西洋오랑캐

On Sunday evening, Jinhui and I traveled to Seoul to witness the 8th annual Seoul Drum Festival. We had gone together last year, and had enjoyed ourselves greatly. We were therefore looking forward to seeing it again. So after a quick dinner at Lotteria, we hopped on a bus and head for Seoul.

Last year, the event was held on the grounds of City Hall, which was pretty decent. This year the event was held at Kyunghui Palace (경희궁), and I for one was not please with the change. The seating at Kyunghui Palace wasn’t as awesome, and in addition the stage seemed to be much lower than the stage from the year before. This made things like seeing what was happening or taking photographs a little bit difficult.

Anyhow, my gripes about venue changes aside, we had an awesome time. Jinhui and I had some beers and saw six percussion groups (or teams as they were refered to as in Korean). Now in the style of my rock show reports of old, I’ll give you a rundown of exactly what it was that we saw.

First up was a group called New Dimension from Belgium. New Dimension were one of those percussion groups that rocked out on trash cans and chairs as opposed to actual drums. While they put on a decent show, I’m kind of over the trash as a percussion instrument gimmic…I saw STOMP and Skeleton Key do the same kind of junk like 10 plus years ago. Do we really still need to be doing to garbage can thing? Anyhow New Dimension, if you want to rock out on trash at least rock out on some unique trash that others haven’t already done to death. Oh and one other thing, while I was watching this group perform, I couldn’t help but wonder if they brought their trash cans and chairs with them or if they picked them up when they got here.

Following New Dimension was the group Jamstick from Korea. Jamstick rocked out on all sorts of drums, xylophones, and at one point crash helmets. They also had a keyboardist that accompanied their drumming. I kind of liked Jamstick mainly due to the fact that they made outstanding use of xylophones and / or glockenspiels, both of which are excellent instruments.

Unfortunately Jamstick fell into the trap so many Korean musicians (indie rock bands, pop stars, rappers) seem prone to fall into: incredibly longwinded explanations between songs. Maybe this is because I grew up with anti-showmen like Kurt Cobain and that dude from Stone Temple Pilots, but I find these verbose monologues to be tedious and pretty much ruin the flow of the entire set. But enough ranting, they played “Devil In A Blue Dress” as a marching band so they were pretty alright in my book.

Next up was the band, Safara, from Senegal. These dudes (and ladies) were awesome in all kinds of ways. For starters everyone in the group was sporting face paint and robes, which made them look way more awesome then guys that took the stage in black t-shirts. Secondly they had these two ladies who busted out the most insane dance moves the entire time. These women were rocking the kind of moves you’d see in a film featuring “witchdoctors,” and it was totally awesome! And as a quick aside, one of the dancing women from Senegal was white, which at first struck me as odd, but in reality isn’t any weirder than Seo Taiji’s white drummer…or me for that matter. Safara were also the only group of the evening to feature singing which was pretty awesome. But the thing that was the most awesome about Safara was the fact that they had the most phallic looking instrument I’ve ever seen in my life. Awesome!

Following Safara was a Korean group known as Drumcat. Drumcat were pretty decent, but they probably would have been better if I weren’t a married man that had to feign complete and utter disinterest in the fact that Drumcat consisted of six sexy ladies in tight pants pounding drums and rocking out. And oh how they rocked out! I mean they did a cover of “Du Hast” for crying out loud (here by cover I mean that the song played over the PA and the ladies smashed big ass drums during it)…and they had pyro! If I had to complain about something I guess it would have to be the fact that they all had really bad 1970’s shag haircuts. Yet even with that massive disadvantage they still managed to look hot.

Next up was the Korean group 하타 (Hata). These people took traditional Korean percussion instruments (including that huge ass drum) and mixed them with silver jumpsuits and big plastic hazardous waste drums. I guess they were pretty ok, if only for the silver jumpsuits and the use of that huge drum (see the photo at right). As a quick aside, when they hit that thing you can feel it in your guts…it’s that deep! Anyhow, like New Dimension, I found their choice in garbage to hit kind of boring. Dudes, there’s other garbage in the world!

The final group of the evening was 풍장21 (Poongjang 21). v 풍장21 was your standard issue 농악 (nogak…aka farmer’s music) group. I’ve seen this kind of group so many times in my three plus years of living here that I’m kind of bored of it. I mean the first time I saw this kind of band I thought they were awesome, and I still think that it is awesome, but it’s got to be totally awesome for me to get into it. These guy were alright, but they weren’t awesome to the point that I wanted to get up and do some ass-shaking dance moves. However for some reason the only thing I am able to take decent pictures of is 농악, so of the pictures I took that evening, 70% of the good ones were of this group.

Anyhow with the drumming done for the evening, we got on the bus and headed home again. It was a nice event, even if we were stuck sitting behind some dirty hippies.

Click here for photos (if you care about crap like that).