Han Mun-hwi Q&A

Reception status at 3 AM

The air inside a recording booth was always a little dead. Je-ha first learned that fact at sixteen. Soundproofing was, after all, about keeping sound from escaping; trapped sound, unable to leave, seeped into the walls and died. The better the booth, the more so. The A room of this studio, which had supposedly cost three billion won, felt like a coffin. "One more, please." The engineer said it from behind the glass. His voice carried fatigue, but Je-ha could see him trying not to show it. It was three in the morning, and they had been repeating the same sixteen bars forty-one times. Je-ha adjusted his headphones. The backing track came in: four bars of piano, strings layered over, and his cue arrived. He sang. Perfectly. Pitch, rhythm, diction—all exact. He rode the emotional curve the producer demanded up and down, precisely. The forty-second take was indistinguishable from the forty-first; the forty-first from the first. No one behind the glass said anything. "…Was that okay?" Je-ha asked. "Perfect," the engineer said. Je-ha took off his headphones. The word "perfect" had followed him for eleven years, and never once had it felt like praise. --- Outside the booth, Min-seok was sprawled on the sofa. He had his legs stretched under the console and his arms crossed, eyes closed but not asleep. Since he was sixteen, Min-seok had pretended to sleep in front of Je-ha. It meant he was pissed. "You heard it?" Je-ha asked. "I heard it." "How was it?" Min-seok opened his eyes. He stared at the ceiling for a long moment, then sat up. "Mr. Yoon Je-ha, I enjoyed the new song. You sing well." "Min-seok." "No, really. You sing well. You've always sung well." Min-seok picked up a cigarette pack from the console, then put it back down when he remembered they were indoors. "But you weren't good before—when you were seventeen. Pitchy, slurred diction, your voice went in the third verse. I liked that better." Je-ha said nothing. "Sorry. That was harsh." "No." Je-ha filled a paper cup with water from the dispenser. "You're not wrong." "Je-ha." "Let's stop for today." Min-seok opened his mouth as if to say more, then swallowed. The room was so quiet the swallow sounded audible. --- In the parking lot, Min-seok handed him the car keys. Je-ha had been driving alone lately. The agency had opposed it—what if he got into an accident, what if a photo leaked—but driving alone was the first thing Je-ha insisted on. An hour a day when no one watched him. "Meeting at eleven tomorrow. CEO Oh will be there." "Okay." "Je-ha." "Yeah." Min-seok hesitated. "About the album. Couldn't we just… make it within the company? They'll attach a good producer. That's what I'm saying. There's no rule saying you have to write all twelve songs." "Then why would I do it?" "To sell it." Je-ha looked at Min-seok. Min-seok didn't avert his eyes. "Hey, I've been by your side for eleven years. I want to sell too. Is that bad? Is it a crime to want to make an album that sells a million copies?" "It's not." "Then why are you looking at me like that?" "I wasn't." Je-ha opened the car door. "Go inside and sleep." --- The riverside highway was empty. Je-ha turned the audio on. It was a habit. When he drove alone at dawn he always put on the radio—not because he needed music but because he needed a voice. Anybody's voice. A voice that wasn't talking to him. 〈…And now the last song of the night. The listener who sent this said they bought this album ten years ago and still have it. But it's out of print now—the distributor's gone, the label's gone. So we can't play it on streaming. No LPs or CDs left. This is unusual: the listener actually sent us the CD. I'm going to play the physical disc that's sitting in the studio. If this causes a broadcast incident, it's on me.〉 The DJ laughed. 〈Moon I-re, 1st album (Unknown), third track.〉 The guitar came in. At first Je-ha thought it was just badly tuned. The sixth string was a half-step flat. Not a drop-D—just a tad low. Like a mistake. By the next bar he knew it wasn't a mistake. The voice entered. Not loud. Too close to the mic; you could hear breath. It was probably recorded at home. A low refrigerator-like hum ran under it, the kind a pro would have cleaned up. They hadn't. The woman couldn't sing well. Je-ha realized that on the first phrase. The range was narrow, the throat tightened on high notes, there was almost no vibrato. Diction blurred. After about thirty seconds he noticed he was judging the song—an instinct eleven years had ingrained. Good or bad, sellable or not. And at around one minute forty, that instinct stopped. The song went nowhere. There was no chorus. To be precise, where the chorus should have come the woman stopped singing and left only the guitar—eight bars of nothing. Then, very quietly, almost spoken, she uttered a sentence. It wasn't a sung line. It had no pitch. Je-ha took his foot off the gas. The car slowed. No one was behind him. He pulled onto the shoulder, switched on the hazard lights, and sat there with the engine still running. The track ended at 3:12. It didn't fade out. The last guitar chord rang, the woman let out a small laugh—like a "pik"—and the recording cut. 〈…Wow.〉 the DJ said. 〈This is really… the staff's signaling me there's no time, but I'm going to say one thing. Why did this sell 500 copies? Why? Moon I-re, if you're listening, contact us. I waited ten years for this.〉 