Constant and Change: Ten Years of 'A Band Doesn't Run on Persistence — If It's Not Fun, It Falls Apart'

30-second overview: Constant and Change (KST) is a four-piece independent band formed in Taipei in 2013: lead vocalist ARNY (Wu Ying-Ran, born in the Philippines, 20+ years in music), guitarist Creed (Chao Tsu-Yi), bassist Jinmao (Chen Yu-Hsiang), and drummer Xiaomi (Chang Yi-Yun, whose thumb cannot bend due to rheumatoid arthritis yet she still plays). Their 2016 debut 〈Stranded〉 addresses workplace paralysis; Iteration (2020) was nominated for Best Band at Golden Melody 32; in 2023 they played their first large-scale solo concert to 5,000 at Taipei Music Center; 2025 saw the final leg of the Meigetsu Line world tour in Hong Kong. They rose at the same moment as No Party for Cao Dong — one critic said "if Cao Dong is the twenty-something with nothing, KST is Cao Dong ten years later — someone with perspective from real joy and grief, who still holds back." The band name draws from Heraclitus: everything flows, and the only constant is change itself.

On the evening of September 2, 2023, at 7:30 p.m., Taipei Music Center. Constant and Change's tenth-anniversary concert opened.¹

ARNY stood on stage facing 5,000 people. He didn't shout thanks — he said one sentence that summed up ten years:

"From 2 audience members to 5,000, this road took 10 years."¹

That sentence made the room go quiet — because it was not an exaggeration. At their first LiveHouse show in 2013, there were genuinely only two people in the crowd. Ten years later, they got there not through going viral, not through a drama theme song, not through variety show appearances — only through album after album, turning two listeners into five thousand.

📝 Curator's note: Many independent bands emerged in Taiwan after 2010, but very few went from a LiveHouse to Taipei Music Center's large hall while showing clear evolution with every album. KST did it — and without idol baggage.

Born in the Philippines, former Fire EX bassist

ARNY Wu Ying-Ran is not the "young independent musician" you might picture. He was born in the Philippines in the 1980s and later moved to Taiwan. His family are all foreigners.² He has been in Taiwan's music scene for more than 20 years — as a producer, arranger, and film score composer.

His list of past bands and live credits runs long: Strawberry Machine guitarist, Fire EX bassist (2006), house guitarist for Huang Jie's concerts, house guitarist for Rainie Yang, house guitarist for Wan Fang (2012).² When he formed Constant and Change with Creed, Jinmao, and Xiaomi in 2013, he was not a newcomer — he was a craftsman who had already worked in Taiwan's music industry for 10 years, deciding it was time to start his own band.

This background later explains why KST was different from most independent bands from the start — their music was relatively mature on their first album. No "new band roughness" because none of the four were beginners.

The drummer with a factory tattoo

Drummer Xiaomi (Chang Yi-Yun) has two features that make her easy to identify: she is a photography enthusiast who especially loves photographing ruins; and she has tattooed a factory on her hand — a self-declaration about "collecting landscapes."³

But what truly makes her the most heartbreaking member of this band is this: two years before making their album, she discovered she had rheumatoid arthritis; to this day her thumb cannot bend, yet she still plays drums and still performs on stage.³

This is not a story the band's PR invented for emotional effect. She has never emphasized this in interviews. A bandmate mentioned it casually when asked — as if stating a background fact they have long accepted.

A drummer whose thumb cannot bend, who still gets through the 7-minute 〈Hi There〉 and runs the full set for 5,000 people at Taipei Music Center — this is a metaphor for the backbone of what KST is: their persistence is not willpower grinding through pain, but a quiet daily resilience that needs no explanation.

