Album Production (1)

“Come on in, come on in.”

This was an entirely different place from the one Myeongjeon had visited before. Unlike the fairly tidy practice room, this space was steeped in the signs of everyday life. The music coming from inside stopped for a moment, and someone poked their head out. It was Tailored’s drummer.

“What brings you here? I thought you weren’t coming today.”

“Ah, I wanted to talk a little about Suyeon’s album project today.”

The drummer nodded and slipped back inside. Cheoryeon smiled and indicated a seat at a table along one side of the room. Myeongjeon lowered himself onto a leather chair so worn that it was impossible to guess how many people had sat in it. The cushion had long since stopped serving its purpose.

“These are our band members’ individual practice rooms now. We used to open up another floor here and have a recording room and a group practice room too, but we don’t do that anymore. It costs a lot of money, and replacing the equipment is difficult.”

Once Myeongjeon sat down, Cheoryeon pulled a pile of things from the bookshelf. Tailored’s albums and notebooks, drawings, and various other odds and ends. Some looked like they had been made on a word processor, while others had clearly been handwritten. There were messily drawn scribbles, as well as sketches that gave only the roughest explanation of the album art.

“This is what we used when we were making our third album. Computer art was really popular back then.”

At Cheoryeon’s words, Myeongjeon looked at the third album Cheoryeon had handed him. It had exactly that sort of feel: strange computer art of the kind that had just begun appearing at the end of the century in the 1990s. That sort of thing really had been popular back then.

“How did you usually make something like this?”...