Huang Shao-yong: Dropping Out of a Biochemistry PhD to Bring Mother Tongue Music 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, winner of Best Arranger at the 33rd Golden Melody Awards (2022), and co-producer of Abao's kinakaian 母親的舌頭, which won the 2020 Golden Melody Album of the Year. Son of Examination Yuan President Huang Jung-tsun, an NTU biochemistry master's graduate, he terminated his doctoral program around age 30 and became a full-time musician. His arranging philosophy is a counterintuitive proposition: electronic music is not a tool for popularization—it is a language for opening the mainstream door to the most marginalized voices. From Amis to Paiwan, Japanese to Taiwanese Hokkien, he uses electronic production to translate languages the Mandarin pop industry assumes are "uncommercial" into sounds capable of winning Album of the Year.

On July 2, 2022, at the 33rd Golden Melody Awards ceremony, Huang Shao-yong won Best Arranger for "fu'is 星星歌"—a song blending Amis language and avant-garde electronics, performed by Siyat Xia (夏子), the debut release of Nanguaq Culture (那屋瓦文化).¹ After delivering his acceptance speech, he pulled a recorder from his jacket and played a solo passage on stage. Crowd-nominated Best Male Mandarin Singer Lu Guangzhong (盧廣仲) then pulled a recorder from his own clothes, and the two played to each other—one on stage, one in the audience.

That moment carried three threads simultaneously. Lu Guangzhong was Huang's first professional employer as a session musician in the early 2010s;² they had recorded together on the album Slow Soul (慢靈魂), performed an early-morning set at the historic Red House (西門紅樓) in Ximending, and played six consecutive shows at Legacy. The arranging award itself is the most "invisible" category in the entire production system, yet he deconstructed what an acceptance speech should look like using a child's toy-level recorder. And the winning track he arranged, "fu'is 星星歌"—that combination of "Amis language plus avant-garde electronics"—was precisely what he had spent an entire decade doing: making the most serious things playful, and pushing the most marginalized voices into the mainstream spotlight.

The Year He Left the Biochemistry PhD

Huang Shao-yong's father is Huang Jung-tsun (黃榮村), former Minister of Education and current President of the Examination Yuan.³ Before his music career began, his résumé looked like what mainstream society would define as a "proper academic track": a master's degree from NTU's Institute of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, a research assistantship at Academia Sinica, and enrollment in a biochemistry doctoral program.

Then, around age 30, he terminated the doctoral program.

The turning point was not a dramatic flash of inspiration. A friend asked him to play as a session musician for Lu Guang仲. One collaboration led to another, one album led to the next, and eventually he decided: to leave the path that had been laid out for him. His father Huang Jung-tsun's response to this decision, as recounted in multiple reports, was simply that he should have a clear goal of his own.³

📝 Curator's Note
For most music producers' biographies, the "founding moment" is a particular landmark work: the first album they produced, the first award they won, the first time they found their own sound. Huang Shao-yong is different. His founding moment is the act of leaving academia itself. This is the character premise behind his later willingness to pursue decisions like "mother-tongue electronic music" and "independent electronic label"—neither of which was a safe bet.

During his time as a research assistant at Academia Sinica, he learned to arrange music on a computer. "The foundation of computer-based arranging was learned at Academia Sinica."⁴ In that period, he did biochemical research by day and taught himself DAW software by night. After leaving academia, this side pursuit that seemed entirely unrelated to his field became the main work of the next decade and more.

Dark Paradise Records, Named After a Song

In 2013, he founded Dark Paradise Records (派樂黛唱片) in Taipei. The label's name was taken from Lana Del Rey's "Dark Paradise." Its ethos in eight characters: "Think Big, Act Small."⁵

His reason for founding Dark Paradise was stated plainly:

"Because there were relatively few people in Taiwan running a local independent electronic music label, I thought I'd give it a try."⁵

"I thought I'd give it a try" sounds casual. But the market conditions Dark Paradise faced were an ecosystem he himself acknowledged was difficult to survive in: "If you only do electronic music, it's hard to survive."⁴ Since the 2010s, Taiwan's independent electronic music has faced a structural dilemma: "International-level DJs all come to Taiwan to perform, but Taiwan's own electronic music creators remain a very small niche within independent music."⁵

