Indie-pop trio Nice Legs returns to Seoul

Henry Demos, left, and Lew of Nice Legs jump into the audience during a performance at Freebird Cosmic Live for their farewell show in Seoul, Jan. 27. / Courtesy of Jon Dunbar

By Jon Dunbar

Expat Indie-pop band Nice Legs will return for one more show to offer a reunion, a farewell and a 40th birthday at Strange Fruit near Hongik University in western Seoul, Saturday.

Its two founding members Henry Demos and Lewtrakimou recently relocated to Japan. They will be back in Korea this weekend, in time for the 40th birthday of Nice Legs superfan Douglas Vautour, a Canadian photographer based here.

They will also give a farewell party for Vautour’s houseguest, Kendra Van Nyhuis, who has spent the last few years studying Korean indie music. Van Nyhuis is a Fulbright scholar on a junior research grant.

She first discovered Korean music and instruments while working at the National Music Museum in South Dakota. This led her to do her master’s readings at UC Berkeley on pansori. Later, she chose to work on a dissertation about Korea’s modern underground music scene.

“I have focused on networks of performance, and the ways genre, location, and culture play into a musician’s understanding of their performance network,” she told The Korea Times.

She said she went to two or three shows a week to observe the interactions across cultural and linguistic barriers.

“It wasn’t until summer 2015 that I found out about foreign musicians playing in Korea,” she said. “I found that different groups of foreigners had various strategies to find performance spaces and distinct opinions about working with Koreans.

“It was the same for Koreans; they had diverse viewpoints on foreign musicians and fans. I found that observing performances and conducting interviews not only taught me a lot about music making in Korea, but also larger social understandings about interactions between foreigners and Koreans.”

Of course, it’s not all heady academic inquiry for her.

“One of the benefits of my research methodology is that I have been able to see bands and musicians that play every type of music that I like,” she said.

“If I can say anything about live music here, it is that a person could find whatever they want to listen to being played ― and played well ― in Seoul.”

Along with Nice Legs, the show includes Rough Cuts, as well as three bands by Ali Safavi: Visuals, Mountains and Machines. The concert starts at 9 p.m. and costs 10,000 won.