Huang Shao-yong: Dropped Out of a Biochemistry PhD, Used Electronic Music to Send Indigenous Languages to the Golden Melody Album of the Year

30-second overview: Huang Shao-yong is the founder of Taiwan's independent electronic music label Dark Paradise Records, the Best Arranger at the 33rd Golden Melody Awards (2022), and co-producer of Abao's "kinakaian — Mother Tongue," which won the 2020 Golden Melody Album of the Year. He is the son of Examination Yuan President Huang Jung-tsun, holds an NTU master's degree in biochemistry, and abandoned his PhD program in his early 30s to become a professional musician. His arranging philosophy is a counterintuitive proposition: electronic music is not a tool for reaching mass audiences — it is a language for opening mainstream doors for the most niche sounds. From Amis, to Paiwan, to Japanese, to Taiwanese-language, he uses electronic arrangements to translate sounds that the Mandopop industry has defaulted to treating as "uncommercial" into the sonic register that can win Album of the Year.

July 2, 2022. The 33rd Golden Melody Awards ceremony. Huang Shao-yong won the Best Arranger award for "fu'is Star Song" — a song blending Amis and avant-garde electronic music, sung by Xia Zi, and the inaugural work from Nanguaq Music.¹ After his acceptance speech, he pulled a recorder out from under his jacket and played a solo right there on stage. Below in the audience, Lu Guang-zhong, who had been nominated for Best Male Vocalist that year, similarly produced a recorder from inside his clothes, and the two played at each other — one onstage, one off.

This single image carries three threads simultaneously. Lu Guang-zhong was his first professional musician employer in the early 2010s², and the two collaborated on the "Slow Soul" album recording, early-morning gigs at Red House in Ximending, and six consecutive nights at Legacy; the arranger award itself is the most "invisible" award in the entire producer system, yet he used a children's toy-level recorder to deconstruct what an acceptance speech "should" look like; and the winning track "fu'is Star Song" — that combination of "Amis plus avant-garde electronic music" — was exactly what he had spent a whole decade doing: making the most serious things playful, sending the most niche sounds into mainstream view.

The Year He Abandoned the Biochemistry PhD

Huang Shao-yong's father is Huang Jung-tsun, former Minister of Education and current President of the Examination Yuan.³ His own resume, before his career in music began, looked like the profile of a "mainstream academic regular-track soldier" by society's standard definition: NTU master's degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Research Assistant at Academia Sinica, enrolled in a biochemistry PhD program.

Then in his early 30s he terminated the PhD program.

The turning point was not a dramatic flash of inspiration. A friend asked him to play in Lu Guang-zhong's band; one collaboration led to another, one album led to another, until finally he decided: leave that path that had originally been laid out for him. His father Huang Jung-tsun's response to this decision, as conveyed across multiple reports, was only to ask that he have a clear goal for himself.³

📝 Curator's note
Most music producer biographies have a "founding moment" — the first album they produced, the first award, the first time they found their own sound. Huang Shao-yong doesn't. His founding moment was the act of leaving academia itself. That is the character prerequisite for the later decisions he dared to make — "indigenous-language electronic music," "independent electronic music label" — every one of which was not a safe bet.

During his time as a Research Assistant at Academia Sinica he learned computer-based music production. "The fundamentals of computer-based music production — I learned them at Academia Sinica."⁴ During that period he did biochemical research by day and self-taught DAW software by night. After leaving academia, this side pursuit that seemed completely unrelated to his main job became the main job of the next ten-plus years.

Dark Paradise Records: A Name Borrowed from a Song

In 2013, he founded Dark Paradise Records in Taipei. The label name was taken from Lana Del Rey's "Dark Paradise." Eight-word philosophy: "Think Big, Act Small."⁵

His reason for founding Dark Paradise was stated plainly:

"Because relatively few people in Taiwan were running labels for homegrown independent electronic music, I thought maybe I could give it a try."⁵

"Thought maybe I could give it a try" sounds like downplaying things. But the market conditions facing Dark Paradise were ones he himself acknowledged as difficult to survive: "If you only do electronic music, it's very hard to survive."⁴ Since the 2010s, Taiwan's independent electronic music has faced the structural difficulty of "international-level DJs all come to perform in Taiwan, yet Taiwan's own electronic music creation remains a very niche slice of independent music."⁵