Je-ha sat with the hazard lights on for another fifteen minutes. His own album had twelve tracks. Every one had a chorus. Every one clocked between 3:20 and 3:50. All recorded by pros, all noise-free, all perfect. He hadn't pulled over for a single one of them. --- It took four days to find the album. At first Je-ha thought it would be easy. He was Yoon Je-ha. One phone call solved a lot. It didn't. There was no digital file. The distributor had folded in 2019 and the contracts had been left in limbo; to redistribute would require the original rights holder's consent, and no one knew who that was. The label had disappeared in 2018. The CEO was unreachable. Two used CDs were on the market: one priced at 220,000 won, the other had no reply from the seller for three days. Min-seok ended up buying the 220,000-won copy. "If it's a scam, you're paying me back," Min-seok said, tossing the package. The case was cracked. The insert was nothing more than two folded A4 sheets. The print quality was poor. The lyrics were handwritten and the scans were blurred; a few words were unreadable. There were credits on the back. > Lyrics·Composed·Arranged·Guitar·Vocal — Moon I-re > Drums — Jung Gyeo-ul > Mixing — Moon I-re > Mastering — Moon I-re > Recording — Seogyodong 302 Everything was solo. Even the mastering was done by the same person. Je-ha read that line three times. No one masters their own records. It must have been because she had no money. And the sound on the radio had been the result. He left the CD in the car and listened to nothing else for a week. On the eighth track the woman flubbed the lyrics—she missed an entire phrase and came back half a beat late. She didn't erase it. On an eleven-track album there were about ten moments like that. Je-ha envied it like hell. --- "Yoon Je-ha." Oh Sang-heon, the CEO, stood by the meeting room window. He never sat down to talk. "About the album." "Yes." "Let's change producers." Je-ha looked up. "Producer Kim said he can't work with you. He says he doesn't know what you want. You scrapped all twelve songs, didn't you? That's already the third time." "I—" "Yoon Je-ha." Director Oh turned. His face wasn't angry. Director Oh had never shown anger. That was the problem. "Tell me in one sentence what you want to do." Je-ha opened his mouth. Nothing came out. Director Oh nodded, as if he understood. As if he felt sorry. "Remember when you were nineteen? When you asked me to let the band continue? What did I say back then?" "…You said to hang on for three years." "Right. Three years. But it's been eleven." Director Oh smiled. "I'm not going to apologize. Look at what you've become in those eleven years. But Je-ha, I can tell you one thing. It's not the producer or the company that keeps you from making things." "Then what is it?" "It's that you have nothing to say." The meeting room fell silent. "If you have something to say, songs come out. Thirty songs, a hundred songs—songs come out. When you were seventeen you wrote twelve songs a month. Remember? They were all trash, but there were twelve of them." Director Oh picked up some papers. "I don't hate you. I pity you. Because I made you this way." He left the room. Je-ha stayed seated for a long time. --- It took ten more days to find her. Moon I-re didn't exist. Or rather, she hadn't existed online since 2021. Her last social post was from March 2021: one photo, a hand on a guitar neck. No caption. No live dates. No interviews. No wiki page. Her fan cafe had fourteen members and its last post was four years ago. Min-seok had tracked down the drummer's side. "Jung Gyeo-ul. She's working as a dental hygienist in Gangnam now," Min-seok said, handing over the tablet. "Her SNS is alive, but there's nothing about music. All dog photos." "Did you get through?" "Sent a DM. Not read." "…Okay." "But—" Min-seok swiped the screen. "She posted this to her story three weeks ago." It was a photo: a dark corridor, a fluorescent light, a door. The number '302' was on the door. The caption was one line. > Still here Je-ha leaned closer to the screen. "302." "Yeah." "On the back of the CD," Je-ha said. "Recording — Seogyodong 302." Min-seok looked at Je-ha a long time. "Je-ha." "Yeah." "Do you know what you're doing right now?" "No." "This is stalking." "I know." "…" Min-seok set the tablet down. "I couldn't find the exact location. Do you know how many 302s there are in Seogyodong?" Je-ha didn't answer. He was already zooming in on the photo. There was something stuck by the door. A sticker. Half peeled. He knew that sticker. It was the logo of some festival in Hongdae from 2011. He had been sixteen and his band (Wolgwang) had gone on as the fifth act that night. --- The building was down an alley. It was a four-story building with no sign; the first floor was a laundromat, there were water stains on the stairs, and no elevator. Je-ha pulled his cap down, put on a mask, and climbed to the third floor. His heart was pounding—not from the climb. He stood in front of Room 302. There was sound from inside. Not drums. Not guitar. The sound of someone scrolling through synthesizer presets: click-click-click. Someone was looping the same two bars and trying different tones. Two bars repeated. Ten times or so. Then it stopped. And a voice came. Not singing. A mutter; muffled through the wall but edged with annoyance. "…No, that's not it." Je-ha knew that voice. It was the voice that had been on the CD's final track, the tiny voice heard just before the recording cut. Left unedited. He lifted his hand. Just as he was about to knock, another voice sounded from inside—a man's. "I-re. Let's just go with Plan A. Their company will smooth this over by tomorrow morning." "The chorus doesn't stick." "It does. That bit earlier was good." "That earlier part wasn't mine." A pause. "I-re." The man's voice was soft. That made it worse. "You wrote it. What's the point of the credits? The money still leaves." Je-ha lowered his hand. For a very long time there was no sound from inside. Then click, and the preset scrolling started again. Je-ha stood in the hallway listening. The fluorescent light flickered ever so slightly—sixty hertz. He found himself counting the flicker without meaning to. Something he hadn't done since he was seventeen. Click. Click. Click. He took the CD case from his pocket. Cracked. Bought for 220,000 won. With the handwritten insert inside. And he knocked. Three times. The noises stopped. Footsteps approached. They paused beyond the door. The sound of someone peering through the peephole. "…Who is it?" Je-ha lowered his mask. The door did not open. It stayed shut for a long time. Then he heard the latch being undone.

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