Amuro Blog

Discipline: Music

  • The Back ups

    Seven or eight chaotic years into settling in Australia, maybe I finally had a little breathing room, because I started wondering — what do Sydney punks even do for fun?
    Just googling “Sydney punk shows” turned up basically nothing useful. One day Miyoung dug all the way through Facebook and found something — info on a punk show happening at a pub near UTS in the city.
    I called up Edang, and Miyoung and I headed to the Valve Bar. Edang got there first and was already sitting at the bar with a beer, waiting for us. Seeing him decked out head to toe in full punk gear, sitting there quietly, gazing off into the middle distance three or four meters ahead like he was lost deep in thought — it felt like he was saying, yeah, this guy’s been waiting for this too, missed this too, of course he has. Once the show started, the playing was as sloppy here as it is back in Korea, and the kids doing the slam pit and old guys like me hung back a bit, soaking in that raw, unpolished noise. If smoking had been allowed in there and a haze of cigarette smoke were hanging over the ceiling too, it would’ve been perfect… During the gaps while the next bands set up, everyone spilled outside in a mob and a loud, chaotic conversation broke out.
    I jumped into the mix here and there too, saying “I’m Amuro, I’m Amuro” probably a dozen-plus times. As I kept saying it had genuinely been hard to find this place, an old punk about my dad’s age who introduced himself as James asked for my email, and from then on started sending me an updated list of every punk show happening in Sydney, every week.
    And it was only after I’d made Facebook friends with a few of the punks there that show listings actually started showing up on my own timeline.

    From then on, I chased down shows every weekend — Newtown, Sydenham, all over. Not long after, word came that there was going to be a punk picnic at Sydney Park, so the four of us — me, Miyoung, Edang, and Via (Edang and Sharon’s daughter) — packed an esky full of beer and headed over. Under the chimney at Sydney Park, the place was packed with punks, clustered in twos and threes, knocking back beers. I was still out there making the rounds introducing myself, and the moment I mentioned I played drums, eyes lit up — makes sense, since drummers are always in short supply here just like in Korea, good or bad doesn’t matter, if you could sit down and bang out a beat, you were a drummer. Supply never matches demand, so it’s extremely common for punk drummers to be juggling two or three bands at once.
    A tall, skinny skinhead came up to me.
    “Hey, you play drums?”
    “Yeah, I can play pretty much anything except blast beats.”
    “I’m Manuel.”
    “I’m Amuro.”
    “Want to start a band together?”
    “Sure.”
    And just like that, a band was formed.
    The following week we booked a rehearsal room called Soundwork in Marrickville and tried playing together for the first time. Haha. He was terrible. Didn’t matter. Watching him show up with his own original songs and play guitar dead seriously despite being bad at it — there was something great about that.
    After rehearsal we went into town for a round of beers and talked about punk, skinheads, Colombia, Korean punk, back and forth. Over the next few rehearsals, Jose joined on bass, and after four or five different singers came around wondering if they should give it a shot, Ben joined. The week after that, Oscar joined on guitar, and four or five songs came together fast.
    No point overthinking it — we brought everyone into the office and recorded five songs. Not a real studio: my desk just happened to have a cheap USB audio interface on it. Drums went through an electronic kit, bass and guitar both went in direct with effects layered on in software afterward, and vocals got wrapped up on a $20 AliExpress microphone. Around then Jose left, headed back to Colombia, and Mick came in.
    During a cigarette break, the five of us were talking about what to name the band, and landed on taking the first letter of each of our home countries — B for Barcelona, A for Australia, C for Colombia, K for Korea — spelling out BACK, and after playing around with it a bit more, it became The Back ups.