More than a decade on, Dark Paradise has gathered under its banner MATELIN, Dizparity, LUPA, Ruby Fatale, Waves of Doppler, and Ń7ä, becoming one of Taiwan's most important independent electronic music labels. Huang Shao-yong's own band MATELIN (founded 2012) won Best Electronic Music Album at the 6th Golden Indie Music Awards for "Animals in the Room" in 2018; his solo project Oberka's "BELTA" (2021) later won Best Electronic Music Album at the 13th Golden Indie Music Awards.⁶

His dual-track survival model was set from the day Dark Paradise was founded: on one track, running the label and doing the electronic music he believed in but the market found cold; on the other, going into the albums of commercial artists like Jolin Tsai, Hebe Tien, Hsu Chia-ying, Eve Ai, and Wei Ru-xuan as arranger or producer. The two tracks supply each other — the artistic track doesn't have to be swallowed by the commercial track, and the commercial track sustains the label.

The Producer Who Couldn't Understand the Lyrics

From late 2019 to early 2020, Huang Shao-yong went into the recording studio with Abao to make "kinakaian — Mother Tongue." This was an all-Paiwan electronic music album.

He later recalled the production process in a conversation on KKBOX:

"The most important thing for a vocal producer is understanding how to express emotion through the lyrics. Although Abao had given me a translation of the lyrics, I really couldn't understand them. I was constantly confused, and only figured out the title of each song before the mix."⁷

"Couldn't understand the lyrics" should be the biggest obstacle for a producer. But for Huang Shao-yong, this obstacle became a liberation: without semantic interference, what was left was only the texture of the sounds themselves to determine the arrangement. This confession inversely defines his production philosophy — arrangements don't serve semantics; semantics serve sound.

"kinakaian — Mother Tongue" went on to receive 8 nominations at the 31st Golden Melody Awards, winning the three major awards of Album of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Indigenous Language Album.⁸ Huang Shao-yong was nominated for Best Album Producer as co-producer (shared credit with Arai Juichi). An all-Paiwan electronic music album winning the Golden Melody Album of the Year was a first in the memory of the Mandopop industry.

His own understanding of this type of work, put in near-plain-speech terms:

"Since both indigenous-language music and electronic music have very few listeners, let's just combine the two and mess around."⁴

On the surface this sounds like a joke. But as a working methodology, it reveals a counterintuitive conclusion: in the Mandopop industry, electronic music is not a tool for reaching mass audiences — it is a language for translating the most non-mainstream sounds back into the ears of the mainstream. He defines electronic music as a carrier "capable of bearing what is heterogeneous," not EDM on dance chart rankings. Dark Paradise also states it clearly: "Dark Paradise's electronic music is not mainstream EDM (Electronic Dance Music)."⁴

An Amis Electronic Track That Won Best Arranger

The chain of commissions for "fu'is Star Song" went like this: Abao asked Huang Shao-yong to edit a beat, originally intended for Nanguaq Music's inaugural work; it was then performed by Golden Melody Best New Artist winner Xia Zi, vocalist of the Kula Ki band, in Amis with Japanese. Huang Shao-yong himself said: "In 'fu'is Star Song,' I'm making the music I want to make."⁴ The song won him the Best Arranger at the 33rd Golden Melody Awards.¹

This chain of "Abao commissions → Xia Zi performs → Huang Shao-yong arranges" is itself the network structure of Taiwan's new generation of indigenous-language musicians. It's not a single-genius narrative — it's the industry ecology of indigenous musicians referring each other. Abao is simultaneously a singer, a Nanguaq label chief, and an introducer for younger musicians; Huang Shao-yong and Abao's collaboration doesn't end at one album: the two jointly lead "MINETJUS Electronic Music Production Decoded," an indigenous-language electronic music production course now in its fifth session.

Xia Zi, Kula Ki, Nanguaq — in the mainstream narrative of Mandopop, these names have belonged to the symbolically treated category of "multicultural," "minority language." Huang Shao-yong's arrangements pulled them from symbolic category into sonic category. This step is crucial: when a song is discussed in terms of its beat, its spatial sense, its low-frequency treatment — rather than "what culture it represents" — that's when the sound has truly entered the mainstream.

