Our entire album “Chaos Theory” was built on vintage and broken gear. Kai’s guitar is a 1974 Fender Stratocaster that he found in a Seoul pawn shop for 80,000 won. It was supposedly unplayable—the input jack was corroded, the frets were worn flat, the tremolo system was completely shot. He fixed nothing. He plays it exactly like it is. That broken tremolo is on every track. It’s not an effect; it’s a voice.
Our bassist Joon runs his signal through a 1987 Ampeg SVT amp that hums at about 60Hz. We had it serviced once and immediately hated it. Brought it back to the tech and asked him to break it again. His tone is that hum. Our drummer Minah used a mix of vintage Ludwig drums (1960s, inherited from her grandfather) and a 2020 electronic kit that has a bad circuit board that clips at certain velocities. We layer them. The tension between analog decay and digital distortion—that’s our sound.
Production philosophy: never fix what sounds wrong. Fix what doesn’t serve the song. We recorded through a Mackie mixer that keeps dropping the second XLR input at random. We worked around it. One vocal take on “Shatter” has a 100ms dropout in the second verse because we didn’t notice until we already had the perfect performance. We kept it. That’s Mirae. The gear doesn’t serve us—we serve the accident.