2019s FINAL<\/a> might\u2019ve been surprised to encounter Taiwanese drone-doom duo \u7834\u5730\u7344 \/ Scattered Purgatory<\/a> flooding the room with noise, in what was billed as their last performance. Yet the duo had already been toying with the boundary between the city\u2019s rock and electronic scenes; guitarist Lu Jiachi, who cut his teeth in the stoner rock band Sleaze<\/a>, dabbled in deconstructed club music throughout the late 2010s, eventually putting out tracks for local labels like JIN, OverMyBody, and Sea Cucumber. Five years after that cacophonous \u201cfarewell\u201d show, the band is back with an album that builds on their foundation of Earth<\/a>-esque guitar-and-bass rumbling, incorporating more bite-sized song structures inflected with trip-hop, jazz, and synth pop.<\/p>\n

In their early work, Scattered Purgatory let distorted guitar tones simmer and dissolve into infrasound, occasionally spritzing traditional Chinese woodblock and cymbals on top. Inspired by the same ritualistic mysticism that powers Taiwanese compatriots Mong Tong<\/a> and Island Futurism<\/a>, the band would hone its sound in Thian-gi Lok-ian<\/a>, an improv collective that mined the depths of local musical traditions. At the same time, their songs would get shorter and shorter as they began to incorporate kosmische synths and sequencers: 2017\u2019s Sua-Hiam-Zun<\/a>, their most recent full-length, was a wash of ambient textures, swirling suona airs, and distant guitar swells.<\/p>\n

No score yet, be the first to add.<\/p>\n

\u6ce2\u5730\u7344 \/ Post Purgatory is a bold change in direction for a band that made its name on slow-building jams that reached upwards of 20 minutes; the longest tracks here run less than six. \u201cWunai\u201d is a wink at their turn toward a poppier style, using a phrase meaning \u201chelplessness\u201d commonly used in \u201990s C-pop ballads<\/a>. Yet their sound is as dark as ever, welding hallucinogenic percussion to spoken-word delivery inspired by the \u53e3\u767d (kh\u00e1u-pe\u030dh in Hokkien) of Cold War-era songs<\/a> by Wen Hsia. Buttressed by jazzy ghost snares from White Wu (Prairie WWWW, Manic Sheep), \u201cWunai\u201d is a cry into the void: \u201c\u4f60\u5481\u771f\u6b63\u6709\u807d\u8457 \/ \u6211\u5fc3\u5167\u7684 \u7121\u5948\u201d (\u201cDo you dare hear\/The helplessness inside my heart?\u201d), Lu Li-yang mutters, his voice dispersing into an echo.<\/p>\n

Although the vocals (in Mandarin, Hokkien, and English) are an impressive testament to Taiwan\u2019s linguistic diversity, some tracks are less successful at tying together the band\u2019s freewheeling ideas. \u201cThundering Dream\u201d is a less cohesive \u201cL\u2019Ancienne<\/a>,\u201d with Hokkien vocals drowned out by sputtering electronics and haunting ad-libs; when a gamelan melody forces its way into the mix halfway through, it\u2019s less of a mic drop and more like a punchline. \u201cMoonquake\u201d has an interesting backing track, samples of Nanguan flourishes bursting over a sparse bassline like a Taiwanese \u201cSa Mo Jung<\/a>.\u201d Yet the English lyrics by dotzio (I\u2019mdifficult<\/a>) on \u201cMoonquake\u201d seem to drag on endlessly, more atmosphere than substance: \u201cFollowing rules, she\u2019s been following patterns\/Does this all have a meaning?\u201d The band\u2019s recent one-off<\/a> with New York\u2019s Dis Fig<\/a> might have been a better fit here. Other songs meander, struggling to find their footing: \u201cAbove the Clouds\u201d opens with a Beiguan accelerando that gives way to a piano riff girded by an omnipresent Sigur R\u00f3s<\/a>-like guitar drone, yet the song loses steam halfway through and ends with an abrupt fade-out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In January 2021, unassuming clubbers looking for a Saturday night out at Taipei\u2019s FINAL might\u2019ve been surprised to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":403738,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[375,96,128,56,54,55,307],"class_list":{"0":"post-403737","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-albums","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-music","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom","13":"tag-unitedkingdom","14":"tag-web"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=403737"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403737\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/403738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=403737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=403737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=403737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}