How the stranded become numb

On December 16, 2016, KST released their debut album Stranded at Legacy Taipei.⁴ The lead single 〈Stranded〉 contains a verse that later became the anthem of a million workers:

"A numbed life accustomed to the life I hate
A numbed life accustomed to being terrible
A numbed life accustomed to painful relationships
A numbed life accustomed to spending all my money every month"⁴

The song's core is a sharp observation: people are not stranded because they don't know how to move — they know, and choose not to. The band described this phenomenon in interviews as "the modern person's self-deception":⁵

"We actually all know what needs to be done for our lives to genuinely change, but we habitually stay in our comfort zones and find ready-made excuses to stay in place."⁵

The MV for 〈Stranded〉 has two versions — a detail rarely mentioned: one is a black-and-white documentary version by Golden Horse Award-winning director Su Che-Hsien, the other is an impassioned dramatic version by emerging director Tseng Wei-Yu (the band members' acting debut).⁴ Same song, same lyrics, two radically different visual treatments — one restrained observation, one direct dramatization. This choice itself is KST's aesthetic DNA: they don't treat listeners like children, they let you choose how to read the song.

Beautiful things happen after the bottom

Iteration was released in 2020 and was nominated for Best Band at the 32nd Golden Melody Awards.⁶

The most famous track on this album is 〈Can Beautiful Things Happen to Me〉 — the title itself is in the passive voice. Not "I will pursue it," but "can it happen to me." This grammatical choice precisely captured the mood of an entire generation during the COVID pandemic: not lying flat, not giving up, but drifting along half-heartedly.

The creative context behind this song is crucial: ARNY wrote it during his lowest point in 2017.² 2017 was a hard year for KST — market response fell below expectations, the sense of achievement from previous band life was fading, and the new band had not yet found its footing. And this song with its passive voice grammar became their second peak.

The same album contains two more representative tracks: 〈Nag〉, which uses near-rap compressive chatter to write about the confusion of the times; and 〈Hi There〉, a 7-minute emotional arc that opens with a soft monologue and builds to fierce screaming, with one lyric in the middle: "What's gone is not youth."⁷

A music critic later made a precise comparison between KST and No Party for Cao Dong, who rose at the same moment:

"If Cao Dong is the twenty-something with nothing (Ugly Girl), Constant and Change's Stranded is Cao Dong ten years later — someone with perspective from real joy and grief, who still holds back."⁸

This contrast is crucial: Cao Dong projects outward in anger; KST turns inward in acceptance. Both postures are authentic emotional states in Taiwanese independent music after 2016.

From two people at Legacy to five thousand at Taipei Music Center

September 2, 2023: Taipei Music Center, 5,000-person hall.¹

This was the band's first time standing on a stage of this scale in their 10th year together. Tickets sold out. But more important than ticket sales was that for this concert they introduced XR technology for an immersive experience for the first time, collaborating with Yueyan Theater on stage design.¹ The reason the band made this technical upgrade was not to show "we're also capable of doing a big show" — it was for one specific purpose: to visually render the core concept of the Meigetsu Line album — a railway line that has already stopped running but is still heading toward the unknown — on stage.

On August 31, 2024, they brought the same setup to Kaohsiung Music Center's Hai-Yin Hall — their first large-scale solo concert in Kaohsiung.⁹ Produced by the FREES team (led by Er Ma), with "an all-new Meigetsu Line universe visual." On March 28, 2025, the Meigetsu Line world tour finale was held at MacPherson Stadium in Hong Kong, closing a 1.5-year journey.¹⁰

From LiveHouse to Taipei Music Center, from Taipei Music Center to Kaohsiung Music Center, from Taiwan to Hong Kong — this growth arc took ten full years. By mainstream Mandarin pop standards, that's slow. But KST never wanted to run fast.

A Forest Railway That Was Abandoned in Alishan

The title of the 2023 album Meigetsu Line was proposed by drummer Xiaomi.¹¹

The Meigetsu Line is a branch of the Alishan Forest Railway connecting Alishan Station to Meigetsu (Sleeping Moon) Station. It shut down in 1983 after a landslide; some sections were later repaired, and other sections became popular hiking trails. For Xiaomi — a photography enthusiast who especially loves ruins — this railway carries a familiar image: a path whose mission has already reached its terminus, yet still heads toward some unknown destination.

KST expanded this image into an entire album's theme: a ten-year-old band that has completed the mission of "proving itself" — where does it go now?

This kind of self-aware maturity is a question most Taiwanese independent bands that have lasted 10 years dare not ask. Most bands either disband at year ten or enter "maintaining existing fans" mode. KST chose a third path: acknowledging that the old mission is complete, then heading toward a new direction.