  • Super 8bit

  • Spiky brats

  • Cellar doors

  • Rux

    Jonghee dropped by the practice room.
    We talked about We Are the Punx and everything, and then he asked if I could step in for a while — Sanghyeon, Rux’s drummer, couldn’t keep playing with the band due to some personal circumstances.
    Hm, honestly I thought, oh, this could be fun, so after a few rehearsals to roughly get in sync we started playing shows. Rux had a completely different vibe from Half Brothers.
    Half Brothers was pop-punk, something like the Toy Dolls, while Rux was street punk through and through. Even the atmosphere of the shows was different, and so was where the songs put their weight.
    Back then Juhyun (of Galaxy Express) was still on bass, and Gunwoo (now the YouTuber Minimal Yumok) was on guitar. We shot the “Hanmaeum” music video together, played the Korea-Japan Oi Festival, and put in a lot of work playing club shows.
    We also got a few chances to play rock festivals, and I got to go up there. Not quite ten thousand people, maybe five thousand? — the crowd surging together like one single organism. And the drums, even though they’re at the very back, are also up on the highest riser, so I get this view from up there that honestly only I get to see: the band and the crowd fusing into one, this real marbling of interaction unfolding in front of me. Anyway, that show on Pentaport’s sub-stage was — how do I put it — a genuinely special experience for me, the kind where I thought, is this the feeling I’ve been raising all this hell trying to get to, all this time?
    We also went to Let’s Rock Festival — Jonghee and the organizers went back and forth arguing over our set time before we even got on stage. We’d decided to open with “Ruckus Army,” with a drum intro, and Jonghee asked if I could just keep repeating the same pattern until he gave me the cue. Sure, okay, I said, and started —
    Duh-guh-dung tak-tak, duh-guh-dung tak-tak, duh-guh-dung tak-tak, duh-guh-dung tak-tak……. I kept playing that for over a minute, and this guy wasn’t giving any cue, he was just staring out at the crowd. I must have played it for at least two minutes.
    Why, was it because the stage was so big? Playing the same pattern over and over, I started losing track of which bar I was even on, whether I’d counted to three or to five, my legs started giving out, and right as I was thinking, god damn it, would you just start already, the cue finally came.
    Three, four, in my head, juwang~~ duh-guh-dung tak-tak, juwang~~ duh-guh-dung tak-tak, and then the guitar and bass came in and the whole place went off. It was still daytime so the crowd hadn’t fully filled in yet, but I could already feel that surging energy from down below rolling right back up to me.
    We were about to launch into the second song, “Our Life, Our Stage,” when Jonghee announced into the mic, “Alright, last song.” Huh? All the other members were like, huh? Everyone just stared at Jonghee, like what are you talking about — turned out the organizers had only given us 15 minutes total, setup included. No matter how unknown an indie band we were, that was pushing it. Jonghee, pissed off about it, went, fuck it then, I’ll make it even shorter — and we played just two songs and walked off.
    Playing EBS Space Gonggam turned into another special experience. Even now, if you dig up the old footage, you can see just how tense and clueless I looked.
    But once my wedding came around, I had no choice but to leave Rux too.

  • Captain bootbois

    Back when I was doing live-club auditions and playing shows, some kid asked if he could come back to my place and have a drink with us — why not, I figured, so I brought him home and we drank all night.
    His name was Donghyun. At first he thought I was older and kept talking to me formally for a good while, and he seemed to be getting a little uncomfortable about it.
    “You guys can drop the formal talk with me — I’m way younger than you.”
    “Huh, how old are you?”
    “I’m still in high school.”
    “What? No way — your face doesn’t look anything like a high schooler, you look three or four years older than me.”
    “I’ve always looked like this, hahaha.”
    We ended up calling him “the Farmer.”
    A few years later he went off to college, started his own band, and we ended up playing shows together.
    He was in a skinhead band called Captain Bootbois, and at some point they asked me to play drums for them.
    I already knew the songs since I’d recorded them, but actually rehearsing and playing shows with them, Captain had a whole different energy of its own — the way the songs built up their power was genuinely pretty good.
    That rousing, chant-along Oi! melody style actually resembles early punk more closely than anything else out there. In Hongdae, different genres drew different crowds, and even the venues each scene played were slightly different.
    Captain moved with the GMC crew — bands like Samcheong Reeducation Camp and Knockdown — and that naturally became my way into knowing that whole crowd.
    Half Brothers ran with the skate-punk crowd,
    Rux ran with the street/pogo-punk crowd,
    Captain ran with the GMC hardcore-punk crowd,
    and then there was Town Hall Records, doing old-school hardcore, moving in its own separate orbit entirely.
    In this tiny neighborhood, people kept clustering around whoever they clicked with, and little by little the scene split into factions — that’s how things were shifting.

