Chapter 54
A story written on some wiki. [The number of visitors can hardly be called small, but it would also be inappropriate to call it large]. It was the most fitting sentence for summarizing Club Paradox.
In the Hongdae indie band scene, Paradox served as something like an entrance. As long as someone was in a band, the club accepted them for its open mics, encompassing a wide range of genres and drawing people into the scene.
Next, it divided the people who had been fairly well trained at Paradox into their respective fields and sent them to other clubs. Metal went to MM, for instance, and jazz to River Hall. It sorted people and sent them elsewhere, but if anyone grew tired of the hardcore atmosphere, it held on to them and directed them toward a new genre.
That was how Club Paradox came to serve as a “hometown for everyone.” Even so, there were very few regulars who belonged specifically to “Paradox.” That was because everyone merely stopped by for a while before moving on.
But even Paradox was gradually changing its atmosphere. The biggest change was a sort of rumor that had begun circulating among people at some point.
‘If you go to Paradox at 4:00 p.m. on Saturday, you can see something interesting.’
Most people who heard that dismissed it as nonsense. They said things like, “But Paradox doesn’t even open until 6:00 p.m., so why would you go there at 4:00?”, and, “Is this that Neapolitan horror-story thing?”
But after a few people who had gone began leaving comments like, “Hey, it’s really good. And fun,” and continued visiting Paradox at 4:00 p.m. on Saturdays... people’s curiosity only grew.
And, like lemmings, the number of people visiting Paradox at 4:00 p.m. on Saturdays gradually began to increase. They did not really know what lay at the front; they simply followed whoever was leading.
Still, there was certainly a difference between lemmings and Paradox at 4:00 p.m.
Lemmings died en masse after plunging off a cliff, but at Paradox, one person became two after watching a performance, and after two or three visits, there would be three or four. And the people who increased in number that way were certainly not just one or two.
“Why are there so many people now?”
“I know. Now we have to come ten minutes early if we want to see the kids from the front.”
Before the performance, Ayoon stepped outside the club and complained softly, in a voice that would not carry to those around her. Her friends listened to her grumbling. It had been about a month since the band they and her friends had recently begun stanning, “Group Sound,” started performing at the club.
People who had not shown even the tips of their noses at the first performance because it was far too early a time slot had now gathered in considerable numbers.
And their numbers kept growing.
When Ayoon had come to see Group Sound’s first performance, there had been only a handful of people. There were Ayoon and her friends, who had come while asking, “Is it really that fun?”; one or two elderly people who happened to be there; a couple of drunk college students; and a few people who had come to see why the club was open at that hour.
It was an entirely different scale from the crowd that had gathered for the open mic.
But now?
Quite a lot of people had come to watch the performance even at this hour. The scale was clearly different from the beginning: people who looked as though they had simply dropped by once, a hipster man leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, as if he had stepped straight out of an anime, and even people who had subtly brought alcohol in from outside despite the performers being minors.
More surprising than anything, even to Ayoon, was how diverse the audience was. Unlike during the open mic, when most of the people looked like the sort who listened to rock, the audience now seemed quite varied in both age and the tendencies revealed by their fashion.
Still, Ayoon was grateful that the crowd had not yet grown large enough to fill the club. Or was she supposed to be grateful? Wouldn’t it be better for the band she liked to succeed?
‘But if these kids suddenly become famous, I won’t be able to come see them like this anymore...’
What was the proper attitude for a fan to have? Was it selfish to hope they did well while also wanting to keep seeing them from this close?
What snapped Ayoon out of her considerable inner turmoil was someone’s voice.
“Unnies! What are you doing out here? Aren’t you going in?”
“Gasp!”
With her trendy hime cut, green beret, and jacket, Choi Iseo, the cute-looking bassist, was adorable. Her physique made it a little difficult to call her cute, but even that looked incredibly adorable to Ayoon.
“Gasp... gasp! I-Iseo...”
“Why? Why? Aren’t you going in?”
Iseo casually sidled up to them, while the girls thought they had hit the jackpot. Just as they were wondering whether they could be this lucky and were about to ask her to sign the Group Sound T-shirts they were wearing, a voice came from behind them.
“Aren’t you going in?”
“Oh, wait a second. There are, uh... fans? Can I call them fans?? Fans~ There are fans here.”
The person who poked her head out beside Iseo was Ha Suyeon, the guitarist. While Ayoon’s friends, who liked Ha Suyeon more than Choi Iseo, reacted excitedly, Ayoon handed Iseo one of the gifts she had brought in her bag.
“Th-this!”
“Huh?”
“It’s a keychain! A keychain. I thought it would look pretty if you hung it up and carried it around...”
It was an animation mascot keychain. Iseo naturally attached it to her jacket, then posed with a V sign as if asking them to take a picture. Shortly afterward, the two of them disappeared.
“Did you get a picture? I’m jealous.”
“You didn’t take pictures?”
“Uh... They shook my hand, saying that taking pictures wouldn’t leave anything behind in life, and that what really mattered was memory and sensation. They even gave me some well-wishes.”
“Huh??”
Was this some new way of refusing? But wasn’t that comment a little strange? And what did they mean by well-wishes? Ayoon wondered.
* * *
“Why do you only shake hands?”
“Important moments are meant to be remembered. Not photographed with some piece of junk called a phone or whatever strange device, shoved away somewhere, and never looked at again.”
“No, if you don’t want to take pictures, just say so.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to... Sigh, what’s the point of explaining it to you?”
Once again, Suyeon was saying something Ayoon could not understand. Iseo simply let it go and entered the waiting room. Hyeona and Seoha, who had been making slight adjustments with a metronome set in the center of the room, welcomed the two of them.