More than a decade on, Dark Paradise's roster has grown to include MATELIN (林瑪黛), Dizparity, LUPA, Ruby Fatale, Waves of Doppler, and Ń7ä, making it one of Taiwan's most important independent electronic labels. Huang's own band MATELIN (founded 2012) won Best Electronic Album at the 6th Golden Indie Music Awards (金音創作獎) in 2018 with 房間裡的動物 (Animals in the Room); his solo project Oberka's album BELTA (2021) later won Best Electronic Album at the 13th Golden Indie Music Awards.⁶

His dual-track survival model was set the day Dark Paradise was founded: on one side, running a label doing the electronic music he believed in but the market was cold on; on the other, arranging or producing for mainstream pop artists like Jolin Tsai (蔡依林), Hebe Tien (田馥甄), Lala Hsu (徐佳瑩), Ai Yiliang (艾怡良), and Waa Wei (魏如萱). The two tracks fed each other—the artistic line was never swallowed by the commercial line, and the commercial line kept the label alive.

The Producer Who Couldn't Understand the Lyrics

From late 2019 into early 2020, Huang Shao-yong entered the studio with Abao to work on kinakaian 母親的舌頭. It was a fully Paiwan-language 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. Even though Abao had given me translated lyrics, I genuinely couldn't understand them. I was often confused, and didn't fully figure out each song's meaning until right before mixing."⁷

"Not understanding the lyrics" should be a producer's greatest obstacle. But for Huang Shao-yong, that obstacle became a kind of freedom: without semantic interference, only the texture of the sound itself determined the arrangement. This confession inversely defines his production philosophy—arranging does not serve semantics; semantics serve sound.

kinakaian 母親的舌頭 went on to receive 8 nominations at the 31st Golden Melody Awards, winning Album of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Aboriginal Language Album.⁸ Huang Shao-yong was nominated for Best Album Producer as co-producer (alongside Eleven Liao of荒井十一). A fully Paiwan-language electronic music album winning Golden Melody Album of the Year was, in the memory of the Mandarin pop music industry, a first.

His own understanding of this approach, put in near-colloquial terms:

"Since both mother-tongue music and electronic music have very few listeners, why not combine the two and see what happens?"⁴

On the surface, this sounds like a joke. But as a working methodology, it reveals a counterintuitive conclusion: in the Mandarin pop music industry, electronic music is not a tool for popularization—it is a language for translating the most non-mainstream sounds back into mainstream ears. He defines electronic music as a medium "capable of carrying heterogeneity," not EDM for the dance charts. Dark Paradise's official statement is equally clear: "Dark Paradise's electronic music is not mainstream EDM (electronic dance music)."⁴

An Amis-Language Electronic Song That Won Best Arranger

The commission chain for "fu'is 星星歌" went like this: Abao asked Huang Shao-yong to produce a beat, originally intended for Nanguaq Culture's debut release; it was later performed by Siyat Xia (夏子), winner of the Golden Melody Best New Artist award and lead singer of the band Collage (柯拉琪), singing in Amis and Japanese. Huang Shao-yong himself said: "In 'fu'is 星星歌,' I was making the music I wanted to make."⁴ The song earned him the 33rd Golden Melody Award for Best Arranger.¹

This "Abao commissions → Siyat Xia performs → Huang Shao-yongs arranges" chain is itself the network structure of Taiwan's new generation of mother-tongue music. It is not a lone-genius narrative—it is an industry ecosystem of Indigenous musicians referring one another. Abao is simultaneously a singer, the head of Nanguaq Records, and a connector for younger musicians; Huang Shao-yong's collaboration with Abao extends beyond a single album. The "MINETJUS 電音製作解密" Indigenous-language electronic music production course they have co-led has now run for five editions.

Names like Siyat Xia, Collage, and Nanguaq previously belonged, in mainstream Mandarin pop narratives, to the tokenized categories of "multiculturalism" and "minority languages." Huang Shao-yong's arrangement pulled those names out of the symbolic category and into the sonic category. This step is crucial: when a song is discussed for its beat, its sense of space, its low-frequency treatment—rather than for "what culture it represents"—that sound has truly entered the mainstream.