Chen Jian-qi Dismantles Mandarin; He Dismantles the Other Half of the Same Line

On December 24, 2024, Wei Ru-xuan's "Pearl Punishment" was released. The production team for 10 songs listed four names: Chen Jian-qi, Huang Shao-yong, Wu Hsien, and Han Li-kang. Chen Jian-qi produced 6 tracks independently; Huang Shao-yong produced 3 independently ("Evil Mouth," "Like Leaving," "Sea Moon"); Wu Hsien and Chen Jian-qi co-produced 1; Han Li-kang produced 1 independently.⁹

Chen Jian-qi is Wei Ru-xuan's longtime collaborator of 20-plus years, going back to her Natural Roll band era, all the way through Ophelia, Ni Tzu-chun, and Pearl Punishment. But for "Pearl Punishment," achieving the texture of "grotesque pearls" — deformed, heterogeneous, a bit uncomfortable — required bringing in Huang Shao-yong's electronic thinking, a system outside Chen Jian-qi's.

Huang Shao-yong filled in a piece outside Chen Jian-qi's producer lineage. This is the most direct contrast between the two in Taiwan.md's producer biography chain. Chen Jian-qi (zh only: 陳建騏) in his 20 years of work dismantled the "strange sounds" red line in Mandopop, giving non-standard Mandarin voices (Peng Chia-hui, Wei Ru-xuan, Hsu Chia-ying, Hebe Tien) a seat within the mainstream sonic boundary. Huang Shao-yong is dismantling the other half of the same line: opening up a place within the mainstream arrangement system for non-Mandarin languages (Paiwan, Amis, Taiwanese, Japanese).

One opens the red line on Mandarin vocals, the other opens the red line on non-Mandarin languages. The two jobs look different, but at bottom they are the same thing: continuously pushing out the line the industry defaults to as "what sounds are allowed to be heard."

Why He Says "The Producer Award Matters More Than the Arranger Award"

In his conversation with producer Wang Xi-wen on KKBOX, Huang Shao-yong said something worth pausing over:

✦ "Compared to the arranger award, I'd rather be recognized in the producer categories. Arranging is more like a display of personal craft."⁷

This statement places the identity of "author of an entire work" above "display of personal craft." The arranger award recognizes the micro-craft of a single sound: an intro, a drop, a sense of space. The producer award recognizes the total vision of an entire album: the relationship between one song and the next, the album's narrative arc, the wholeness of a single sound world.

In 2022 he won the arranger award. In recent years he has been nominated multiple times for Best Album Producer (2020 for "kinakaian — Mother Tongue," 2022 for "HAVE A NICE DAY"), but hasn't won.¹⁰ In the same conversation he said: "Yeah! Every year I think I'll be nominated, wondering how it's possible I'm not!"⁷ This is half joke, half genuine.

He still hasn't won the producer award. But ten years of Dark Paradise Records, ten years with Wei Ru-xuan, six years with Abao — layer by layer pushing sound outward — who "the author of the entire work" is, the sounds inside the records will answer for themselves.

Further Reading

• Chen Chien-chi (zh only: 陳建騏) — Another case of an "absent author" in Mandopop; the other lead producer on "Pearl Punishment," forming a "Mandarin / non-Mandarin" dual-line operation on sonic boundaries with Huang Shao-yong
• Wei Ru-Xuan (zh only: 魏如萱) — Singer Huang Shao-yong has collaborated with from the MATELIN era through "Pearl Punishment," over ten years; two-time Golden Melody Best Female Vocalist, a voice that resists being recognized
• Abao (Aljenljeng Tjaluvie) — The singer and chief of "kinakaian — Mother Tongue"; jointly leads the MINETJUS indigenous-language electronic music course with Huang Shao-yong
• Enno Cheng (zh only: 鄭宜農) — A same-generation Taiwanese-language / mother-tongue musician, "writing the most honest songs in the most unfamiliar language" to win the Golden Melody Taiwanese double award
• Yang Cheng-lin (zh only: 楊丞琳) — The contrast axis of singers moving from "being produced" to "self-production"; the work of producers like Huang Shao-yong is the prerequisite ecosystem for singers ultimately being able to take over production rights

References