What was the first sound that meant something to you? If you have a memory of a sound that was meaningful to you, even if it wasn't music, let's start there.

The first was the sound of leather. About 13 or 14 years ago, before I went to Guinea in West Africa, I had the opportunity to hear drums made from logs and real animal skins in a studio that I happened to stop by. Up until then, I was a fan of set drums, but there was something indescribably profound about the sound of an instrument made from raw materials that were as close to their natural state as possible, not like man-made materials like plywood or plastic.  A lot of things happened very quickly after that, and the next thing I knew, I was playing an instrument somewhere on the West African continent. The first time I experience that sound was a very meaningful moment for me.

The second time was when I was probably in kindergarten or elementary school, and I happened to see a youth orchestra concert, and I was fascinated by the sound of the clarinet, and I told my dad for a long time that I wanted to learn that instrument, and he got me an old used clarinet through a friend of dad who was a musician, and I spent the next few years learning the clarinet and playing in orchestras, and that was the first sound of music that really connected with me.

What was the soundscape of your childhood

I don't come from a musical family, in fact there was no particular sound in the house. It was very quiet, and my mother used to write, but she gave up art after she became a housewife to raise me and my brother. But my father was a nature lover, so from a very young age, we would go camping in the mountains or by the sea, and I would spend weekends and holidays with him, building bonfires, camping, and catching shells in the sea. Nowadays, campgrounds are very organized, but back then it was often just nature itself, and I have a lot of memories of soundscapes with my dad, building a campfire, roasting potatoes, and being surrounded by the sounds of trees, wind, birds, and bugs for a holistic soundscape experience.

Now let's move on to Africa. Did you follow the sound of leather instruments to the continent to learn percussion?

Actually, I didn't go straight to West Africa. A musician from Guinea, West Africa, was touring Japan, and I wanted to meet him first to get some advice and ask his opinion on music. One night we spent together, he said to me, “If you're this serious about instruments and sounds, and you really like them, you should come to Africa,” and he wrote me a visa invitation. At that time, I didn't have any particular instrument in mind to learn. In fact, even now, based on my personal experience, I think that in many of the regions and tribes I visited, the sound itself was accepted and used as a distinction rather than the type of instrument, and I still wonder if the intangible nature of the sound is more important than the physical form of the instrument. Anyway, that meeting sparked my desire to study traditional African music, and I left for West Africa and never looked back. As an aside, I was young and had nothing but a desire for music, so I remember being a bit confused when I first arrived at the airport, not knowing if French was even spoken there.

What kind of sounds did you hear while you were in africa?

The place I stayed was in an area where there were a lot of classes and tribes involved in music, and I think I heard instruments almost all day long, except at night when I was sleeping. In addition to playing or practicing music, after dinner we would sing for a long time to thank the person who cooked for us, and when we were done eating, we would all get together and play dance music on crappy speakers and dance and sing all night and then fall asleep. Drinking was strictly forbidden there, so we'd have soft drinks and play and play and play. We'd listen to it all night, and then when we woke up in the morning, we'd sing and play again to celebrate the morning, and then after breakfast, we'd play while we studied music together. It was like a dream, I was exposed to music all day long.

Did that change the way you look at sound and music as a musician?

Totally changed. I studied classical music as a child, and as a teenager I loved to collect punk, heavy metal and hip-hop records with headphones in my CD player. For a long time, I was forced to look at music through Western theories, and it was quite a shock to hear raw West African music. I had vaguely heard that sound and music are always present in our lives, but when I was there, I could feel it with my whole body. For example, women working in the kitchen would suddenly get excited and stop cooking and start playing, beating on the gourds they were using as tools or bowls, and it would spontaneously become a labor song. It's raw, improvised music. When they were cooking rice, if they ran out of rice or the rice was undercooked, they would light a new fire in the stove and start playing again, and it would go on for another hour or so. Being exposed to that kind of situation so naturally and constantly made me ask myself a lot of questions. All the reference points I had been studying fell apart, and questions like “What is music?”, “Where does music begin?”, “What are the ideal standards for music, composition, and recording?” kept coming up.

