The time I have to listen to music at my home (or at all…) is very limited nowadays. Still, my weekend listening this past weekend primarily consisted of streaming the same tracks over and over again from this one MySpace page. A message was sent to the band responsible and I can now proudly present Indieful ROK’s very first own mini interview! The band in question is of course I&I Djangdan and its Frenchman Seafran was the one to answer my questions.

Could you please introduce I&I Djangdan: Who are you?
I&I Djangdan is KIM BANG JAN at the drums & vocals, JANG GOON at the vocals, NA YOUNG at the keys, SMILEY at the percussions and melodica and me HOARANG (aka Seafran) at the dubwise (fx,livemix) and samples.

Your music is very “chillastic” and somewhat addictive. What can you tell us about it?
Our music is all about Roots and Culture, we want to dig out the specific sounds and atmosphears we feel about Korea to express it in a dubwise tradition.
Korean traditionnal music is very unique and special in terms of “chillastic”, I guess your feeling about our music comes from this at first, I also guess it may comes from our musical influences, and the understanding between members, altrought we have some different tastes.

Dub seems to be a rare occurance in Korea’s music scene. What is the history of Korean dub?
We are starting the history of Korean dub. I&I Djangdan is the very first dub project in Korea.
As the reggae is big all over the world it is almost inexistant in Korea, altrought the Japanese neighbours have a serious reggae scene since the 80s.
I started play reggae and dub music here when i arrive 3 years ago with my bag of LPs, and even this is a real passion it is sometimes very hard to keep that work when you almost alone to do it. Anyway i continued play and produce dubs until I had a gig the same time and place and the bredda KIM BAN JANG’s Windy City Band, which was playing at my biiig surprise very fine reggae music!!! Our common ideas about roots and culture / conscious music magnetically put us in contact. From here something started.
We had shiny eyes at the first dubsession in studio, and decided later to build our own project soon joined by SMILEY, our melodica player and fine percussionist, NA YOUNG, our keyboard and heavy bass keyboard player, and sista JANG GOON, our Korean voice and gguengari (trad.cymbal) player.
We choose to do dub music as a LIVE practice rather than a studio one, and put the mixing console on stage as an instrument to show what is the Dub process.
As we are the first dub band it is a duty to show audience what is the live mix they hear. We have to make a good path for the future of Dub music in korea.

There are reggae enthusiasts all over the world and even a small reggae festival will usually have bands from faraway countries. Have you considered taking your music abroad?
Of course! We are very interested in exporting our music abroad, because it is always a chance to feel and share culture, influences, music and livity… I think this is very important for musicians to enlarge our views.

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And there you have it! A big, big thank you to Seafram for doing it!

If you want to hear some of the awesomeness that is I&I Djangdan for yourself, head over to MySpace.
If you want to pick up their recently released debut EP, Culture Tree, you will find it at mrkwang’s.
And if you want some more information on that EP, Seafram also provided an album text in English:

The culture trees are at places where influences of diverse horyzons can meet and interact. this one find its roots in korean and french traditions. traditions of tought and music.
Like water and sun are different but essential food for the tree, our diversities are feeding the same unity.
Dub music is for me the way to make this cross cultural thing possible by the way of (a)live mixing.
As we are all branches of the same tree, we all have different influences, lives and interest, but that shouldn’t makes us forget that we our roots are all originated in the same soil.
Our differences are beautiful. It is natural for human to be all different and form a big variety of toughts, customs, opinions, religions and philosophies. This EP is for me a celebration of the differences.
We let the usuals conflicts caused by differences be replaced by the dubwise and let all animosity fade away like delays and reverbs.