Chen Chien-chi Breaks Open Mandarin; He Breaks the Other Half of the Same Line

On December 24, 2024, Waa Wei's Pearl Punishment (珍珠刑) was released. The production team for its 10 tracks comprised four names: Chen Chien-chi (陳建騏), Huang Shao-yong, Wu Hsien (吳獻), and Han Li-kang (韓立康). Chen Chien-chi solo-produced 6 tracks; Huang Shao-yong solo-produced 3 tracks (〈惡口〉, 〈例如離開〉, 〈海月〉); Wu Hsien and Chen Chien-chi co-produced 1 track; Han Li-kang solo-produced 1 track.⁹

Chen Chien-chi is Waa Wei's long-time collaborator of over 20 years, dating back to her days in the band Natural Q (自然捲), through Ophelia, 倪子鈞, and Pearl Punishment. But for Pearl Punishment to achieve its "grotesque pearl" aesthetic—deformed, heterogeneous, slightly uncomfortable—it was necessary to bring in an electronic sensibility from outside the Chen Chien-chi system.

Huang Shao-yong filled in a gap outside Chen Chien-chi's production genealogy. This is the most direct point of contrast between the two in Taiwan.md's producer biography chain. Chen Chien-chi, over 20 years of work, dismantled the "affected accent" red line in Mandarin pop, giving non-standard Mandarin voices (Penny Tai, Waa Wei, Lala Hsu, Hebe Tien) a place within the boundaries of mainstream sound. Huang Shao-yong dismantled the other half of the same line: opening up space for non-Mandarin languages (Paiwan, Amis, Taiwanese Hokkien, Japanese) within the mainstream arranging system.

One opened the red line for Mandarin vocal timbres; the other opened the red line for non-Mandarin languages. The two bodies of work look different on the surface, but at the bottom they are the same thing: continuously pushing outward the industry's default line for "what kind of sound is allowed to be heard."

Why He Says "Production Awards Matter More Than Arranging Awards"

In a conversation on KKBOX with producer Wang Hsi-wen (王希文), Huang Shao-yong said a sentence worth pausing on:

✦ "More than an arranging award, I'd rather be recognized in a production category. Arranging is more of a display of individual craft."⁷

This statement places the identity of "author of the entire work" above "display of individual craft." An arranging award honors the micro-craft of a sound: a prelude, a drop, a sense of space. A production award honors the overall vision of an entire album: the relationship between one song and the next, the album's narrative arc, the totality of a sonic world.

In 2022, he won the arranging award. In recent years he has been nominated multiple times for Best Album Producer (2020 for kinakaian 母親的舌頭, 2022 for HAVE A NICE DAY) but has not yet won.¹⁰ In the same conversation, he said: "Right! Every year I think I'll get nominated, and then I think, how is it possible I never do!"⁷ Half-joking, half-genuine.

He has not yet won a production award. But ten years of Dark Paradise Records, ten years with Waa Wei, six years with Abao—layer after layer pushing sound outward—and the question of "who is the author of the entire work" answers itself through the sounds on the records.

Further Reading

• Chen Chien-chi — Another case of the "absent author" in Mandarin pop; the other lead producer on Pearl Punishment, forming a dual-line "Mandarin / non-Mandarin" sound boundary with Huang Shao-yong
• Waa Wei — A singer Huang Shao-yong has collaborated with for over a decade, from the MATELIN era through Pearl Punishment; two-time Golden Melody Best Female Singer, a voice that refuses to be recognized
• Abao — The singer and head of kinakaian 母親的舌頭, co-leader with Huang Shao-yong of the MINETJUS Indigenous-language electronic music course
• Enno Cheng — A peer-generation Taiwanese Hokkien / mother-tongue musician who won dual Golden Melody Taiwanese awards for "writing the most honest songs in the most unfamiliar language"
• Rainie Yang — A contrasting axis of a singer moving from "being produced" to "self-producing"; the kind of producer work Huang Shao-yong does is precisely the prerequisite ecology that enables singers to eventually take over production themselves

References