Seoul-based composer and songwriter Ian Chung has teamed up with Dublin singer Martello on his new single, Falling For You. We asked Ian the BIG questions . . .
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Ian has previously composed a tribute to the late Ryuichi Sakamoto and collaborated with Ukrainian band MBreeze with a project born during the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
He spent a formative part of his adolescence in Dublin, a city he credits with opening him up as an artist, and to which he returns whenever life allows.
“Dublin shaped me as an artist in ways that my own country, at the time, didn’t easily allow,” Ian says.
“When I began writing Falling For You, a dream pop and shoegaze-inflected song built on warm synthesizer pads and chorus-drenched guitar, I knew I needed a Dublin voice to complete it. Martello’s was the one.”
Martello
He adds, “There’s a certain symmetry to it that felt almost inevitable: shoegaze as a genre was pioneered by My Bloody Valentine, a band formed in Dublin. And this music was made by a Korean composer whose artistic identity was shaped by that same city, brought to life through one of its most promising new voices.”
Tell us three things about yourself . . .
I’m a Korean composer currently living in Seoul, absolutely nothing to do with BTS – much to my disappointment – though at this point, I’ve been asked enough times that I should probably just put it in my bio. I spent my teenage years in Dublin, where I survived on Tayto and Club Milk in my lunchbox, answered “howya” with “grand, thanks,” and thought that was just how the world worked. And my name Ian was given to me by my lovely Irish uncle Charlie, which, in hindsight, explains everything.
How would you describe your music?
Quiet, but not small. I work in the space between what’s felt and what’s said out loud, music that sits just beneath the surface, like a memory you’re not sure you should revisit. What I’m really after, I think, is empathy. Music that makes someone feel less alone in whatever they’re carrying. A shoulder to lean on. Something that says: I know.
Who are your musical inspirations?
Damien Rice taught me that a song could be a confession. My Bloody Valentine showed me that noise could be tender. Then somewhere along the way, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Ólafur Arnalds, and Sufjan Stevens in his own way, made me understand that structure and emotion were never opposites to begin with. That you could build something with the precision of architecture and still leave people undone. Ed Sheeran was a different kind of lesson: that a song doesn’t have to protect itself, that meaning it completely is enough. And then there’s Mark Feehily, which might seem like an odd inspiration for a composer. But every time he performs, even the same song, there’s something new in it. A phrase bent differently, a note that lands somewhere unexpected. He never quite sings it the same way twice. That changed the way I listen. It made me realise there’s a difference between deviation and delinquency. That the most beautiful things sometimes happen just outside the line.
What was the first gig you ever went to?
Green Day in Sydney. I was very young and I remember almost nothing about the setlist except that when 21 Guns came on, I sang every word at the top of my lungs. I’m not sure I even knew what the song was about at the time. I just knew it felt enormous. That’s probably the first time I understood what a room full of people feeling the same thing at the same moment could do to you. It also confirmed that I should never sing in public.
What was the first record you ever bought?
Two, actually, bought on the same day, with my own money for the first time. The Beatles 1 and a special edition of a Westlife album released for the Asian market, featuring BoA, who was at the time the pop star of Asia. In the West back then, boys weren’t really supposed to listen to boyband music. But in Asia, Westlife arrived not as a boyband but as a cultural phenomenon, the way BTS did a generation later. Pure pop that crossed every boundary. In Korea, they were basically curriculum. My English teacher used My Love as a listening exercise, fill in the blanks, simple grammar, every word perfectly enunciated. An entire generation of Korean millennials was essentially brainwashed by Westlife in the name of education. So when I finally saved up to buy music myself, one of them was inevitable. The Beatles, I chose. Westlife chose me, and honestly, I’ve never tried to resist.
What’s your favourite song right now?
Bohemian Rhapsody, which I hadn’t listened to in years and then suddenly couldn’t stop. It was on my Leaving Cert music curriculum when I was at secondary school in Dublin, so for a long time it felt more like homework than a song. But coming back to it now, I hear something I completely missed then: the insane dynamics of it, the way it refuses to be one thing. It’s a pop song and an opera and a hard rock anthem and somehow none of those things at the same time. I think I needed to grow into it. Either that, or I’ve finally run out of new music to discover.
Favourite lyric of all time?
“People hearing without listening/people writing songs that voices never share/and no one dared disturb the sound of silence” – Simon and Garfunkel.
What stays with me is that it was written sixty years ago and nothing about it has aged. The problem it’s describing, the gap between sound and meaning, between being heard and being understood, is exactly the same now. Maybe worse. I think about those lines a lot when I’m writing. Not as a warning, exactly. More as a reason to keep going.
If you could only listen to one song for the rest of your life, what would it be?
That might be the most horrifying question I’ve ever been asked. But if that day ever comes, and I hope it doesn’t, I think I’d put Liszt’s Consolation No. 3 on repeat and make my peace with it. There’s something in that piece that doesn’t ask anything of you. It just sits beside you. I think that’s what I’d need, in the end.
Where can people find your music/more information?
All my music is available on Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube Music. My latest single Falling For You featuring Martello is out now.
Alan Corr