As with most indie bands, things were never planned to a T for electro-rock duo Love X Stereo.
Asked about the meaning behind the band’s name in an interview last week, the two members looked at each other and laughed.
“Bands hate being asked that question,” member Toby Hwang said before adding that it had been a mixture of happenstance and compulsion.
“I’m a big fan of The Cardigans,” said Hwang, seated on a rickety chair in the duo’s basement studio in northern Seoul.
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| Electro-rock band Love X Stereo at the band’s studio in Eunpyeong-gu, Seoul (Yoon Byung-chan/The Korea Herald) |
“We had been playing ‘Lovefall’ on YouTube when we were trying to come up with a good name,” he said, referring to the Swedish rock band’s hit single. “And we thought it would be nice to have the word ‘love’ in there.”
The second part of the band’s name came from “Stereo City,” said Hwang, the name of a group he had been part of back when he first started out in music.
“Then we decided to add the X. We figured it could mean something like paths crossing,” said frontwoman Annie Ko, gesturing to a black banner on the wall emblazoned with the band’s name.
The rest of the cramped, distinctly indie punk-style studio was plastered with stickers from international music festivals — including the 2014 Music Matters in Singapore and the 2015 Canada Music Week — where the quickly rising band has played over the past few years.
Comprised of members Hwang and Ko, Love X Stereo describes itself as an electro-rock-synth-punk band based in Seoul. The duo, whose Instagram profile reads, “We sound nothing like Gangnam Style,” has in recent years been grabbing the ears of a niche group of global listeners with English-language songs like “Fly Over,” performed on numerous overseas tours and festivals.
On Wednesday, the band is set to play at this year’s South by South West music festival in Austin, Texas, marking their second appearance at the celebrated event.
“It was a lot of fun,” said Hwang on the band’s last visit there in 2014. “We became friends with a lot of international fans who still contact us and offer us gigs from time to time.”
Global fans are quick to see past Love X Stereo’s psychedelic, moody style and pick up on a wide range of influences, Hwang said. Though the band is best known for its soft electronic vibes — like in the track “Hide and Seek,” featured in Korean TV series “Cheese in the Trap” — the duo draws heavily from ’90s rock bands like Green Day and Nirvana, they said.
“The base of our sound is punk,” said Hwang, reeling off names of bands.
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| Electro-rock band Love X Stereo at the band’s studio in Eunpyeong-gu, Seoul (Yoon Byung-chan/The Korea Herald) |
Love X Stereo itself came into existence by chance. Guitarist-bassist-producer Hwang and singer-keyboardist Ko were pursuing their own separate goals when their tracks happened to converge around 2004.
Hwang was one of the pioneering members of the Hongdae indie scene back in its nascent days in the late 1990s, rubbing shoulders with the country’s first generation of angst-ridden punk bands like Crying Nut and No Brain.
“But I was planning to leave Korea then,” said Toby. “I have a friend in Canada who makes movies, and he asked me to help with the music side of things.”
He was set to take off when a TV producer friend of his convinced him to take another shot in the Korean music industry.
“I thought, ‘this time, I’ll go completely commercial,’” said Hwang. The early 2000s in Korea was a time when coed pop-rock bands like Cherry Filter and Rumble Fish were all the rage, recalled Hwang. “So that’s the direction we decided to go.”
Hwang and his team then held auditions for female vocalists, which is how they came across Ko, who at the time was training to become a singer.
“I figured I would write the songs, and (Annie) would come and sing. And that would be the end of that,” said Hwang. What he suspected would be a relationship that was strictly about profitable business, however, soon evolved into a creative partnership, allowing the band to veer away from the commercial into the alternative.
Now, the duo is a much in-sync songwriting team, Hwang and Ko say, in terms of both inspiration and efficiency. Ko gives feedback on raw tunes that Hwang comes up with, while he comments on lyrics that Ko writes.
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| Electro-rock band Love X Stereo at the band’s studio in Eunpyeong-gu, Seoul (Yoon Byung-chan/The Korea Herald) |
“I didn’t just want to sing,” said Ko. “I wanted to make music together. I could tell (Toby) thought I wouldn’t last long, though,” she recollected, laughing.
Ko herself had trodden a convoluted path into the music scene. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in physics from Ewha Womans University, she went on to study astrophysics at the prestigious Seoul National University. Fluent in English from having grown up in Los Angeles, Ko also worked at the English-language publishing house Seoul Selection for seven years –- all the while pursuing music on the side.
“But I dropped everything else when we went on our U.S. tour in 2013,” Ko said.
Many things might have happened by chance for the band, but their global expansion was a result of strategic planning, they explained. Rather than jumping blindly into the American music scene, the duo did thorough research on what kind of clubs would be interested in Love X Stereo’s sound.
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| Electro-rock band Love X Stereo at the band’s studio in Eunpyeong-gu, Seoul (Yoon Byung-chan/The Korea Herald) |
“We looked into each club’s style and sent out demos to the ones we felt would respond,” said Ko. “We reached out to small radio stations and booked shows.”
This kind of strategic planning allowed Hwang and Ko to successfully finish their 46-day tour in the U.S. in 2013, visiting eight cities and playing at 22 shows. Since then, the band’s songs have been picked up for licensing in several overseas TV shows.
Love X Stereo considers itself independent from, though influenced by, the global rise of K-pop.
“The K-pop boom has definitely helped shed light on Korean indie bands as well,” said Hwang. And while being Korean may have shaped the band’s music to stand out from other teams around the world, the duo does not consider themselves particularly bound to nationality, they say.
“Ultimately,” Hwang said, “our goal is to become a global band.”
Meanwhile, the band is waiting for the release of its next LP, “We Love We Leave, Part 2” — a sequel to the 2015 album “We Love We Leave, Part 1,” released by Universal Music Group — which will focus on the theme of “leaving” and feature “more straightforward, less pretty” sounds, the band said.
By Rumy Doo (doo@heraldcorp.com)
This is the eighth article in a series that explores the driving forces behind hallyu and the global rise of Korean pop culture. — Ed.
