(Guitarist. Bassist, Composer)
"The process of falling in love, making love, and having a baby was as mysterious and huge an event as watching Carl Sagan's documentary flim <Cosmos>. When the word ‘daddy’ came out of my baby's tiny mouth, I felt an inexplicable excitement: “Yes, I'm your daddy!”
What kind of sounds did you grow up with?
There was an elementary school in my neighborhood, and at dusk I could hear the baseball team practicing. I could hear the bats and balls crashing and the kids yelling and screaming, and I loved that sound and loved to sit on the couch and listen to it. There were parks and mountains nearby, so in the summer there was a lot of cicadas, and I loved that sound, too. I spent my childhood collecting insects until elementary school, and I even formed a team called the Mantis Commandos. In middle school, I started commuting to school a little further away by subway and bus, and when I had time, I would walk to school and look at the market, and to my surprise, the Korean chapter of the X Japan Fan Club was right there. I opened tiny little doors and walked in and there were X Japan posters and they were selling CDs and videotapes. Also, There was a local record store at the time, and the owner made and sold illegal tapes, and I saw a label printed in blue that said “Best of X Japan.” I asked him about the tape and he played it for me. I was pretty shocked at the time. One of the songs that still remember is “Kurenai,” which starts off quietly with guitar arpeggios and then suddenly explodes with an reversed cymbals and starts running like crazy. I remember the first time I heard it, and that's how I listened to X Japan for quite a while after that. I would do my homework while headbanging to the music.
When did you first learn to play an instrument yourself?
My first year of high school. There's a story behind how I got started. At that time, my family used to watch a TV show called “Comparison of the Best and Worst” after church on Sundays. One day, they were comparing the cheapest musical instruments to the most expensive ones, and I remember thinking that cheap drums are really bad, but guitars are okay if you can play them well. A few days later, my brother suddenly suggested, “Why don't we sell our game consoles and buy a bass for me and a guitar for you? I agreed because I knew it was going to be his idea anyway, but he spent all the money and only bought the bass. I was crying really hard, and my mom heard the story and bought me a guitar. That's how I started playing guitar.
Did you learn guitar by yourself at home?
I started practicing with X Japan's band sheet music, but it was too fast and difficult, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get a good sound. Then I had a friend in my neighborhood who played acoustic guitar, and he was able to imitate X Japan's music to a certain extent on acoustic guitar. That really inspired me. After that, I started practicing slowly and gradually.
Let's talk more about sound. What's the most memorable sound you've heard in your life? It doesn't have to be music.
It's hard to say. When I think about it, I think I've always been easily drawn to sounds, and that's what got me interested in different instruments. Also, if you are a guitarist, you come across a lot of different effect pedals, and you can combine pedals and amps to create different sounds. All the sounds that I discovered by combining them were very fascinating to me.
From Smiles to Linus' Blanket, Oh Ji-Eun and the Wolves, Banshinsa, Chang kiha and the Faces, Ieenalchi and Omar and the Eastern Power, you've played in many famous bands in the indie music scene. Some bands have been very successful. Do you have any criteria for choosing bands?
It's more of a case of coming together at some point rather than choosing. One of my favorite musicians when I was younger was Cornelius, and he used to perform at school festivals and change his clothes four times. The bands would change, but he would stay on stage and change his clothes. I heard that story and thought I could do the same if I liked a lot of different music, so that's what I did. When I was younger, I had the confidence to play in as many bands as they would let me and have as much fun as I could.
What do you think is the appeal of band music?
I love the fact that band music is made by a group of people, so it's good that each person has their own personality. For me, it's all about being with my friends, so like I said, it's not so much about choosing a band as it is about getting to know each other or starting a band naturally. It's really fun to see a group of friends who love something come together and make it happen.
You've been a member of successful bands such as Chang Kiha and the Faces and Leenalchi. Have you learned to sense what kind of music resonates with the public?
I feel like I've gotten some sense of it, but of course there's a lot of luck involved. I don't know exactly what it is about music that is loved by the public. I think it's important that the music is catchy and has repetition, but I think people like it when there's visuals and other things in addition to the music.
Nowadays, you works as a music director in various genres, including film, drama, theater, and dance. What's the difference between working with a band and working alone?
Simply put, in a band I focus on my instruments. I focus on my instrument first and then discuss it with band members and come to an overall consensus. But in a movie, it's not just the musicians you're working with, it's the director or producer, the investors, the distributor, the production company and else. When you're in a band, you're talking about musically specific things, but in this case, you're talking more about a certain mood or something abstract. When I was working on a video the other day, I got some feedback that the music should be scarier, but when I was in a band, I never thought about making music to scare someone.
You often work on performance or theater music as well as movies and dramas. So you've experienced music in a variety of mediums, but is there an art form that you feel more attached to?
I've personally enjoyed working on theater because I think it's similar to a band in that you can be involved from the rehearsal stage and the direction can change through music and feedback, whereas with film and drama, the visuals are often finished before the music. Of course, film is fun too, I think it's a different style, but with theater, I think it's important to archive the output because once the show is over, the music is gone.
