Gugak Fusion Pairs Korean Folk with Pop

Korean artists are creating radio pop with instruments and techniques rarely heard on the airwaves. Read full story on the Bandcamp Daily .

In early 2022, in the depths of Covid-19’s second wave, cooped-up music fans turned to the internet to lift their spirits. Some found solace in a Tiny Desk concert by ADG7, a South Korean pop group who excel at the types of earworms that have turned Korean pop into a global sensation. But across ADG7’s nine member lineup there are no guitars or synthesizers—the only instrument a Western viewer might recognize is a drum kit.

Instead, ADG7 plays a variety of instruments unique to Korea’s folk history: a 12-string zither called a gayageum, a double-reed oboe called a piri, a multi-pipe mouth organ called a saenghwang. Through Tiny Desk, ADG7 became an international envoy for a Korean-born pseudo-genre sometimes referred to as “fusion gugak.” Gugak is an umbrella term for a range of traditional Korean music styles historically performed in royal courts, folk gatherings, or shamanic rituals across the Korean peninsula.

The members of ADG7 started playing together in the gugak band Jeong Ga Ak Hoe; in 2015, they created ADG7 to experiment with more pop-oriented styles. “We became curious about what would happen if we created music that could appeal more broadly to the public,” explains ADG7 leader and vocalist Kim Hyunsoo. This was not a straightforward task.

“I haven’t found a specific element of Korean traditional music that naturally fits into pop structures on its own,” says Kim. Rather than grafting Korean instruments on top of standard pop songs, the band needed to develop a new style from the ground up. “Instead of trying to extract something that already fits pop music, we focus on understanding what makes pop work and then building forms and sounds that align with it,” Kim says.

What took shape is less of a “fusion” than a reimagining—pop music with melodies as vibrant and catchy as anything listeners might hear on the radio, but created with instruments and techniques that would rarely appear on those airwaves. This situation is familiar to LEENALCHI, an alt-pop band whose four singers are trained in pansori, a traditional Korean form of song-based storytelling. Named after legendary pansori master Lee Nal-chi, LEENALCHI combines pansori’s vocal techniques with groove-oriented bass hooks to create left-field pop compositions that stand out precisely because their pairing is so uncommon.

“I think the unexpected combination of elements that don’t quite fit together creates the unique charm of our music,” says vocalist An Yi-ho. As a style of spoken word, pansori has a “flow” similar to hip-hop, but with unique rhythmic and tonal variations that open up possibilities unavailable in everyday pop production. “When we work, elements like onomatopoeia and mimetic words in pansori sometimes create unexpectedly catchy and addictive melodies when placed over pop music,” explains vocalist and keyboardist Choi Suin.

Other groups have discovered similar synergies between gugak and contemporary music. One prominent example is the geomungo, a six-string zither played whose lower register “makes it especially effective for bass and rhythmic roles,” according to Hwang Hyeyoung of the band dal:um. This allows the instrument to move smoothly into heavier genres like metal and post-rock, where it can match the energy and presence of the guitar.

JAMBINAI, one of the earliest gugak fusion outfits, has explored the geomungo’s cross-over potential in depth, using it to underscore their blistering post-metal compositions. Driven by the chart-topping success of K-pop, interest in Korean music has recently reached a high-water mark. “Internationally, there are fewer fixed ideas about traditional music.

It’s often seen not as outdated, but as something stylish and fresh,” notes LEENALCHI vocalist Ra Seojin. Some K-pop artists have begun incorporating aspects of gugak into their own work—BTS even worked them into their comeback album. But these types of short-term collaborations aren’t necessarily the best examples of authentic connections with the genre.

“It often feels less like genuine interest in traditional music itself and more like using it as a kind of “flavor” to highlight uniqueness or cultural difference,” says An. A true dialogue with gugak, An explains, requires continued engagement with the artform as a complete whole. For their part, LEENALCHI isn’t interested in being known for modernizing gugak, focusing instead on using their backgrounds to make songs that people love.

ADG7 has similar goals. “We wanted to create music that people could enjoy together,” says Kim. “Music you could jump to, dance to, and share energy with others.”

That’s a quality that any audience will recognize, regardless of what instruments they see onstage. ADG7 Such Is Life ADG7 stands for “Ak Dan Gwang Chil,” a