Interview - Imugi speaks with Mark Derricutt - November 2020

By: Mark Derricutt

Revealing his electronic/synth-pop loving alter ego - Mark Derricutt spoke to Auckland duo Imugi about their new release Dragonfruit, discovering music, and their upcoming December shows at Meow and The Tuning Fork.

Yery Cho: Thank you for going through all this.

Carl Ruwhiu: So I cannot apologise enough, man. I'm so p****d off. I don't know why the microphone on my laptop was not working. I tried every option. I restarted my computer. I'm so sorry, but we're here! I had to download zoom on my phone and install it again, I hate my laptop even more now.

In general that's probably a better idea because the microphones on laptops are terrible for recording because they're sitting right next to the fan on the laptop.

Carl Ruwhiu: Sure. That's a really good point.

Mark Derricutt: So as a recording artist you should be aware of this kind of stuff right...

Carl Ruwhiu: Well, that's the thing. Recently we've been recording music at Yery's place and so I've taken all my gear over there and I just came home from work so all I have with me is like one laptop and I didn't anticipate the microphone not working.

I guess that's always the way with music and performances and stuff, things break and go wrong and you just have to deal with it.

Yery Cho: Yeah, you got to roll with it.

Carl Ruwhiu: I'm very familiar with that. Yeah.

So it's great to actually talk to you guys. I was just saying before I'm not overly familiar with the band and your history. I’ve been aware of you for awhile through seeing you playing at Laneway. I don't think I actually managed to catch you guys.

Predominantly I'm more of a heavy rock/ heavy metal/ industrial kind of person with more on the heavier side of electronica and that kind of stuff but I do have a secret love affair of retro synths and eighties melodic, good beats. I've been listening to dragonfruit intermixed with a whole lot of other stuff that I've been listening to over the last couple of days and I'm really liking this album. It's different to what I normally listen to and I think that's actually a good thing to keep a variety of what you're actually listening to for both creativity and just awareness of what's on.

So, how about you guys? Tell me a little bit about the history of the band, where you've come from and who you guys are.

Carl Ruwhiu: Oh, thanks for the compliment. I really appreciate that. I feel like we worked really hard on the album and so I feel it's nice to have it out then to have the reception. So thank you for your kind words.

Yery Cho: Yeah. Thank you so much and thank you for listening. I feel like we both don't really tend to have much expectations when it comes to making music or putting it out. So it's always very heartwarming to hear when people just listen. About the history of us, we were friends first in high school and our friend group kind of gravitated towards each other cause we were all a little bit alienated or outcasted as it happens in high school and we were all music fans, so we all just became friends and all of us were in different rock bands and we were playing instruments and writing angsty songs.

It was a matter of time before me and Karl started writing music together and that's pretty much that. We wrote one song, dropped it on the same day and it just gained a lot more traction than we were expecting because we don't really have any expectations. After that, we just wanted to keep the momentum going. We’ve both grown a lot when it comes to ourselves and our team and our band and the way that we approach music. I feel like it's been a journey and I'm thankful for it.

When you say that you dropped it on that same day, was that like a Soundcloud upload or?

Carl Ruwhiu: Yeah.

So you're definitely in the new age of just Soundcloud. Just write something, publish it straight away and just see if it works or it doesn't work - what kind of response do you get now? Was it just friends or were strangers picking it up?

Carl Ruwhiu: Yeah, well, first, like when Yery and I first started making music, it was actually one of our friends at school suggested that we should make music together and I'd been working on a few beats and Yery had been singing in a band. So when we actually got together around that time, we were such music fans. I felt like the way that we were discovering music was always like Soundcloud and Bandcamp and Limewire growing up and that kind of stuff, I feel like it was always the easiest way to find music.

I feel like we were finding these kinds of underground albums that weren't really well known, but we were getting really into them and we would start sending back and forth between friends of these odd albums and weird underground music that we would find. I feel it was like this online community that we wanted to be a part of, you know? It was like, we wanted to create something that someone would have the same experience with, that someone would unearth on the internet and be like, wow, this is actually really good. We wanted to put the time and effort into really crafting something that someone would appreciate it, whoever it would be.

Yery Cho: Yeah. Cause I feel like, we were raised by the internet. We grew up on the internet and the internet is all about these very niche communities. I think having been fans of such random, little niche things it's yeah, I think we just wanted to have this mindset of like, even if one person finds us completely randomly, as long as they really enjoy it, that's all that really matters.

