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www.groovekorea.com / October 2014 94 Edited by Elaine Ramirez (elaine@groovekorea.com) muSIC & ARTS While the bands’ quality continues to thrive, today’s punk scene is not exactly brimming with possibilities. Some la- bels stopped pressing, older punks got respectable jobs and retired from the scene, and fewer kids have come in to replace them. “There are still a lot of us here in our 30s,” says Dunbar. “You go to a show now, you’ll see a lot of male pattern baldness.” “You’ve had basically the same core group of people for 15 years running the punk scene,” adds Moses. “There’s a small influx of younger kids in the scene, but not a lot. Most of the people got into it before the hagwon culture, before the Korean government pushed K-pop as their identity.” Around 2010, new venues rose up in Mullae-dong. Close to Yeongdeungpo Station, Mullae was a graffitied neighborhood of art galleries, rehearsal spac- es and artists’ squats, some of them built over disused steel foundries. New bands like the Veggers, the Kitsches, Banran and Scumraid played there, in- jecting fresh oxygen into the scene. Though the Mullae ven- ues are now mostly gone, most of the bands still play in Hong- dae and elsewhere. “The bands remain extremely high in quality,” Dunbar says. “Even if you go see a band on their first show, they’re going to come out doing really well. Korean bands practice until they’re good at their songs, which is very different from North American bands.” The low demand for punk is a double-edged sword for the artists. Since major Korean labels have no interest in punk music, the bands are in the local scene to stay. “There is no shot of ‘making it’ in Korea as a punk,” Mo- ses says. “Which kind of sucks, because it means you’re always going to have a crappy job. If you want to tour, it’s really hard because Korean jobs don’t give you any time off. But the good side with that is that big labels don’t come in and scoop up all the good bands. “If we were in L.A., Rux wouldn’t be playing $10 shows at Spot anymore. Bands that I really look up to, we get to play with all the time, because there’s nowhere else for them to go.” scumraid shim jihoon of Huquemsaw yoong ghang Hwang of sagal nowhere To go ‘If we were in L.A., Rux wouldn’t be playing $1o dollar shows at Spot anymore. Bands that I really look up to, we get to play with all the time, because there’s nowhere else for them to go.’ Jeff Moses, ...Whatever That Means