    I’m a leftist — an old-school leftist — but I’m fine talking to anyone about anything. Right-leaning, left-leaning, doesn’t matter, I’m all for meeting up, arguing it out, even fighting a little over it. The only ones I’m not interested in are the far-right and the far-left.
    There’s no getting through to them. They don’t have opinions, they have doctrine. In the world of “the extreme,” anything that doesn’t fit the ideology they’ve already built is treated as the enemy — there’s zero flexibility in that.
    Instead of wondering why someone thinks the way they do, they just write you off as an idiot — so there’s no room for actual discussion at all. It’s just a waste of time. How are you supposed to talk to someone whose whole brain runs on black or white?
    Here’s an example. Out of ten Trump policies, I agree with four and disagree with six. That’s a personal call. You’re allowed to like some things and dislike others, personally.
    So does 4-to-6 make me a leftist? And if it were 6-to-4, would that make me a rightist?
    The “extreme” crowd wants it 10-to-0 or 0-to-10, nothing in between. Isn’t that just stupid? How can you possibly agree with 100 percent of some stranger’s policy platform? It feels like a cult to me. Blind devotion.
    If I say 4-to-6, they treat me like some kind of fence-sitting bat. I’ve never seen brainless fuckers this brainless.
    “The far-right is just plain simple-minded, and the far-left just won’t stop whining” — that’s my firm political identity, plain and simple.
    Skinhead identity has been slapped with a far-right frame by the media, but the skinhead thing I actually knew never meant that in the first place. Still, with this particular GMC crew, all I ended up seeing was that faded, dark side of skinhead culture.
    Who the hell pulls seniority and age rank in the 21st century, you idiots.

  • Save your mind

    We’d each knocked back a bottle of soju at the practice room, and Bongguk and I were trying to figure out what to do — decided to head out to Hongdae and see if anything was going on.
    We were going to walk, but this guy started the car.
    “Hey, what are you doing?”
    “Let’s take the car!”
    “You’ve been drinking.”
    “It’s fine, it’s five minutes away, what’s gonna happen?”
    He turned left down an alley to park on the main street, and there was a cop waiting.
    The second I thought, oh, we’re screwed — he floors it.
    “Hey, hey, hey, what are you doing?!”
    “I’m screwed, I’m on a license suspension right now — got caught coming back from the ski slopes last week. If they catch me now, I’m done!!!”
    He sprinted flat-out for about 300 meters, then turned right toward Hapjeong station, left, left, right — I looked back.
    No one there.
    “Oh man, that was close”
    — right as he let out a sigh of relief, a police car pulled up behind us.
    A five-minute chase followed.
    I was just riding shotgun, a bit player in this whole action scene, but my heart was pounding harder than the lead’s.
    The road kept narrowing and my field of view shrank down to a pinhole.
    As we hit the end of the alley, Bongguk said:
    “Hyung. We’re not gonna make it, are we?”

    Bongguk got taken in, and showed up at the practice room the next day.
    Luckily they took the circumstances into account — a 910,000 won fine, license revoked, and released with a warning.
    Normally you’d get an on-the-spot summary judgment as caught-in-the-act, but he got lucky and ran into a decent cop.

