A year later, in 2023, Parannoul and I meet at a cafe in Yeonhui-dong. “I wasn't nervous,” he says, when the Rolling Hall show goes up, “but I wondered: Are we going to stay in touch? Or are we just going to play one show together and then go our separate ways?'' he remembers. Dubbed Digital Dawn by its organizers, the concert was intended as an IRL showcase for Seoul's new generation of indie artists, who until then had mostly shared their work online. “Despite my tendency to stay in, I found myself talking a lot,” Parannoul says of his initial meetings with the other artists, where they planned the barbecue concert. “After that realization, I became a little more positive.”
The Parannoul in front of me today is not the same artist who once bemoaned his “fucking awful” vocals in interviews and whose cult popularity on RateYourMusic.com apparently brought him more stress than joy. To see the next part of the dream, the album that made him famous on the internet, had the resignation of a lonely teenage romantic on the verge of giving up. Now, he admits he has a specific ambition: “I've already come this far, so maybe I can keep going.”
None of this seemed possible to him when he first started making music with a free trial of a recording program in his bedroom as a high school student, inspired by bands like Arcade Fire and Mogwai. In those days, he says, he completed a new album every month. When he graduated from high school and got the results for the Suneung, Korea's notoriously grueling college entrance exams, was frustrated. “I was doing badly, so I decided to stop making music and focus solely on studying for a year,” he says. He poured into a 'final' album before backing out: Let's walk the path of a blue cat, his first release under the Parannoul moniker. The record fell to little fanfare and went into the books for another year, bearing the stamp of a jaesusaeng: the Korean name for a student retaking the national college entrance exam, a title associated with underachievement and social despair.
“In those days my dream was to become a musician. But I had no results to speak of and no money from my music,” he says. A second shot at Suneung he gave another disappointing score, sending him into deeper distress: “Everyone around me had already gone to college, and if I was the only one who didn't go again, I'd really be a failure.” He decided to cut his losses, go to any college that would accept his scores – but not before making one more “final” album. For real this time. “I was like, this second album, this is really the last,” he says. “For the last time, I will dwell on my misfortune, then I must go to college.”