“For now, we’ll just do today’s performance as scheduled. As I said before, after today’s show, we’ll talk a little about the government-supported program. Is there anyone who suddenly can’t make it? No one, right?”
After calling the three of them together, Suyeon brought up the government-supported program they had been hearing about until their ears were ringing for months.
‘Is she finally going to talk about this?’
Normally, they should already have been entering the judging process by now, or so they had been told. But because everything had been delayed by several months, the online judging would not begin until the end of this month.
Suyeon continued explaining. After the online judging, they would select the Top 8, hold an offline competition, and finally choose two teams... something along those lines. At that, Iseo remembered what she had previously heard from Seoha.
“That support program... Band Pioneer? Have you ever heard anything about it?”
“Well, I’ve heard quite a bit. There are people participating who live nearby, and I also knew someone involved.”
During a break in rehearsal, Iseo and Seoha met outside the practice room. The atmosphere had grown slightly awkward, so Iseo hurriedly asked her a question. Fortunately, Seoha accepted it quite naturally.
“I told you before, didn’t I? An older guy I know had a band that was eliminated immediately.”
“Did you?”
“I think I mentioned it when the subject first came up. Anyway, uh... As I remember it, this year’s prize money alone is six million won per band. There’s four million won for album production, support for producing a collaboration with an established musician, and even an opportunity to perform at a festival. There aren’t many programs with better benefits than this.”
“Whoa. That’s insane.”
Ten million won in total, a collaboration, and a festival. Iseo thought she understood why Suyeon had suggested applying for this program.
“Besides, the program is for rookie bands—bands with five years or less under their belts. So on the surface, the competition doesn’t seem that fierce.”
“I suppose not.”
“And the preliminaries are just recorded and viewed online. So the hurdle looks really low. But that actually makes the competition fiercer, because it looks doable.”
“They said more than a hundred teams entered the online preliminaries last year alone. And there are rumors that the field will be wide open this year, so it might be even more competitive...”
‘That was more or less what she said.’
So, basically, the prize money had increased this year, there was no clear favorite to win, and it was going to be extremely competitive. Wasn’t that the gist of it?
But Iseo did not think any of that mattered. Why wouldn’t they be fine as long as they worked hard? In the end, true victory belonged to the skilled.
* * *
“We’ve been performing at this hour for quite a while now, haven’t we? About a month, maybe? Or perhaps it hasn’t been that long. Anyway, I’d like to thank you all for always listening to our chaotic setlists.”
Another song ended, and a calm voice spread through the venue. Judging by the laughter erupting throughout the audience at the phrase “chaotic setlists,” the crowd seemed to consider that one of the band’s charms as well.
Like a radio taking song requests, they played a few songs that had been decided in advance, but everything else appeared without context. Other than being band songs, they had nothing in common. Sometimes they played metal, sometimes J-pop, sometimes anime songs, and sometimes blues.
And most of those performances were not at 100 percent. They were songs performed at 70 or 80 percent quality. Compared to the originals, they had plenty of shortcomings, and some were rather empty performances with various gaps in them.
Nevertheless, most of the audience thought the reason they could love those songs was largely the skill of the guitarist currently holding the microphone in front of them.
“And I think I owe you another apology. Today, too, I suddenly felt like playing a cover song that wasn’t on the schedule. Since I got some new equipment, I really wanted to use it in today’s performance, so I ended up changing the setlist like this. I did practice a little, but it may still be lacking, so I wanted to apologize in advance.”
“It’s okay! It’s okay!” the audience continued cheering. Suyeon loosened up her hands slightly, then looked at Hyeona and nodded.
“Then we’ll begin. Pink Floyd, ‘Us and Them.’”
At that signal, delicate notes began to emerge from Hyeona’s Kurzweil keyboard.
Alongside the dreamy sound, the guitar filled the place where the saxophone should have been.
The guitar tone, with delay and panning that had not existed in the original, produced a strange sensation in the listeners.
The audience, which had been swaying this way and that to the lively song moments earlier, gradually began to quiet down as the melody somehow calmed them.
But that lasted only a moment.
The tone Suyeon switched to as she stepped on the pedal instantly revived the audience, whose mood had fallen asleep as though drugged by drowsiness.
“Whoa...”
With a drum fill, a grand sound spread beneath everything. A deeply impassioned voice filled the stage of the club, whose capacity was just under two hundred people. But that was only temporary.
Before the audience could fully experience the sensation, all the soaring sound vanished, leaving only the dreamy piano once more. They felt as though they had been pulled out of the water and then submerged again, taking in the full rush of restrained emotion.
The narration and guitar solo followed.
The sense of space, pushed to its limits with the Binson Echorec, made the inside of the club feel vast through the speakers, as though it had become outer space. The people were packed close enough to touch, yet it felt as though they could never reach one another...
It was like being cast into the middle of the universe, vaguely orbiting a galaxy while listening to a sound coming from somewhere.
“They’re insanely good. They’re high school students?”
While the audience was overwhelmed by the sound, one of the people lined up against the wall at the very back of the room spoke.
“Yeah. I heard they only started the band recently.”
“That makes no sense... Really?”
A woman asked again as if the claim were absurd, while a man silently nodded.
“Can we beat them? Honestly, I’m not even confident in us as we are now.”
“Are they definitely participating?”
As the conversation went back and forth... a tall man who had not said a word until then finally spoke.
“We can’t afford to get eliminated again. This time, really...”
“We have to do something, no matter what.” The words lingered at the man’s lips for a moment before falling away.