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Aeon Dream Studios talks ‘To The Edge of the Sky,’ BTS, & dreams [interview]

May 28, 2017/in Features, Interviews /by Anna Cheang

It’s only been about a month since their visual novel demo To The Edge of the Sky was released, but Aeon Dream Studios has already achieved great success with a 4.9/5 user rating on Google Play and over a hundred thousand installs. With beautiful graphics and an intriguing storyline set in 2077 featuring BTS members […]

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The sonic identity of K-pop girl groups: implied meanings & what the future holds

May 26, 2017/in Features /by Ana Clara Ribeiro

This is the third and last part of a series in which we discuss the changes in the music of K-pop girl groups throughout the last decade and what these changes say about the environment within which they thrive. Remember how in the first article I described T-ara’s music as the sonic portrait of an […]

Aeon Dream Studios talks ‘To The Edge of the Sky,’ BTS, & dreams [interview]

May 28, 2017/in Features, Interviews /by Anna Cheang

The sonic identity of K-pop girl groups: implied meanings & what the future holds

May 26, 2017/in Features /by Ana Clara Ribeiro

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Aeon Dream Studios talks ‘To The Edge of the Sky,’ BTS, & dreams [interview]

May 28, 2017/in Features, Interviews /by Anna Cheang

It’s only been about a month since their visual novel demo To The Edge of the Sky was released, but Aeon Dream Studios has already achieved great success with a 4.9/5 user rating on Google Play and over a hundred thousand installs. With beautiful graphics and an intriguing storyline set in 2077 featuring BTS members as characters in an enigmatic government organisation, the demo has definitely whetted the appetites of fans who cannot wait for more. We spoke to the game’s creators at Aeon Dream Studios about their new game as well as their future plans and dreams.

Kultscene: Thank you for taking the time to talk to Kultscene. To begin with, could you all introduce yourselves and your roles in the company?
Ajané Celestin: Hello! I’m Ajané Celestin. I’m the CEO, Creative Director, and I also write and act as the Editor.
Chieu Nguyen: I’m Chieu Nguyen. I’m the Art Director and Lead Artist responsible for most of the visuals in our games, mainly character art and user interface.
Eglė Dilytė: I’m Eglė Dilytė. I’m the Lead Creative Writer, main scriptwriter, and I also work as our Social Media Coordinator.

How and why did you decide to found this company?
AC: Chieu, Egle and I met up on Tumblr as fans of visual novel games. We became friendly with each other and since Egle and I were writers and Chieu was an artist, I asked them if they wanted to make a game. We decided to see what would happen and go as far as we could go. We didn’t imagine things would get this far, but we’re very happy it has.

Also on Kultscene: The Sonic Identity of K-pop girl groups: Implied Meanings and What The Future Holds

What first inspired you to create To the Edge of the Sky, and more specifically, to model your main characters after the BTS members?
AC: We’re fans of BTS’ music and their concepts and aesthetics constantly inspired us last year. As creators, we began to see more ways we could flesh out some of their story concepts in a visual novel game format and also thought that ARMYs would probably be interested in such a game.

Characters of the game modeled after BTS members (image via To the Edge of the Sky)

What were the challenges you faced in your creation of To the Edge of the Sky?
CN: Definitely time pressure. We had about two weeks for this demo while still planning on our previous game, so it was rough trying to get the assets done while still maintaining our usual quality. Fortunately, the first part of the demo was finished like how we envisioned it.
AC: As Chieu said, it was mainly time. Chieu had already done promotional artwork because we were gearing up to create the demo, but I suddenly came up with the idea to do it before I headed to their Newark concerts in March so we could hand out the promotional artwork. We challenged ourselves to create a concept from scratch as well as artwork within roughly a 10 day period. However we were able to achieve it and are grateful to receive the positive responses.

You’ve posted online about your plans to present the idea for To the Edge of the Sky to BTS’ label, BigHit Entertainment, how do you intend to achieve that?
AC: As anyone who has been paying attention to BTS knows, they are reaching their peak right about now, so it is very difficult to contact them. Right now we are in contact with someone local to Seoul who may be able to assist us with that further.