📝 Curator's note: 〈Meigetsu Line〉 is a purely instrumental post-rock work with no vocals. The band uses pure instrumentation to declare: we are past the stage of "using lyrics to prove who we are." Now we speak with sound itself.

Not persistence but fun

If you had to summarize in one sentence why KST lasted 10 years, why every album shows evolution, why the band never fell apart — bassist Jinmao said it:

"A band doesn't run on persistence — if it's not fun, it falls apart."¹²

This is not a complaint and not a joke — it is the genuine philosophy of a band that has walked 10 years. He also added a supplement:

"Either you enjoy it, or you make money from it; you can't end up with neither — that's how you get exploited by a record label."¹²

This money-and-joy dichotomy is rarely discussed openly by independent bands. Most bands either romanticize their poverty or frame success as "meaning over money." Jinmao just laid out the rules of the game clearly: being in a band is adult work; you can't be unhappy and not making money at the same time.

This pragmatism has the same foundation as ARNY's 20 years of experience — they are past the stage where they need to romanticize themselves.

In 2025, Jinmao also founded his own label "Wonder Water" (忘憂水), which Creed joined.¹³ This is not leaving the band — it's business extension: the band continues, but they are beginning to do music industry work outside the band.

Cao Dong ten years later

Back to the critic's phrase: "KST is Cao Dong ten years later."⁸

What makes this precise is that it says two things at once: KST and Cao Dong both belong to the independent music generation that erupted in 2016, but KST's music takes Cao Dong's observations and walks ten more years forward. Cao Dong wrote about young people fresh out of society and their anger at the system; KST writes about people who have worked for ten years and their helplessness with themselves.

Both postures are authentic states of life for Taiwan's working generation — just at different points in the sequence. The audience for 〈The Big Wind Blows〉 in 2016 will, ten years on, become the audience for 〈Stranded〉. These two bands are not rivals — they are two stages of a single generation.

In 2024, KST released the new single 〈Ice〉, collaborating with Cheer Chen and Jude — Cheer Chen wrote the lyrics for the song. Cheer Chen's assessment of Xiaomi's writing: "The lyrics she wrote are absolutely perfect! The sharp use of words gave the song the power of rebirth."¹³

This is an album written for the stranded

From 2 audience members at Legacy in 2013, to 5,000 at Taipei Music Center in 2023, 5,000 at Kaohsiung Music Center in 2024, and MacPherson Stadium in Hong Kong in 2025 — Constant and Change has walked 10 years.

No viral moment in between, no variety show fame, no drama theme song. What there is: four middle-aged musicians (ARNY with 20 years in music, Creed on guitar and co-vocals, Jinmao with his pragmatic business view, Xiaomi whose thumb can't bend but still drums) + one departed member (VJ Qi-Tai / Hou Qi-Tai, who left in June 2022) + album after album growing better.

What they leave behind is three albums: one writing about being stranded (2016 Stranded), one about iteration (2020 Iteration), one about an unknown future (2023 Meigetsu Line) — plus the 2024 collaboration with Cheer Chen, 〈Ice〉.

The band name draws from an ancient proposition of Heraclitus: everything flows, nothing stands still. They used 10 years of work to prove Heraclitus right — the only constant is that everything is always changing.

And that Alishan railway, the Meigetsu Line, is still running in their songs.

Further reading:

• No Party for Cao Dong — the independent band that rose at the same moment in 2016, writing about the anger of those just entering society; KST writes the stranded state ten years later — two stages of the same generation
• Wei Ru-Xuan (zh only) — also in the 2010s independent music ecosystem, a female vocalist path instead of post-rock
• Cicada (zh only) — all-instrumental no-vocal pure post-rock, a counterpoint to KST's "post-rock + vocals"
• Crowd Lu (zh only) — another path in independent music: compositional singer crossing the three major awards
• Popular Music and Golden Melody Awards (zh only) — the stage coordinates where KST was nominated for Best Band at Golden Melody 32
• Taiwan Independent Music (zh only) — the generational lineage of independent music from 1976 to KST, Cao Dong, and Sunset Rollercoaster
• Taiwan Popular Music (zh only) — the Mandarin popular music industry environment

References