If we measure things by full-lengths, it’s been a long time since we’ve heard from Taiwan’s Manic Sheep – their last album Brooklyn came out way back in 2017 – but but they’ve not been idle. New EPs have been released in the interim – Deep Dusk in 2019, Morning Fragment in 2023, and Invisible last Spring – and while nine new songs over nine years hardly counts as prolific, they get to stay in the “active concern” column.

And while I’ve only caught onto it now, they added one more two-song EP to their discography. It’s a live document of a session they did for Cinemaphonic, which operates a recording studio from an abandoned Taipei movie theatre, and while I had seen them advertising the performance on socials when it took place last January, I didn’t see the resulting videos get posted in April nor the recordings show up on streaming services at the end of August.

The two songs in the set are “Invisible Discord”, from Invisible, and “Tawdry Clip” from Morning Fragment, are wisely chosen as they’re the two best and banger-est songs they’ve released in the last while, and translate really well live. Obviously it’d be great if we got some more output from Manic Sheep, but if what they do put out stays at this standard, I guess that’s okay.

And a little/lot late, here’s an English interview with the band at A-Indie in June 2023, just after I did my last post on the band.

Manic Sheep : A Taiwanese Indie Music Story @ A-Indie