A Guide to What’s Going on in Korea
Pentaport just announced the additions of Deli Spice, Kasabian, Geom X GumX and Windy City to this year’s line-up.
And Seo Taiji announced that this year’s ETP Fest will be on Aug. 15. No word on who (besides Taiji) will be playing.
Sorry for not updating the site over the past week. I became suddenly busy… although busy with some fun projects, so that was okay (you can read a bit about them at my other blog). Hopefully I should find some time in the next few days to update the concert listings more and maybe write a post or two.
A heck of a lot of shows going on this weekend, especially on Saturday night. I have already talked about the shoegazer show going on at Bowie, but here a couple more that should be worth going to.
Certainly the biggest bang for your buck is Saturday night at Badabie, where there will be 11 acts playing for 5,000 won. It is the going-away show for Ironic Hue, as they will be heading to Toronto to play in the North By NorthEast (NXNE) festival in June. The show starts at 5pm and goes until midnight.
Another interesting show on Saturday is the late-night gig at Soundholic. Oriental Lucy, Belle Mafia and a couple of other groups that I don’t know… But it is just 10,000 won and it includes a drink (two drinks for women). Show starts at 11pm.
Oriental Lucy also plays Friday night at Club Bbang.
Interesting looking show coming up on Saturday (May 24) at club Bowie featuring three shoegazing bands — Lobotomy, Bulssazo and Bulgilhan Joeum. The show is the eighth Never Right show… although I must admit I have no idea what the Never Right thing is all about.
If you have not heard of Bowie, it is in the space space Aura used to be, halfway between Shinchon and Hongdae, near the Sanullim theater and the bridge of the railway tracks (or what used to be the railway tracks).
As for the bands, Bulssazo is one of the most Sigur Ros-like groups I know in Korea, although I can not imagine Sigur Ros naming their songs “The Light Shoegaze” or “Too Big to Fuck.” At first, Bulssazo seems like a rather surprising choice for a Pastel Music band (Pastel is usually more commercial and melodious), but like Pastel’s other artists, Bulssazo has a light and almost delicate quality, despite their very cool wall of noise. Great interview with Bulssazo at KOA Zine, btw.
Bulgilhan Jeoum (otherwise known as Master Musik) is associated with the Balloon and Needle noise label (collective? not sure about the best descriptor) and is the most aggressive and cacophonic of the three bands. At least that is what I have seen of them online and in the past. Lots of feedband and smashing things.
I do not know much about the band Lobotomy — except that they have a Myspace page and a song called “Hong Sang Soo.” Having a shoegazing band with a song about Korea’s famous shoegazing director earns big points from me (especially a song that reminds me so much of “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”).
Btw, if you are interested in Korea’s experimental electronic scene, you can download the songs from four Balloon and Needle CDs here (the bottom four disks on the list are available for download… I like BNN 1 the most).
Okay, I know one of the Gig Guide’s biggest problems has been that today’s shows do not appear in the calendar. At 12:01 am each day, my database deletes the day’s concerts. I have not figured out how to change the Gigpress plugin to fix that problem, but I do have a workaround of sorts.
I have added a new category — Today’s Shows (and History). If you go to that category, you will see shows happening today … along with all the shows that I have ever entered into the system.
It is not a perfect solution. But until I figure out how to rewrite my plugin, this is a way for everyone to check out today’s gigs.
I just wrote a little blurb about the rise of fun new places and shops around Hongdae. Far from complete, it is just a little essay about Indian restaurants and other fun things around. It was a decent-sized little essay, but I barely even scratched the surface. Did not talk about the humongous new Coffee Bean on the main street, the Coffee Prince coffee shop or the oh-so-classy cocktails in a bag at Vinyl.
Fun little mini-show coming this Friday at Yogiga. For an hour before Kim Deok-young’s new show Wave of Emotions opens, there will be folk music by Utsumi Kaya and Anaki Project.
Concert begins at 6pm, then the art show at 7pm. Wave of Emotions runs from May 16 to 24.
Singer Lee Sang-eun is going to be on TV a couple of times soon. KBS on May 17 (don’t know what time, sorry), and then on EBS on May 19 at 8:50pm.
Her concert at Club Answer in Cheongdam-dong is being billed as her 20th anniversary concert. Which would be a lot cooler if we were not the same age — instead, it mostly makes me feel old.
This is a couple of weeks late (well, three weeks), but I just discovered Janis Ian’s announcement that she was canceling her part in the Flower Power Peace Concert. And it is depressing:
The South Korean dates have been cancelled, for reasons too numerous to go into here, but among them are failure to pay in a timely manner, failure to communicate for weeks at a time, failure to provide visas and/or work papers or information about same in a timely manner, false advertising (saying I will be appearing in places I have not agreed to appear in), and other breaches of contract too numerous to mention here.
My apologies to anyone who was planning to come to the shows because of my own participation in them. We have been trying to resolve this, in good faith, for months now. With the show dates less than 3 weeks away, we finally gave up on it this morning.
The Japan dates are still on, make no mistake! I’ve worked with those folks for decades, and have no problems with them!!
Well, that was distressing. Very sad to see Korea continues to be such a shady place for concerts. Especially since people like Yellow9 have been trying to hard to improve things.
While there are, sadly, way too many stories like this in Korea’s concert annals, here is one of my favorite, the story of James Randi (aka “The Amazing Randi”), when a concert promoter tried ripping him off back in 1995.