Boiler Room X Valentino

I've received an enormous number of love and hate (which I also love to take in) in the last 4 years of my music career. I had to learn how to let things come and go regardless of my intention. I wanted to archive my vivid memories before they fade away in my body, both beautiful and ugly things. Hana is an album which portrays all of my thoughts and emotions. Kill Me With Your Love is purely based on my experience from a few years ago, about someone that I loved so much to death! It’s kind of like a poem with a melody talking about how much we travelled together in our own world as if we are some flying object or an ocean creature. One day, the love I have built towards him collapsed like a tower of Babel in the blink of an eye. Its remnants collapsed and the love has killed me at the end. Well, that’s at least the story behind how I first started composing the song.

Although I’m based in Seoul, I spent my high school and college years in the United States so I was able to build my musical taste and style that’s kind of hybrid. When I started listening to electronic music, I purposely listened to many European electronic musicians for its aesthetics. And I mixed it into my own root of being Korean.
From my 4 year experience of being a musician, the electronic scene in South Korea has not flourished much yet. While there are many amazing electronic musicians in different genres especially house/techno and avant-garde music, I feel like there’s not enough stages or platforms to showcase their work. Cool electronic music communities do exist on a small scale, but I’d say it’s pretty limited compared to the amount of artists who are out there active in Seoul. In many cases for Seoul electronic music scene, it is shown through the form of audio-visual experience, which I love.

I think this concept of isolation is an image of ourselves. I feel that during this pandemic, where we are all distanced apart, we are in the realization of ourselves as an individual, singular human entity. We have been consistently labelling ourselves or have been labelled, by the group of a certain community, workplace, family, friend group, and society we’re part of. And now when everything is far apart, we feel that we are on our own.
The idea of being left alone in the middle of the buildings of Seoul was not bizarre, nor unfamiliar to me, since I’ve always felt I was alone. But things don’t happen without teamwork with my teammates, even for this particular shoot. I cannot go further without teamwork with others. This fact came as a straight realization to me, and I got to appreciate my surroundings even further.

My first experience of creating art is by visual. I went to an art school in the states, and learned how to execute my ideas visually, and soon after I got out of school, I started learning how to produce music through YouTube and the internet. My first step to the music-making process is visually drawing a scene or a picture in my head. Sometimes I scribble on my notebook with pen, no colour, and based on that image/scene I start to transfer parts to my audio program.
If I imagine a pink and swamp on the background, I would try to make my synth pad sound really moist and deep using different effects, and swamp usually has morning dews on the leaves. So I would create another new track to describe pink dews on the leaves using bell-like sounds with tremolos, and if there’s a creature with a gigantic foot, I would try to find a kick sample that is damp and heavy and resonates. It might sound kind of silly but it’s fairly easy and fun to do it. It’s just my own way of the creative process, and I like to work this way.

A live show with real people around me, magical energy from the audience, true interaction with people I love, pulling all-nighters with my fellow musicians for new tracks, traveling to a new country for a gig, making memories with new musicians from different parts of the world, virtual reality interactive musical contents, evolved version of Cifika, a world without Covid, performing for Olympics with my new album, falling in love.

I really wanted the authenticity, high-level taste in production, and energy to pop out on this project. If I could put it one word it would be powerful. Overall, I wanted to empower whoever was listening.

I hope the audience is ready to get up and not sit back down until they’re tired. At best, I would like the audience to feel my energy, be inspired enough to take a message away from my performance, or just have a good time, whatever they feel.

I think I subconsciously include my culture in everything I do. I’m a student of many different cultures, so I often have different sounds and styles that influence my music.

This fusion between fashion and music means so much to me because the fashion and the art come together and makes lifestyle. Both fashion and music are so heavily influenced by one another that you can’t have one without the other. Valentino is truly bringing together the best of both worlds.

I’m looking forward to continuing to empower women and men all over the world while making my mark in fashion and music.