Since returning to Korea, You’ve been working as a percussionist and participating in various group such as Kan and IJM. What kind of music did you want to make after returning Korea?

It's really embarrassing to think about now, but at the time I was really arrogant and I thought that everyone who was doing music in Korea was fake, and I thought that recorded music wasn't real music because I was exposed to a different environment in West Africa, so I started with the arrogant mindset that I had to show people what real music was, and I wanted to introduce people to the sounds and instruments that I collected in Africa, and the concept of primitive music and sound itself. Looking back, it's a really embarrassing story.

There are so many different sounds in this comtemporary world today, and translating traditional music into score isn't necessarily the wrong way to go. After all, traditions are constantly evolving and we're writing a new history of traditions. As time goes by and I study more, I realize that I shouldn't be trapped in a narrow mindset with shallow experiences and knowledge, and I continue to expand my personal views and thoughts without shame.

In 2017, you released your solo album <DOKKAEBI PLAY>. To what extent was the album a refinement of the Embarrassing Passion you mentioned earlier?

At the time, I was focusing on the nature of free improvisation and improvisational sound. I had the opportunity to play and meet musicians in Berlin at the time, where I witnessed a very deep improvisation scene, participated in various performances, and attended many workshops on improvisation. I wanted to focus on how improvisation was developing as an emerging experimental genre, rather than the improvisation of soloists that we usually associate with jazz music.

I studied Korean and West African folk music, and it occurred to me that the sounds used by people who perform rituals and ceremonies, such as shamans and priests, are not codified in musical notation, but are passed down orally and adapted to the situation. The record you mentioned focuses on how improvisation in a specific situation, such as a ritual or ceremony, might be expressed when interacting with other musicians.

I went on a performance trip to a tribe and village near the Sahara Desert in Mali, and before a certain performance or religious ceremony, they put charcoal in a bowl and the musicians sit around and smoke incense and wash their faces with the smoke. They believe that it has a great influence on the ritual and the music that will be played. I was inspired by these different experiences and reflected them on my album.

Rituals and ceremony seem to be an important theme in your work, from your solo albums to the present day. In 2021, you’ve also performed <Ecology of Death and Annihilation: A Ceremony for Things that Wither>.

That is one of the most important topics in my work. Why did the first music exist before it was named as an art form? What is the origin of sound as an art form? I've always been curious about this and have read many papers and looked for sources, but I haven't found any clear answers. This is not surprising, since musical instruments are constantly decaying and sheet music has only recently been written down. It's hard to know exactly because there are no clear records of how our distant ancestors began to play and enjoy music.

But one thing that many researchers agree on is that humans probably started using sound to survive. Sounds to warn of danger or hunting were the first to emerge, and sounds for pleasure came later. As sounds for survival became entrenched in our lives, they began to be expressed as a form of art in the form of rituals or ceremonies. Historically, when there was a drought or a major disaster, people would perform rituals, and I think people had to get a little crazy and pray to get through the hard times. The role of sound and music would have been to create a state of madness to convey a desperate wish. <Ecology of Death and Annihilation> is collaboration work with secent artist Kim Leedan, we explore the idea that ritualistic elements such as sound, smell, light, and movement, which have been used in rituals since the beginning of time, evolved to become the origins of art. We focused on the ritualistic origins of art and includes reflections on contemporary rituals.

You had a sound exhibition <Sound Ritual> in 2021. In the exhibition's introduction, you talk about “reclaiming the sublime through sound in a city that has diminished the experience of the sublime. What is the sublime that we can experience through sound?

Kant's concept of the sublime talks about the moments when humans feel majestic and their relationship to the sublime. The idea is that we feel the sublime in situations where we might otherwise feel fear or dread, such as the fear we feel in front of the mighty Mount Everest or in the middle of an ocean of unknown depth. In fact, I've had a similar experience when I stood in front of an incredibly huge baobab tree on the Africa. In these moments, humans experience a new level of synesthesia. Time flows differently, space is perceived differently, and even the slightest breeze feels beautiful.

