News June 1, 2018

Muki’s K-pop songwriting expedition [Photo Diary]

Life has changed a lot since Australian artist Muki inked a publishing deal with Sony/ATV last September.

Since releasing her three singles ‘Sassaparilla’, Friends Don’t Make Out’ and ‘Gold Oxygen’, and her songwriting and collaboration jaunt to LA earlier this year, the young gun has just returned home from MARZ, an exclusive invite-only South Korean pop writing camp.

The camp saw some of the biggest K-pop songwriters and artists gather together to collaborate between May 10 – 18. Personally invited to attend by the camp organisers, Muki connected with artists, publishers, songwriters and even Google Korea.

Check out Muki’s photo diary for TIO below, complete with pics taken at 2:30 in the morning, a visit from the K-pop stars’ A&R, and a puppy!

Every day we would have to write a song from scratch and we would have it completed by the end of the day. Which would mean we were sometimes staying at the studio till 3am in the morning tracking vocals. I took this photo at like 2:30am in the morning! I’d been in the studio for 14 hours already!

After our sessions we would often all had crowd into the smallest studio and have a listen to a songs that we had made that day.

Just up the road from the studio, there was a puppy store and we would go in and visit almost everyday. The puppies at this store were so tiny! This little fluffball came up and would jump up on me when I would come in!

DAY 5 – Scott and I are trying to write some lyrics and I was trying to teach him how to be sassy… he failed.

I HAD SO MANY KOREAN NOODLES!!! I wasn’t mad about it!

DAY 7 – I was tracking vocals for a song we had written that day, but I was DRENCHING wet because I had ventured outside to get some coffee and it started to POUR down with rain. I came back into the studio head to toe completely soaked through. My shoes were still wet from that day when I got home! Also Google Korea had popped through that day to see what we were up to!

Because we were writing for K-pop girl groups we would have to write about 5-8 separate vocal parts for each section. So we would be stacking vocals and putting in really intricate harmonies and vocal ad libs. Poor Digi is going through all of my vocal takes and tightening them up. It was really fun to write for, because the Muki stuff isn’t as vocally intricate. I got to bring out my inner Mariah Carey.

JB and Joe were working on a particular beat – while I was working on some lyrics and melodies.

On the last day of the camp all the A&R for the K-pop stars we were writing for came and listened to all of the songs we wrote that week. It is quite a nerve racking experience. After the listening party, we all had a couple of shots of Soju which is a Korean alcohol, similar to sake or vodka but it is SOOO YUMMY! There is this amazing grapefruit flavour!

Outside SM Entertainment in Gangnam, Seoul with Daniel and Styalz. Down the road from the studio there was a coffee place that served a peanut butter flavoured coffee called ‘The Nutty Cloud’. We would always make excuses to go get one cause they were so YUMMYYY!