The straightforward KK Yeh, who follows the beat of her own drum, has brought her unique vision into play in founding the charming White Wabbit Records.
Located in a back street near National Taiwan Normal University, White Wabbit Records is like an oasis in the city, bringing together indie albums from Taiwan and around the globe. Just pick up a headset and you can leave the hustle and bustle of the world behind and set your lonely soul free.
Arriving at White Wabbit Records, located in a lane off Pucheng Street in Taipei City, outside the shop we find a porch constructed out of wood, with a variety of posters on the wall and some greenery in the corners. It gives off a leisurely, nostalgic vibe.
Pushing open the glass doors and entering the store, we marvel at the charming world inside. All kinds of albums are arranged on the shelves, while music from around the world—which perhaps you have heard before, perhaps not—streams out of the sound system. The overall mood is one of comfort and ease.
Uniquely skilled staff
As you browse through White Wabbit, you can’t help but notice the notes attached to some of the albums. For example, one says: “Blends R&B, soul and hip hop with an Asian emotional appeal. The band plays in a versatile manner, and the two lead singers intone romantic, catchy melodies. This is one of the year’s can’t-miss super bands.” This is the introduction attached to an album by Sugarcat, nominated in 2020 for a Golden Melody Award for Best Vocal Group. The musical style and unique features of the albums are described by store staff in accessible language on notes smaller than the palm of a hand. There are also straightforward corrugated paper posters with hand-drawn album covers highlighting the characteristics of specific albums. There is no highfalutin jargon, yet one can’t help but feel curious about the content of the albums. These commentaries are all produced by White Wabbit store staff, based on their own extensive listening exposure and experience.
It’s no easy feat to qualify to work at White Wabbit. Besides having listened to a vast amount of music, you also have to pass a test at the interview in which you list band names from A to Z. At the staff meeting each week, each employee must introduce three albums and talk about them for five minutes each. If all they can offer is vague descriptions like “it sounds good, and is suited to such-and-such an occasion,” they will hear boos and hisses of displeasure from everybody else. Through weekly practice, the staff steadily learn to connect listening to albums with their own life experiences, and each individual develops a unique style for their album intros. Even if a Chinese character is incorrectly written on a note, they are in no rush to correct it; when a customer discovers the mistake, this creates an opportunity for conversation.
A club at Zeitgeist
White Wabbit founder KK Yeh relates that she first opened a shop and only later formed a company. Her earliest “shop” was in a corner of the music performance space Zeitgeist, in Taipei’s former Guanghua Market. As Yeh describes it, at that time the store operated more like a club than a business. There were no fixed opening hours and no capital investment. There was just a group of young people who got together and wanted to sell their own albums or those of their favorite bands. But most of the time the premises simply served as a gathering place, and often after enough people got there, they would just decide to shut up shop and go out to have fun.
Yeh says that when White Wabbit opened, in an era when record stores were as common as fast food restaurants, there was a clear distinction between mainstream and indie music. “Given our small size, we had to do things nobody else was doing. Also, I really like discovering new things.” Yeh enjoys unearthing good music and bringing it to public attention, so White Wabbit has released albums by Taiwan indie bands and has also acted as an agent for many overseas albums, specializing in records that consumers couldn’t find at big record shops and offering a rich variety of musical styles to give music fans new aural experiences.
So long as Taiwan’s indie music survives, White Wabbit Records will be around, as it has been for many years now. KK Yeh has proclaimed that if need be, they will be “Taiwan’s last record store.”
Independent, fun, good music
It is not hard to sense the artistic temperament in Yeh, who besides being a music lover is also in a band. Her business philosophy is to be independent, have fun, and offer good music. For Yeh, fun is even more important than good music, and the foundation for everything—be it releasing albums, acting as an agent, or holding musical performances—is that it must be fun.
No wonder that the business focus at White Wabbit has in fact continually changed. Yeh originally thought that as an indie music brand her company ought to release albums by Taiwanese bands. That’s why in 2008 she signed contracts with four acts and devoted herself to managing them. Of them, the singer Enno Cheng had the greatest success, and in that period White Wabbit released Cheng’s debut album, Neptune.
However, success forced Yeh to choose whether to change professions. To focus completely on managing Enno Cheng would mean she would have to give up things she liked, such as organizing concerts and staging music events. After thinking things over, Yeh decided to stick with the kind of music business she most loved, and the company stopped representing music acts. Today, the goal of White Wabbit’s record release work is to help novice bands issue albums that truly reflect their potential.
When we ask Yeh her criteria for deciding which music to release, she laughs and says it’s all about gut feeling. She explains that White Wabbit has a lot of flexibility because it concentrates on indie musicians. She can simply run the record store without committing herself to anything else, so a band has to really strike her fancy for her to go out of her way to organize an event or release an album on their behalf.
Taiwan’s last record store?
Having long been a center for indie music, White Wabbit is virtually a pilgrimage site for foreign music fans who come to Taiwan. Yeh smiles as she tells the following story: Once a music aficionado from North America told the store staff how there had been a record shop very much like White Wabbit on a street corner near his home, but it had gone out of business. Talking about memories of days gone by, the customer began to cry. “Even though we didn’t know each other, White Wabbit gave that customer a feeling of home.”
In the past, about 50% of White Wabbit Records’ revenues came from foreign customers. But then last year the Covid-19 pandemic hit, impacting visits to Taiwan by foreign travelers, and there were no performances by foreign bands and no new album releases, causing Yeh to worry for a time that the shop would not be able to survive. But much to her surprise, because of the pandemic people spent more time reading and listening to music, and sales revenues at White Wabbit, which concentrated on selling albums for the whole year, reached a new high.
Yeh, who has always been optimistic about the development of indie music in Taiwan, argues that music is more than just a commercial product, and its real power comes from the fact that people need it: It is an important way through which people express their emotions, whether these be the result of major life events like weddings and funerals, or simply spiritual weariness. “Indie music began to appear in Taiwan after the lifting of martial law. Out of this period grew Crystal Records and White Wabbit Records, and now there are all kinds of bands out there. With the accumulated achievements of several decades, Taiwan’s indie music will only become increasingly broad and deep and more multilayered. It is constantly developing.” Even if people turn to digital streaming to listen to music, and some doubt the need for brick-and-mortar record stores, Yeh says that buying albums is the best way to support bands. She declares confidently: “Even as others are giving up and closing their shops, if we can keep going we will carry on as Taiwan’s last record store!”
