Loh-Tsui-Kang Commune: Taiwanese, Punk, Farmer Friends, and an Award That Came Thirty Years Late

30-Second Overview: Loh-Tsui-Kang Commune (濁水溪公社) was formed in 1989 and is the first band to bring punk elements into Taiwanese local music. Lead singer Ko Jen-chien (Xiao Ke) was expelled from NTU in 1992 due to involvement in a campus incident; for the next thirty years the band performed in underground venues, singing about politicians, farmers, and desire — never compromising on commercial logic. In 2020 they announced their dissolution, and that same year won Best Taiwanese-language Album at the Golden Melody Awards on their first ever nomination. On the day of the ceremony, Ko Jen-chien did not appear — he's now a civil servant at the National Tax Administration.

An Award Nobody Came to Accept

2020. The 31st Golden Melody Awards ceremony. The host read out the Best Taiwanese-language Album winner: Loh-Tsui-Kang Commune.

Nobody walked to the stage. The band had announced its dissolution months earlier. Proxy recipient Meng Ching-erh said: "This is the last work Loh-Tsui-Kang Commune made. That it would ever be associated with the Golden Melody Awards was completely unimaginable thirty years ago."⁷ Having said that, he stepped off the stage.

The news exploded across Taiwan's internet. Many people ran to search "who is Loh-Tsui-Kang Commune?" — and that very question brought them to a new generation of listeners.

Lead singer Ko Jen-chien didn't come that day. Because he was at work — he is a civil servant at the National Tax Administration.¹

This story begins thirty-one years earlier.

The Seeds of Rebellion at Affiliated Senior High School of NTNU (1989)

1989, Taipei. A group of students at Affiliated Senior High School of NTNU formed a band called "Thunderbird No. 4" for their graduation appreciation evening.¹ That year, Taiwan had been out of martial law for less than two years, and there were more demonstrations in the streets than in the previous decade combined.

After NTU law student Ko Jen-chien (stage name Xiao Ke) joined, the band was officially named Loh-Tsui-Kang Commune. "Loh-Tsui-Kang" (濁水溪 / Zhuoshuixi) is the river in central Taiwan and a cultural dividing line between north and south; "Commune" carries left-wing imagery. This name stated its position from the very beginning.

Their music was never meant to make anyone comfortable, from day one.

NTU, a Fire, Expulsion (1992)

In the early hours of February 26, 1992, a fire broke out on the ground floor of NTU's First Student Activity Center. Tsai Hai-en (left wing) and Xiao Ke and others were implicated, and were subsequently expelled from NTU.¹

After the expulsion, Loh-Tsui-Kang Commune did not stop.

Losing their student status became part of their underground legend. A punk band's lead singer expelled from university — this fact itself was already saying: from the very start, they were outside the system.

📝 Curator's Note: A punk band's legitimacy sometimes comes not from music but from life records. For Loh-Tsui-Kang Commune, the NTU expulsion was the most convincing real-world proof of their lyrics.

_Anal Musical Desire Period Works_ (1995): Attitude Before Music

In 1995, their first official album Anal Musical Desire Period Works was released by independent label "ForFriends Records."²

The title itself was a provocation. The lyrics sang about politicians, farmers, sexual desire — everything Taiwanese mainstream media refused to touch. The playing technique was rough, the attitude clear. This is the core grammar of punk: you don't need to know how to play, you need something to say.

"Our purpose is simply hoping that the audience's body, mind, and spirit will be liberated." — Ko Jen-chien (from The News Lens interview)⁵

That year, Taiwan was preparing for its first direct presidential election, and the political temperature on the streets was blazing. Loh-Tsui-Kang Commune's music was another body temperature of the same era.