To the Edge of the Sky has become very popular on the Internet, especially among ARMYs (BTS’ fandom). What would you like to say to the new fans of your game?
ED: Well, first of all, hello and welcome! Thank you for playing our demo and thank you so much for your kind words and support. This might sound a little cheesy, but we feel energized by all the love and we’ll continue to work hard for everyone.
AC: I’d like to say that we’re really, truly grateful for all the kind and positive comments we’ve received. We had no idea To the Edge of the Sky would be so well received. We put everything we had into it during the short time we had and are so grateful for the ARMYs that gave us positive responses at the Newark concerts and through social media and emails. We can hardly believe it but To the Edge of the Sky is nearing 400,000 downloads within two months of its release and we’re really grateful for the thousands of positive reviews so far. Thank you for also becoming fans of the game and we promise we will do our best to develop this game for you.
CN: Thank you so much for your generous support thus far, it means a lot to us. We will continue to work hard and hope that you could see this game come to fruition with us.

Also on Kultscene: Introducing KultScene’s K-Pop Unmuted: Produce 101

So far only a demo for To the Edge of the Sky has been released, what will come next following this release?
AC: After we finish our current project, we are planning to work on developing the next part of To the Edge of the Sky. We want to give ARMYs more while we continue to work on making this a full game.

Where do you see your company in the next five years?
ED: With a much larger games library and still creating more, it’s been my wish and I think all of ours really to be able to work together and create together until we die of old age. And I hope we’ll be able to produce more content than just visual novels.
CN: We would have more games out with higher quality, and it would also be nice to have a larger fanbase. We are never satisfied with the status quo and are always seeking to improve the quality of our work. Therefore, it is my hope that in 5 years time, we will create even better games and be able to reach out to a wider range of audience.
AC: In five years…It’d be really nice if we had a few different series. It’d be really nice if we could produce more games like To the Edge of the Sky, where genres are crossed over, as well as our own, completely original work. I want us to continue to become better developers, writers and artists and make a variety of different games for all kinds of people. It would be interesting to do work outside of games as well, under our brand name.

Check out Aeon Dream Studios and their current works here!

Have you tried out To The Edge of the Sky? Are you a fan? Tell us what you think in the comment section below and be sure to subscribe to the site and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr to keep up with all of our posts.

The sonic identity of K-pop girl groups: implied meanings & what the future holds

May 26, 2017/in Features /by Ana Clara Ribeiro

Remember how in the first article I described T-ara’s music as the sonic portrait of an era? Well, now the music of Twice and the newer girl groups can be seen as the portrait of our present one. It is noticeable how the increase of beats per minute, the shortening of intros, and the diversity of changes in melody and arrangements during the songs reflect the haste of today’s society for new things and their little patience for anything that takes too much time. Think of 2NE1’s songs for example. The concept and lyrics for “I Am the Best,” released in 2011, are still super cool, even for 2017. But doesn’t it sound a bit “slow” today?

Of course, this is not a phenomena exclusively seen in K-pop. All over the world, and especially in American pop music, it has been observed how hit pop songs have been seeing shorter intros (try even finding an intro in Calvin Harris feat. Rihanna’s “This is What You Came For,” for example) and taking less time to get to the chorus. Max Martin, the god of modern pop songwriting who wrote several number one hit songs from Britney Spears’ “Baby One More Time” to The Weeknd’s “Can’t Feel My Face,” said it himself: “Pop music follows the evolution of society in general. Everything moves faster. Intros have gotten shorter.” Though 2NE1’s songs from just a few years ago made good fits for the Facebook generation, K-pop songs of today are more appropriate for the Snapchat generation. It’s not particularly different in Korea, where the obsession for progress and technology is a way of life.

A sign of the modern times in K-pop is the profusion of musical styles that are blended within the songs. Striving for progress has led South Korea to open up their markets in the past few years, which has had major effects on K-pop also, beginning with the growing presence of more and more foreign composers and producers in the K-pop market. As a result of this, K-pop has become more open to other music genres and arrangements have been much more diversified than they used to.

