About a year after I started my studio, I was talking with Jonghee and the idea came up to put together a punk compilation — thirty bands from all over the country, one track each, adding up to an album around 80 minutes long.
The project ran for almost six months.
After every recording session we’d have a drink together, and I got to know all kinds of punks along the way — bands coming up from the provinces, I’d put them up and get them drinking before recording.
By the time the last band was more or less done recording, I did the math on the total runtime: 81 minutes and change.
That’s a problem — a CD can hold about 80 minutes of tracks, and go over that and you risk burn failures or skipping during playback, so we had to trim it down under 80.
I cut the fade-outs at the ends of tracks as hard as I could get away with, cut the count-ins before songs, and for a couple of bands I called them up to ask if it’d be okay to trim this or that part — and somehow we barely made it fit.
Ridiculous.
I didn’t have any proper monitoring gear, so every day I’d remix and check it on whatever I could get my hands on — earphones, headphones, car audio, the stereo at home, anything.
I had zero mastering experience and tried to farm it out, but it was way too expensive, so with the excuse of
“well, we’re punk anyway,”
I just slapped on a compressor and limiter, cranked the volume to the max, and shipped it off to the CD plant.
Meanwhile Jonghee, who always dreamed big, tried to get this thing released through a major label.
Funny even thinking about it now — the two of us threw on semi-formal outfits that didn’t suit us at all and went to Seoul Records in Jongno.
“Hyung, if we look like kids they might lowball us in the negotiation.”
“Oh yeah? So what do we do? We are kids.”
“…”
We got lowballed.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but that album ended up having a bigger impact on the punk scene than expected, and to this day it’s become a one-of-a-kind, hard-to-find classic.