_Taike Revenge_ (1999): The Peak of Indigenous Punk

In 1999, Taike Revenge was published. This is Loh-Tsui-Kang Commune's most complete artistic work.³

They stuffed the framework of Western punk with glove puppet (budaxi) voice acting, gezaixi (Taiwanese opera) singing styles, the cadences of AM radio herbal remedy shows, and the drums and gongs of funeral processions.³ The result was a new hybrid — "Taike," originally a mainstream society term of contempt for lower-class local Taiwanese cultural taste, which they reversed into a self-declaration.

Taipei Times later called Loh-Tsui-Kang Commune (English name LTK Commune) "the first band to bring punk elements into Taiwanese music."⁴ Taiwan Panorama (English edition) described Taike Revenge as "one of the most important albums in the history of Taiwanese bands."³

These assessments only appeared years later. In 1999, they simply continued playing underground shows.

Farmer Friends, The Wall, and the Life of a Song

"Nong-Chun Chu Tai-Chi" (農村出代誌 — literally "Something Happened in the Village") is Loh-Tsui-Kang Commune's most widely known song. The title is Taiwanese; the meaning is "what happened to the rural villages" — government policies caused farmland to disappear, farmers lost their livelihoods. The song has been sung at Taiwan's social movement venues for decades and remains a common melody at protest gatherings to this day.¹

In 2016, rapper Yen Guan-hsi JY sampled this song to create "Nong-Chun Bu Tai-Chi" — "nothing happens in the village anymore, because the village has already disappeared."¹ The life of a song extended into a new generation's language.

In 2001, the documentary Rotten Head (爛頭殼) was completed, recording Loh-Tsui-Kang Commune's most turbulent year.⁸ That film later became one of the important historical documents of Taiwan's underground music scene.

Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, Loh-Tsui-Kang Commune was a fixture at Taipei's underground venues. The Wall was a key node in Taiwan's indie music scene for thirty years; when it faced closure in 2013, Fire EX. (滅火器樂團), Mayday, 1976, and other independent musicians rallied in support — the closure made an entire generation of musicians aware of the fragility of underground performance spaces.

📝 Curator's Note: How does a band that never received mainstream media coverage for thirty years spread? Through a group of people who carried the music into every protest, every underground show, every privately shared old album. This kind of transmission has no algorithm — only people.

The Final Question (2019)

In 2019, Loh-Tsui-Kang Commune released their final album Interior Decoration, marking thirty years since the band's formation.¹

In an interview, Xiao Ke left his final question:⁶

"All the ideas worth expressing have been expressed, all the shocking subjects have been exhausted, the farmer friends keep growing in number — so why is Taiwan still unable to become independent?"

No answer. Only the question. In 2020, Loh-Tsui-Kang Commune officially dissolved.

After Dissolution, the Award Remains

Then, 2020. The 31st Golden Melody Awards.

Interior Decoration was Loh-Tsui-Kang Commune's first nomination at the Golden Melody Awards — and their last. They won Best Taiwanese-language Album on the first nomination, after dissolution.

The image of Meng Ching-erh accepting on their behalf became the punctuation mark of this history — or rather, a question mark thirty years late: what did Taiwan's mainstream culture owe them?

Ko Jen-chien is now a civil servant at the National Tax Administration.¹ The man who said "soft indie music is ruining the nation"⁵ — the man expelled from NTU, the man who sang about farmers and politicians for thirty years — is now helping citizens handle their taxes every day.

You can call it a tragedy. You can also call it the most punk ending of all: the entire system once rejected him; in the end he walked into it and sat down. Meanwhile the music that remained — in every demonstration, every underground show, every shared old album — keeps wandering outside.

Further Reading

• Taiwan Indie Music Scene — Thirty years of context from Crystal Records to The Wall to the streaming era
• Fire EX. — Also recording their era in Taiwanese punk, twenty-five years starting from southern Taiwan's Kaohsiung
• History of Taiwan Rock Music — The complete history of Taiwan rock from underground to above ground
• Pop Music and the Golden Melody Awards — Forty years of the Golden Melody Awards, the annual mirror of Taiwan's music industry

References