I know you have a large collection of instruments, including guitars, bass drums, synthesizers, effect pedals, and more, especially vintage instruments from the 1960s and 1970s. Some people get simpler and simpler with their instruments as they get older, while others collect more and more instruments, and you certainly seem to fall into the latter category. Why do you continue to collect instruments?
When I was younger, I grew up with my older brother, so I didn't really have a sense of owning my own stuff, but having my own instruments gave me a sense of ownership, and I loved it. I enjoyed collecting my favorite instruments and switching between them. I think I was also very curious about sounds, so I was constantly looking for sounds that I liked by buying and selling instruments. I used to be interested in guitars, basses, and guitar effects, but now I'm more interested in synthesizers and drum machines, so I'm collecting them one by one.
What is it about old instruments, often referred to as original vintage, that appeals to you?
I was also influenced by my older brothers. I had a desire to use good vintage instruments, but I didn't have much money, so I was thinking of buying and selling vintage instruments at a reasonable price and modifying them to fit my hands to create my own sound. That's when my brother Yoon Byung-joo of lowdown 30 told me. “You should stop buying these weird things and buy a proper one, so that you can set the standard for vintage.” My answer at the time was “no, I'm going to go my own way”, but then I bought a Fender vintage bass and a 69” tele bass and realized that a great vintage sounds completely different and feels great in the hand. It didn't have any of the weird discomforts or flaws I'd felt with the vintage ones I'd owned before, so I started looking for the right one. But now I don't necessarily need a vintage instrument to work with, because now I know what the vintage sound is like and I can use it if I need to.
What the heck is that vintage sound?
First of all, most of them are a little bit off in output. The magnetic parts and things like that are not at 100 percent, and the high frequency are a little bit cut off. That's what people like to hear. On the other hand, if you really need the highs frequency, it can be a disadvantage.
As technology advances, some musicians are on the cutting edge of finding new sounds, but what do vintage lovers try to express with old instruments?
I think vintage instruments’s prices keep going up because there's a nostalgia for an era that people love, but I don't necessarily want to make old sounds, old music, with vintage instruments. There are so many different types of vintage instruments, and there are sounds that I like and sounds that I don't like. Vintage instruments have a lot of uncomfortable limitations, but sometimes it's good to have those limitations to guide my work.
How do I feel about the difference between software and hardware instruments?
Very simply, plug-ins have buttons or knobs on the screen, and I've never been able to get as engrossed in playing with them as I do with real analog instruments. There are some favorite sounds that you stumble upon when you spend time playing with an instrument like that. The same analog instrument can sound different in the same setting depending on its conditions. That's the beauty of using vintage hardware.
How did you get into synthesizer sounds after playing guitar and bass?
I saw a program on television about movie sound design, and they used pig squeals to make dinosaur sounds, and I thought it was really interesting. Then I saw the movie <28 Days Later>, and I thought the synth sounds in moive were cool, so I tried to remember them and looked them up, but then I got busy playing bass and forgot about them. Then I got older and wanted to continue with music, but it wasn't as easy to be in a band as it used to be, so I got interested in electronic music. There were a lot of people around me whose older brothers were getting older and doing electronic music, and I didn't understand it when I was younger, but now I really get it. I would travel to places like Berlin and go to local electronic music record stores and things like that, and I got more and more interested in it. It's interesting that instruments like synthesizers and drum machines were originally developed to mimic the sounds of acoustic instruments that already existed, but they were used differently and the music evolved. I think it's a genre that still has room for unexpected developments.
You've owned a lot of instruments over the years, even ones you've sold, are there any instruments that you're particularly attached to?
I love my Mini Moog and my Buchla Music Easel. I have too many basses to list them all, but I think I'll always have four basses (Rickenbecker, Precision, Höfner, Telecaster), a Stratocaster, Telecaster, ES-355, classical guitar, and a acoustic guitar.
The more instruments you can play and the more references you know, the harder it can be to make music. Do you have your own way of starting and developing music?
When I'm working on a video, I start by reading the script and then create the music according to the tempo of the video. But when I'm working on my own, like you said, sometimes I get stuck. In that case, I think the answer is to reduce the tools. For example, I'm like, “Let's do this song with just a certain amount of equipment.
Do you have any goals you want to achieve through music?
It's kind of cheesy to say this, but I think I've accomplished everything I wanted to accomplish when I was younger. Being in a band and performing on a big stage. But I think it's really hard to be in a band forever. Actually, I changed my mind a little bit when I had a child recently, and I thought that since I've been doing music all my life, it would be okay to do something other than music in the future. But since I'm doing music now, I want to have fun making my own music with the sounds I like.
We are nearing the end of the interview. This interview aims to revisit the question of contemporaneity. As a musician, have you ever thought about the current times and the world?
I think it's become a world where it's really easy to make something and connect, and I think people are ready to listen to anything, but I also think that the world is connecting so fast that all major music is becoming similar, so music with a local flavor seems to be more valuable and popular these days. Besides music, I'm also very interested in issues like climate change. When you're raising children, you realize that the planet is dying at a rapid rate. I wonder what artists can do in that situation. But even if I just make music that speaks out against climate change, if I'm not famous, what impact will it have? So, do I have to do something like K-pop to become famous, which I don't think I can do. I think about things like that.