In preparing for this exhibition, I listened to a lot of bells tied around the necks of grazing animals in remote areas of the world, and I found myself mesmerized by the sound and felt my senses expanded by the echoes that had been there for a long time. Through my personal interpretation of sound, I wanted to show people the sublimity that comes from that situation, and suggest that if not in the great outdoors, we can experience that sublimity in the city we live in now, and even in the middle of an amazing large building where sounds that normally feel loud suddenly feel wondrous and beautiful. I think there's a ritualistic element to the everyday soundscape, and I think that's an important perspective that musicians can give people, and I wanted to show that just like artists used to look at things that were naturally present in our everyday lives in a slightly different way, if you give the everyday landscape an interesting twist, you can feel the sublime in it.

In <Sound Ritual>, there is white noise from electronic machine and the physical sound of a solenoid repeatedly hitting a steel plate, with a cowbell set into the landscape. When people listen intently to a single sound, it may not always be beautiful. But there's a new beauty that comes from noticing the different sounds around you. I use the word ecosystem a lot in my work, especially the term “sound ecology,” and I think that rather than specific genres like sound meditation or sound baths, there is an invisible but audible ecosystem of sound that is created by insects and birds, the swaying of trees, the sound of people talking, the sound of a campfire, the sound of cars passing by in the distance, and so on. I think that all sounds are most beautiful when they are harmonized in an ecosystem. For example, the sounds that people often think of as beautiful, such as birdsong or the sound of a stream, are sometimes so annoying when you live in the mountains. The sounds that we think of as beautiful have to be harmonized in an ecosystem first.

I feel like I'm gradually understanding your perspective on sound. In <SOUND RITUAL> and in your subsequent works, you have consistently worked with cowbells and metal. There are many different materials for percussion instruments, such as wood and leather, but why are you interested in metal?

I used to post a lot of photos of my work with metal, but I also use a lot of other materials. I'm interested in more natural or raw materials, which is definitely influenced by my lifelong journey of exploring sound and music. Early humans had no choice but to use unprocessed materials, so the history of musical instruments probably began with making and blowing flutes out of animal bones and pounding discarded wood. The people I've met in my search for the origins of sound, and the primitive forms of instruments I've encountered in various places, have been a strong inspiration to me and have deeply influenced the way I look at materials. Lately, I've been focusing more on metals that feel good to work with. The thrill of hammering and shaping metal is more intense than playing any percussion instrument. You've heard stories of blacksmiths hammering tens of thousands of times to make a single object, and you can't really make something without tens of thousands of hammerings. The shaking you get from repeatedly hammering gives you a different kind of thrill than a percussionist hitting on an instrument.
It also acts as a meditative practice that centers me. Lately, it's become a daily routine to hammer and create. I hammer at least six hours a day to create basic shapes. I have a teacher in Korea who taught me how to make shapes and sounds with hammering. I remember the first time I went to see my teacher, I brought a decades-old cowbell from a mountain tribe and told him I wanted to make my own, and he laughed and told me that hammering is the end of percussion. His dream was to create a performance with a kkwaenggwari or other percussionist playing along while he made hammering sounds to make his instrument. When he said that, I knew this was my teacher.

You studied music in Africa, and I'm sure there's a direction you're going in that's more of a groovy black music route, but your recent work seems to be very different from following the grooves of black music. Now you are more often referred to as a sound artist. However, personally, I think you should be a little suspicious of words that have 'art' attached to the form itself, such as 'media art'.

I think labeling something with the word 'art' should be viewed with suspicion as well. Personally, I don't use the word 'sound artist' very often, but even if I don't use it, other people might call me that. I think one of the reasons people use that word is that they tend to draw a distinction between music, which I see as being more about playing and listening, and sound art, which is more about installation and visual communication. I personally don't think that there's a need to distinguish between genres if the work is done with sound as a medium, but if the term is becoming more and more common to refer to anyone who works with sound, I think we should get used to it.

