Munhwasagidan got in touch — they wanted each band to record and release its own EP. One winter day I went down into some basement in Ewha, and there was Jaejun-hyung, a Tascam 24-channel console, three or four decks stacked up that took VHS tapes, and the drums had been mic’d up after a fashion. There was no separate booth, so everything happened in one room. Jaejun-hyung said let’s just go one take. You know the kind — if one guy screws up, everybody starts over. Hahaha.
Cues were by hand, or just by yelling — stop, stop, stop!! go, go, go!! Obviously there were no headphones or any monitoring system, and no metronome — not that we had the chops to use one anyway. After every take we’d all crowd around Jaejun-hyung’s spot to listen back, over and over.
I had no idea Bongguk’s guitar sounded this much like a mess, the drums were all over the place, the bass swung loud and quiet with no consistency — when we made our own demos we’d polish everything take by take so it came out relatively clean, but trying to nail it in one shot, every single one of us turned out to be a disaster.
The album came out, and I was so embarrassed by the sound quality and our playing that I never listened to it. But funnily enough, that album — now already twenty years old — started growing on me a few years back, and these days whenever I feel like listening to old Half Brothers songs, that’s the album I reach for first.
Back then I genuinely had no idea it was pure, raw energy itself. I guess you could call it the particular charm only a one-take recording has.