    Having seen the potential in
    “We Are the Punx,”
    Bongguk talked some board-clothing company’s president into it and put together
    “Save Your Mind — For the Extreme Riders,”
    a tribute album for skateboard and snowboard fans.
    Nine skate-punk bands, two tracks each, eighteen tracks total — and without me even knowing, a remastered version got re-released in 2024.
    Half Brothers had two tracks on it too, of course.
    The money from this finally got Bongguk out of homelessness.
    It only lasted a few months, but he had a place of his own, and for the first time in his life I got to mooch actual meat off him. lol

    Bongguk, who was supposed to show up for practice, went missing.
    No contact for three weeks.
    Had he died somewhere?
    I went by his place, called everyone I knew who might know him — dead silence, nothing.
    One Sunday afternoon a call came in to the practice room.
    “Hello?”
    “Do you know a Jeon Bongguk?”
    “Uh, yeah — who’s this?”
    “Go to the Yeongdeungpo Detention Center.”
    The line went dead.
    I went to the detention center.
    He was there.
    Head shaved down to nothing, wearing prison-issue rubber shoes, he walked into the visiting booth.
    I don’t know why the tears came so fast —
    “you son of a bitch”
    came out of me before anything else did.
    Turns out he’d been stalling on paying that 910,000 won fine, and one day he got caught in a random ID check at a crosswalk and arrested on the spot.
    Well done.
    Really well done.
    At the detention center, they knock 30,000 won off the fine per day — but you have to fold paper bags for it.
    910,000 won meant a three-month sentence.
    He’d been in for three weeks, and I paid 600,000–700,000 won to get him out.
    Goddamn it, the things I end up doing because of this guy.

  • We are the punx

    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.

  • Take’em all

    That winter, I was out drinking at some barbecue place when I ran into Won Jonghee from Rux, who was home on leave from the army.
    We talked about this and that and went our separate ways, and then one day Jonghee showed up at the practice room.
    “Hyung! Let’s just record one of our songs for fun!”
    I’d only ever recorded our own band’s demos — recording someone else’s band hadn’t even crossed my mind — but hey, why not, let’s give it a shot.
    We didn’t have enough mics for the drums or a proper booth, so we just recorded by yelling cues back and forth at each other.
    Whoa, this is actually fun.
    It was Rux’s cover of Cock Sparrer’s
    “Take ’em All”
    — my first outside recording, and the song was great too.
    From that day on Jonghee spread the word around, and I started recording punk bands.
    I began getting paid a little, upgrading gear little by little, and that’s how my small studio got its start.
    Since it had already begun, I wanted to do it properly, so I tore everything out and set out to build a real DIY booth.
    At the materials shop they sold sandwich panels, so I ordered about ten of them and built a room roughly 4m by 6m.
    I’d seen it done somewhere, so I went to Euljiro, bought twenty sheets of egg-crate foam, and lined the inside walls with it.
    Man, my buddy and I got a little high on the adhesive fumes and were in a great mood for a while.
    Hahaha.
    I thought that was basically the whole job.
    I had the guy helping me step outside the door while I went inside the room and shut it.
    In theory, whatever I said shouldn’t have been audible to him outside.
    So I shouted,
    “Hey, can you hear me?”
    and he answered,
    “Yeah, loud and clear.”
    And that answer came back to my own ear as clear as a whisper.
    Uh, this isn’t right, this is a wash.
    Hahaha.
    That’s when it finally clicked why studio construction costs tens of millions of won — well, obviously, I didn’t have tens of millions of won.

    I needed a different approach — a room inside a room, floating in mid-air.
    First I got a dozen or so scrap tires from a local garage, laid them on the floor, and built the actual floor about 50cm off the walls using wood beams and 12mm plywood.
    I put up walls with sandwich panels and fitted a ceiling on top.
    Hung a door, lined the inside of the walls edge-to-edge with 10mm rubber sheeting, and then wallpapered over that with egg-crate foam again.
    God, that adhesive smell — I don’t have much sense of smell, but that stuff didn’t feel like a smell so much as something acting directly on the brain, haha.
    Either way, the booth was now physically disconnected from the building structure anywhere.
    I picked up some glass someone had thrown out on the street, cut it into two 80cm x 120cm panes, and mounted one on the inner wall and one on the outer wall, making a rough communication channel between inside and outside.
    Once I installed a jack box for the mic cables and put in an air conditioner, it started looking like the real thing.
    A studio, finally?