In that regards, I don't really see much has really changed since I started getting into music. When I was growing up, it was pre internet, so the internet wasn't generally available, but we had bulletin boards which were just purely text-based and actually dial up on the dial up phone to a local bulletin board.

Yery Cho: I remember that. Yeah. Dial up. Oh my god!

There was like the New Zealand music forums and stuff and a lot of those people I still talk to now.

Yery Cho: I love that. Yeah.

We were trading tapes of different bands and a lot of that was like the metal, the industrial goth and dark wave and all this kind of stuff. Then that also translated to getting VHS video tapes sent over from overseas and stuff and finding all other different kinds of bands.

Then there was Napster and then all of that kind of movement. So it's not really changed too much I find, the immediacy has, and like now I find with Bandcamp, it's like every two or three days there's another 200-300 rock bands that I've heard that have probably like five followers and I just absolutely adore their music.

Yery Cho: Exactly. Exactly.

Sometimes it feels like there's too much there.

Yery Cho: It can be quite easy to get swept under that wave of content.

Which is the reason I actually really liked your album as well. It was different to a lot of the stuff that I've been digging into over lockdown and it was just quite fresh. Which song was it that I really liked? The "why you always acting like a fool"?

Yery Cho: Oh really? Thank you.

The one with the really cool baseline? Possibly the track before it. Yes. But those two tracks, I think have a bit more of a hip hop kind of feel to it, and I think it's Somebody Else, that’s got the really cool baseline and a bit of a bass solo.

Looking at your videos, you're mostly at a laptop with a controller and not a real bass. So, Is that a real bass on the record there? Or is that patches?

Carl Ruwhiu: Nice. That's real bass. Yeah. I don't know. It's funny like, it's weird to be put on this category of electronic music. I don't know, there's this time in our lives where, I don't know. I feel like, what am I trying to say here? There's a point in my music, fandom over artists where I realised there wasn't a huge difference between genres and everyone was kind of hitting towards this one man band type thing. I was getting into Tame Impala and stuff and thinking that they were a full band, then when I found out that it was only one person creating it, I realised that you don't have to only make purely electronic music if you're using a laptop, you know?

So I feel like I would sample instruments in the same way that I would like sample something else to make a beat out of. I would play around on bass and guitar and stuff and then in the computer on the DAW I'd splice it up and play around with sequencing in that way. So, yeah, it is a real bass and I feel like there are lots of little small recordings in the album that we recorded live but got manipulated to a point where they sounded like they're electronic.

That was part of what we wanted to craft was something that kind of blurred the lines and then was kind of like, what am I hearing?

You know, is it electronic? I don't know. We wanted to have this layered kind of depth to the production .

You've got two dates coming up in December for the album release shows, one down in Wellington at Meow, and in Auckland on the 10th at The Tuning Fork, is it just the two of you performing those live shows or are you getting like a bit of a band to actually play some of those bass lines live?

What can we expect from a live show?

Yery Cho: You can expect an experience.

Carl Ruwhiu: I'm thinking about playing bass for a couple of songs and I would've been jamming so we're going to have a drummer at both of our shows and so it'd be like a little three piece and it's gonna be fun. I'm really looking forward to it. We're gonna have some dope support acts that we're going to announce soon and we're going to have some friends coming through to perform songs with us, it’s going to be a really good time and I'm really looking forward to it. .

Where can we currently download or buy the album? I'm assuming Bandcamp? Is it available on Spotify and streaming sites?

Yery Cho: So it's up on all streaming services. So Apple Music, Spotify, Deezer, all that. We are uploading to Bandcamp today, actually. We hadn't had that set up before, but yeah, it will be on Bandcamp.

What response have you had to the album so far?

Yery Cho: It's been really lovely, just because we haven't released a project since 2017 I believe, so it's been a bit of a journey to get all this music out, just because we've been sitting on it for a while. It’s been such a relieving and cathartic process to be able to do so independently and such a big privilege as well, to be able to have access to things like funding so that we can have the option to assemble our own team of amazing creative friends.

It's just weird to see how big this project has gotten. That's kind of transcended just me and Karl and turned into this thing with all these other people. The response has been really lovely. All our friends have always been so supportive and people that have been following us since we first started out in like 2016, 2017, 2015, even.

