[INTERVIEW] Indie band achime - Part 1

From left, achime members Kim Jung-min, Kim Su-yul, Kwon Sun-wook, Kim Dong-hyun and Kim Kyung-joo. [Lee Jin-hyuk/10Asia]

It is easy to misinterpret achime's music. And it is because it is hard to define their music as being of a certain genre or style. Some have embraced their latest album as being fun and refreshing since each of the four songs are of different styles but others suspect that they are greedy and say their music of lacks focus. Their first album "Hunch" released last year drew similar response as well. But their attitude, of staying a group that does 'undefined' music in a country where people demand them to define themselves and have split opinion on them, is interesting in itself. They are aware of how people talk about them and also want to do music that appeals to the general public more but they are also a band whose members have different tastes in music, ranging from Kim Yeon-woo to Quruli to Beyonce. Below are excerpts from 10Asia's interview with this democratic band.

10: You held a concert in late May. How was it? It was your first live performance since releasing your latest EP.
Kwon Sun-wook: We had a lot of fun. We were supposed show our audience a good time and make good memories for them but I think we're the ones that were rather presented with such memories so it was a precious time for us.

10: But I think that performing live must be the biggest task bands face all the time because of how hard it must be to sound the way you do in the album. Were you happy with how you played live for the concert?
Kim Dong-hyun (Kim DH): Extremely. I had actually held myself back a lot for the recording because rock bands are all about giving their everything for the live performances. I don't know about the other members of our group but I held back quite a bit on purpose in terms of the notes I play and such, so that I could go all out when I play live. And I think this worked out well for me at our concert.
Kim Su-yul (Kim SY): I put a lot of effort into the recording and post-production work for this album. And then I thought long and hard about how we should express everything we did live but I tried to rearrange everything to fit a band which somehow worked out for when we performed live.
Kwon: I felt that we should take a completely different approach for performing the songs live because we could end up doing a sloppy job in trying to perform them in the way we recorded them in our album so we focused on adding new elements to them while maintaining what was good about them.

Kim Kyung-joo [Lee Jin-hyuk/10Asia]

10: Well the first impression I got from your EP is that is contains a variety of styles. And I understand that you got this response a lot for your first album as well so I'm curious as to why you don't go after a certain style of genre when it's probably the easier way to appeal to the general public.
Kwon: It has a lot to do with the fact that I make the songs... my belief that not seeing change when you're an artist is the same as you being dead. Of course, maintaining what is good is also a very hard thing to do but I think that presenting something new each time is also a duty required of people who do art or music. And each member of our group likes such different music that instead of trying to fuse everyone tastes of music together into each of the songs, we tend to do what we each like best which sometimes results in us producing different styles of music. So unless we undergo major changes, I'm hoping that we'll stay a band that is remembered for the new attempts we make each time.

10: I've wanted to hear the story behind each song since they're all of different styles. I'm sure that your band played the album's first track "Rainbow at 02AM" but the sound was so good that it seemed as if you had worked on it on a musical instrument digital interface.
Kwon: We made a lot of changes in the post-production stage. (laugh) The song is about a girl dancing about on a crosswalk late at night which is very unrealistic and dreamy so I thought of how we'd be able to show this through sound. Then I decided that the dreamy but at the same time humorous aspect to the song should be expressed through our music so we included the sounds from computer games and used auto-tune vocals. We made it funny by using sound that you usually don't hear in rock music. 'Humor' is the most important aspect to this song.

10: The atmosphere changes completely for track No. 2 however, named "First Love Bicycles." It's like acoustic folk rock. And while it seems like the lyrics to "Rainbow at 02AM" are wrapped by sound, the lyrics to "First love Bicycles" can be heard more clearly. I heard that both songs are based on your experiences, Kwon Sun-wook, but I don't think what you went through in "First Love Bicycles" must've been easy.
Kwon: I always ride my bicycle from my house to the bus stop. And I was unlocking my bike one day when I saw the girl I had dated in middle school standing there looking all beautiful. I called out to her and as if she had been waiting for me to, she said she'd borrow my bicycle and zoomed off somewhere with it. She came back a few minutes later but I couldn't tell what she had done during that time. And I just stood there in a daze. I mean, it wasn't like I could chase after her (laugh) but it reminded me of the old times. And she took off before I could ask her anything. So I went straight home after that happened and made it into a song, telling myself that I should write the lyrics to it as if writing in my diary before I forget.

Kwon Sun-wook [Lee Jin-hyuk/10Asia]

10: Your band achime started with Kwon Sun-wook and Kim Su-yul. How did the other members of the band join?
Kim SY: Sun-wook and I had done music since we were young and we were actually in a band together before we went to the military but we all went our own ways when I had to enlist. Then Sun-wook suggested we make another band before he got discharged.
Kwon: That was the beginning of disaster. (laugh)
Kim SY: That's how achime was formed, we were introduced to Dong-hyun who joined us a year ago and Kyung-joo and Jung-min are my juniors at my major in college and I just kind of forced them join. (laugh)
Kwon: We started with the big dream of winning No Reply which we still have yet to achieve. (laugh) No Reply's Jeong Wook-jae actually used to play the guitar for our former band and I was actually a member of the session for a band their vocalist Kwon Soon-kwan was in. There was a time when we all used to have fun together because we're all from Anyang but the gap between us has widened so much now. (laugh)
Kim SY: We can't even see them. (laugh)
Kwon: We can't even breath the same air that they do. (laugh) Us and 10cm both auditioned for the same club. So in a way, we made our debut the same day. And when I saw them audition, I was thinking that they'd make it big someday, which they did, while we quietly followed behind them and did our gloomy music. (laugh)
Kim SY: It's depressing.
Kim Dong-hyun: I think that's why we're called achime. (laugh) Everyone is so depressing that we said that the name of our band should at least be cheerful.

10: The lyrics to the third track "hyperactivity" are very short but I kept wanting to look at them. And I read from an interview you had within your agency that it's almost the same story as what Japanese writer Shuichi Yoshida wrote in one of his novels. So it may be because Kwon Sun-wook majored in Japanese and talked about Japanese literature in another interview that I was reminded of the music of Japanese Indie rock bands while listening to your music. And not of a particular song of theirs but the sensitivity within them.
Kwon Sun-wook: The songs that I listenened to the most while working on this album, or the songs that served as reference, should I say, was post rock which is popular in the Japanese Indie scene right now. There's sort of a Nakameguro-kei that is appearing, after the Shibuya-kei passed, so I referred to rock music that uses jazz-like voicing which derived from it. I think that's how our music got to have that vibe to it.

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Reporter : Kim Hee Ju fifteen@
Photographer : Lee Jin-hyuk eleven@
Editor : Jessica Kim jesskim@, Lee Ji-Hye seven@