So are the questions and attitudes ultimately similar when you're working as a musician or percussionist versus when you're working on an installation?

I don't think it's that different. I don't really care whether I'm introduced as a musician or a sound artist. I think that's the domain of the people who curate and critique. I like to think of myself as someone who works with sound as a material or as a source of inspiration.

Are there any sounds that you subjectively like or dislike?

I think I dislike unintentional sounds the most, like the birds that wake me up in the morning or the sound of people fighting in the middle of the city that I can't stop listening to. In fact, the lines are blurred, so I think I like and dislike the same sounds depending on my surroundings.

Based on what you've said so far, people might think of you as someone who had a sublime experience with sound in Africa and then went hammering away in search of the origin of the sound. But you also work with electronic music and modular synthesizers. What attracted you to electronic instruments?

It all started with one musician. There was a legendary musician named Nana Vasconcelos, who passed away a few years ago. Vincent Moon, a videographer who travels around the world documenting various ritual moments, was on a program talking about his work and wanted to introduce Nana Vasconcelos, so he invited him to play for about 20 minutes. I happened to watch the video and saw him playing barefoot on the effects pedal with a primitive, unpolished instrument. I thought, why dare I stick to analog instruments when an old musician who lives in the Amazon and works with primitive sounds also uses electronic equipment without prejudice, and I bought the same pedal he used.
It was Boss digital delay, and learning how to use it was the first thing that inspired me to start using electronics in my work. I started looking up videos of his performances, figuring out his percussion effects setups and making them my own, and then I had the opportunity to interact with various musicians in Japan, Germany, and elsewhere, which naturally led me to study electronic music. I realized that the concept of a origin of an instrument is meaningless and that everything that is created now will be the origin of another instrument later, so I erased my prejudices about the instrument itself.

My work, including this interview, ultimately tells a similar story. It's about sounds from different backgrounds coming together to form a contemporary ecosystem. You’ve been tracing the origins of sound back to Africa, but now your work is presented as contemporary art. What is contemporary in your opinion?

In fact, the name of my current graduate program is Contemporary Art Practice. I still have a lot to learn and understand, but I personally think that contemporary works, whether it's music, art, or any other genre, are about talking about the social issues of the times we live in.  Environmental problems caused by severe climate change, the arrival of the sixth great extinction, brutal wars caused by destructive desires, social problems caused by rapid population decline, I believe that works that reflect the current situation of our time are so-called contemporary artworks. Personally, in my early years, I deliberately avoided overly reflecting political, social, and philosophical issues in my works, but nowadays, I accept reflecting speculative but long-standing aesthetic views in my works as part of my work. Along with that, I think it's part of the process of contemporary art to adopt new instruments and recording equipment, to play and interpret sounds from a contemporary perspective, and to present them to the world in a progressive way. I think it's important to work with media in a contemporary environment as well as social and philosophical themes.

Do you influenced by a particular time or space?

Time is a very meaningful topic for me. A lot of my work is based on looking back at when sound was first established as an art form, I can't say exactly when, but I'm interested in the evolution of humanity's hand-making and use of instruments. Experiences in Africa have been a big influence, as many musicians always say 'this started decades or centuries ago'.

Currently, I'm exploring the context of the political and economic use of sound across civilizations, with the idea that sound played a key role in the emergence of humans as destructive apex predators and ushering in the Anthropocene.

If you had an imaginary microphone that could pick up the sounds of your subconscious, what do you think it would record?

A strange, unintelligible voice or scream. Personally, I think that was the first sound that humans made. Shouting out loud to threaten something or chase something away. In the beginning, we probably used our voices as instruments to make the first sounds, just primal sounds that came directly from our bodies without any instruments. I think that sound will be recorded.