So, yeah, it's been really lovely and it just makes our hearts feel so full and I'm really proud of us and proud of all our friends and thankful that they wanted to work on this with us.

So you mentioned that first release, that was the Vacasian, wasn't it? I remember reading one of the reviews or interviews, and you were talking about how as an Asian person who grew up here, you've never been home. I guess with lockdown you were kind of even locked down even further, so now that we're kind of back to freedom are you looking to explore and check out some of those roots at all? Once we can, again.

Yery Cho: Yeah. I don't know. It's buzzy. It's like growing up, because we grew up on the shore, which is an interesting place to grow up as a migrant person of colour or just any minority. Yeah, it's a very interesting place. It's just like feeling super alienated growing up, just because there's a big lack of representation and there's a big gap in the market for people that look like me, also just people of colour, a woman of colour in general.

So now I'm kind of at a point where like, we've been lucky enough to have been welcomed into such a beautiful community of musicians in Auckland and made to feel so welcome and made to feel so like, like we're allowed to exist here as we are, but I don't know, post lockdown, it’s nice to be able to see our friends. It's nice to be able to go out again to these community shows. I think one day I would like to go back to Korea just because I've never been.

I feel like that will be an interesting experience because it's like the homeland and there's probably a lot there to unpack, but I don't know, the society is so different there.

I would be a little bit scared, I would never want to live in Korea just because I feel like the side of the society that is more like conservative. It kind of scares me because it's not very welcoming or open to people like me.

It's interesting. It's complex. It's complicated.

Especially identity politics.

You could combine it with a tour and take the band over there and do some performances?

Yery Cho: That would be awesome. That would be so cool. I'd love to see what the underground music scene is like in Korea.

Carl Ruwhiu: Yeah. Hell yeah.

Yery Cho: Hell yeah.

How much of this album was recorded during the current lockdown or was it all recorded beforehand?

Carl Ruwhiu: Actually pre lockdown.Yeah.

Right, so what's the normal recording process like? Is it all just studio on the DAW and then...

Carl Ruwhiu: A little bit different every time, especially with the dragonfruit project. I feel like every song kind of came together in a different way, but, usually it starts on the computer with like a small little loop or something that I'll come up with and then I'll send it over to Yery.

At the same time, a lot of the time, Yery will play some chords on her keyboard or something, or like record some guitar loops and send that through, or just have like vocal melody ideas. So I feel like we'll come together in a different way, but I guess I lot of the time we'll start with slicing up drums in a way to start tracks really regularly, I guess, because I've always kind of approached music with a hip hop mindset, you know?

So I feel like I always tend to start like with slicing drum samples then kind of try to get some strange synth sounds and that's usually how an Imugi song starts. Yeah. Strange synth sound, spliced up drum sample, and a melodic bass line that contrasts nicely with the vocal melody.

Yery Cho: A fat bass line, yeah.

What about lyrically? What's your approach for writing lyrics and the actual song process from that side?

Yery Cho: I feel like we've learned how to craft songs better and better the longer that we've been doing it. But I feel like at the base of it, it just kind of comes down to like, the beat first and then whatever emotion or memory that that evokes, we just kind of tap into that frequency and then whatever comes up, comes up.

Like sometimes I’ll have a bank in my head or in my notebook of things that I've written, whether it be poetry or just random one, two liners. So if that kind of feels right then we'll get those ideas and craft it to fit into the song. But yeah, a lot of crafting, but also sometimes it's just a stream of consciousness and then we just kind of go back and just section things out and do that.

Well, it's been great to talk to you guys today.

Yery Cho: Thank you so much for having us.

I look forward to hopefully checking you out at The Tuning Fork?

Yery Cho: Yeah, it'd be cool to see you there. Yeah. And I know that we may be a dream pop band, but that doesn't mean you can't mosh and fight people to our music.

I think post lockdown I'm enjoying more just like going places and just being amongst people again.

Yery Cho: Just being

At a rock show where there's like aggression everywhere or just a serene kind of dreamy pop tune in the corner that you can sway and dance to, and just kind of relax and groove too.

I think it's a different music for different times and different moods. So it's good to be open to different sounds and styles and appreciate good music, no matter what format it comes in.

Yery Cho: Thank you so much.

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