Neorama combines music and video

“My music is like my child and I want to be responsible for my music as a composer, producer and performer,” said Yang.

By Kwon Mee-yoo

Korean-Japanese crossover musician Yang Bang-ean loves to challenge the established order and is ready to present a totally new concept in performance.

In “Neorama,” scheduled for Jan. 21 and 22, he is going to present a combination of music and video. The title of the show is a newly-coined word by Yang.

“I got the idea from ‘Pan-O-Rama,’ my first album in Korea. I hope Neorama will give a new panorama joined by music and video to the audience,” Yang told The Korea Times in an interview last week.

He was born in 1960 in Japan to a father from Jeju Island and mother from Sinuiju, North Korea. This unique background gave him and his music a cosmopolitan touch.

Despite growing up in a family of doctors, Yang fell in love with music by listening to rock when he was in middle school. “I listened to Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. It was shocking but made me feel much closer to the music,” he said.

In 1993, he wrote the music for Jackie Chan’s “Thunderbolt,” which led him to a new world of soundtracks.

He became famous both in Korea and Japan by making music for animations such as “The Twelve Kingdoms,” “The Story of Saiunkoku” and “Emma: A Victorian Romance.”

He first visited Korea in 1998 after his father passed away. “I thought I had to come and play music here because it is my country,” he said. He lives in Japan, but goes back and forth between the two countries.

After releasing solo albums here, Yang also wrote music for hit documentaries “Dozagi” and “Asian Corridor in Heaven,” along with the online game “Aion,” and movies “Beyond the Years” and “Yobi, The Five Tailed Fox.” His song “Frontier!” was selected as the official music of the 2002 Busan Asian Games.

He said soundtracks should be music wholly to accompany visuals. “I put a lot of effort in choosing the movies or animations to work with. My music has to go with the video and I have to comprehend the original video fully to find out whether it harmonizes with my music,” the musician said. “It takes a rather long time to find the theme for my solo albums — it has to portray what Yang Bang-ean is thinking now.”

Yang is a pianist, composer, arranger and producer. “My music is like my child and I want to be responsible for my music as a composer, producer and performer,” he said.

He thinks of himself as a person in between Korea and Japan. “Everyone has different thoughts and I think it is important to portray the sentiment of the moment when I wrote the music,” he said.

A new concert

Yang is eager to introduce the new concept of the concert next week.

“Previous concerts were Yang Bang-ean’s solo performance and the main repertoire included songs from my album. However, this concert is different from my previous concerts or other film concerts,” he said.

The idea of a new concert combining music and visuals started last February. It took a while to settle copyright issues before taking off to create the harmony between music and video.

Studio Pierrot from Japan, known for producing animations such as “Naruto” and “Bleach,” joins Yang and provides original video clips for the Neorama concert. “I enjoy working on new projects with new people,” he said.

For this concert, he refined existing music to better suit the video footage. “Instead of just taking some part of an animation or movie, a video artist reconstituted the clips according to the music. Afterward, I watched the new video and rearranged the music such as changing instruments. It is an attempt to find solidarity in the music and the image,” he said.

“I hope the audience will feel free and fresh at my concert. That’s why I always try new things,” he said.

Yang is ready to challenge a new field in the future. “I am preparing for a musical and the music for another online game,” he said.

The Neorama concert will be also performed in Japan and France later this year. “French people are interested in animation and I will introduce my music with video footage from Korea and Japan,” the musician said.