    Guitar amp: Hughes & Kettner TUBE 50
    Bass amp: Peavey Combo 115
    Drums: TAMA Swingstar
    Mixer: Mackie 1604
    Mics: assorted Rode, AKG, Shure
    Monitors: Yamaha NS10
    Audio interface: a domestic 8-channel unit
    Software: Nuendo and assorted plugins, all pirated off torrents
    In my own way, I’d scraped together the bare minimum gear.

    Sometime around fall, I was washing my hair at the sink, head full of suds, when someone walked into the practice room.
    “Who’s there?”
    “I live upstairs!”
    “What’s going on?”
    “It’s so goddamn loud I can’t live like this!”
    My eyes were stinging from the suds, so I did a quick rinse of just my face and kept talking.
    He said he couldn’t take it anymore.
    I asked what should we do, how loud is it exactly — he said it rattled his brain.
    So I told him, go play the drums yourself, I’ll go up and listen.
    It rattled my brain too.
    Still, I didn’t think it was that loud and figured he was overreacting — then the cops showed up, then the landlord showed up.
    After weeks of back-and-forth, we finally worked out a deal: only when upstairs was empty, before 9pm, that kind of thing, and barely kept the place running.
    Once again, it taught me exactly why people sink tens of millions of won into building a studio.

    All kinds of punks drifted in and out of the practice room. Recording or no recording, just having a hangout spot near Hongdae was enough — people would wander in on a whim, or crash out on the floor whenever they’d been drinking and had nowhere else to go.
    One day I came in late and found something like twenty people asleep in the place, with no owner even home.

    Bangsori brought in a kitten once, and it was so cute I told him to just leave it with me — so he said, take good care of him then, and actually left it behind. It had odd eyes and turned out to be male, so I named him Bbowi, and the two of us became inseparable.
    We were recording Couch once, and Sharon asked if she was hearing a cat somewhere in the middle of the song. We listened together and weren’t sure — it kind of sounded like it, maybe…
    I fired up the computer, muted the guitar, bass, and drums, and soloed just the gang-vocal channel — and there was Bbowi’s voice, meowing away, yaoooong yaoooong, hahaha. He must have crawled underneath the booth during the gang-vocal take, gotten stuck, and meowed his way straight into the recording.
    Some time later, on a rainy day, Changrae rescued a little orange kitten he found shivering under a car in the rain and brought her to the practice room. She was female, and to rhyme with Bbowi we named her Bbojji. The two of them became a couple.
    A year or two later, Bbojji’s belly started swelling. Oh my god — she was pregnant. Bbojji went into special care and got to enjoy the luxury of wet food.
    Late one night, alone in the studio, Bbojji was struggling next to the TV, glancing over at me every so often and meowing. Guess they’re coming, I thought, guess they’re coming.
    Pop, pop, pop — the kittens came out one by one, every 5 to 10 minutes. Five of them, though sadly two came out already dead.
    The kittens grew fast and were constantly turning the practice room into chaos. One day the landlord asked me if I was keeping cats. I said yes, and he told me the entire building reeked of cat piss.
    He told me to get rid of the cats. I said I couldn’t do that, so he told me to move out. I couldn’t do that either. After a lot of back and forth, it settled into: I’d rehome the kittens, keep Bbowi and Bbojji, and promise to manage things properly from then on.
    Since I can’t smell anything, and Bongguk lived there too so maybe his nose had just gone numb to it, either way we tracked down where the smell was actually coming from — the floor of the recording booth. Since I’d built the booth on top of a tire foundation, there was about 20cm of empty space underneath it, and it turned out the kittens couldn’t share their parents’ litter box, so they’d been crawling down there and pissing and shitting everywhere. Disaster. How was I even supposed to clean that. No idea — I just dumped every chemical I had, Febreze, bleach, all of it, down there and sealed the whole area off with sponge and blankets.
    I figured whoever eventually demolished that practice room someday was in for quite an experience. Hahaha.

  • One Take

    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.