While the need for speed and the uptick of music styles bring a contemporary appeal to K-pop, the increase of cute concepts and aegyo (cute) elements in the songs — so different from the empowerment that we saw dominate the last generation of girl groups– counterbalances the modern vibe in a curious way, suggesting that even though the girls are living in 2017, they still reverberate traditional (patriarchal) values from Confucianism and its standards of femininity. Although this philosophy is no longer dominant in Korea, its influence is still strong.

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The intersection between progress (modern sound, embracement of foreign and innovative music genres) and traditionalism (cute, fragile, submissive, and non-proactive female behaviour) can be heard in songs like WJSN’s “Would You Kiss Me,” a surprising mix of sweetness and edginess, with futuristic elements and trap beats blended into a fluttering pop instrumental, innocent melody, and aegyo speech.

The Role of Music Creators As Curators

The way creators design the sonic identity of a song or group of songs in order to give the audience a specific feeling, which in turn subconsciously tells a story about the society we live in, is quite interesting. Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan made an impact in the 1960’s when he stated in his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man that “the medium is the message,” believing that the form of a medium carries just as much meaning as the content. Based on that, the way music is shaped to sound might say a lot about the one who’s creating it or performing it.

In this matter, blending both modern and traditional elements, like explained above and also in the previous articles in the series, might be K-pop’s way to tell society about its values: to achieve progress and prosperity without losing their traditions.

We can’t incisively say that this is the agenda of the K-pop industry, but it surely means something. This idea might take different forms depending on the context, and that’s what is more interesting. There are infinite ways of giving a certain vibe to a certain song. When you think of it that way, creators (composers, lyric writers, producers) and music executives (yes, them too, since they get to decide which songs will be recorded and which won’t) play the role of curators, deciding which elements would be present in order to convey a concept.

These statements make even more sense in the field of K-pop, where music is not only a sonic instrument but a whole experience that defines visuals, dancing, fashion, and even the personality traits of the group members. In the book Globalization and Popular Music in South Korea: Sounding Out K-Pop by Michael Fuhr, this is described as “performance-centered music.” Therefore, it’s not difficult to imagine the amount of creativity and work that is demanded from music creators.

But what would these teams have in store for K-pop?

What’s Next For K-pop?

by Yasamine Entesari

K-pop has always aroused love and interest for being creative and unapologetically fun. It catches you when you merely watch a video or listen to a song, maybe not realizing why it’s so enticing. Analyzing it might explain why it’s so catchy and so representative of what Korea is or aspires to be, but don’t think we’ve deciphered it yet. Just when you think K-pop is going on a certain direction… It changes.

When Twice released “Knock Knock” in February, fans were quick to describe it as something similar to everything the group has been doing since its debut. In fact, the first verse sung by Nayeon, the easy choreography, and the repetitions of “kung kung” and “knock knock” (just like “shy shy shy” in “Cheer Up,” as well as the mnemonic “ne” syllable sound and “I’m like TT” in “TT”) might have given you an impression that it’s the Twice you’re used to listen. But don’t let yourself be fooled; it was the most daring move the group has made since their debut, simply because it was very, well, simple.

Also on KultScene: 12 visually appealing K-pop music videos

Against their previous singles, “Knock Knock” has little surprises in terms of song structure and production, sticking to one genre only and having a very simple verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus structure (no pre-chorus, for the first time). The melody is also very linear and presents rare moments of high notes. The harmony consisted solely of a E – Abm – C#m – A chord progression, making it the least complex harmony from the group so far.

Analyzing those factors, you could think Twice was going the opposite way and becoming simpler. You wouldn’t be wrong: their latest release “Signal” delivers a less noisy instrumental, with less sonic turnarounds, slighter drums, lower bpm, and a more homogeneous melody.

Like we said in our last article, many thought of 2014 as an apocalyptic year for K-pop, and coincidently, that was the birth year for these groups who brought a new concept of what it sounds to be a young girl in Korea. 2017 is also being pointed as a decisive one for the future of K-pop. May we expect the birth of something new again? Or has K-pop’s heyday peaked and we’re watching it plateau?

There is more interesting data to be added to the guessing game: a recent and curious apparent trend, American pop music seems to be slowing a down a bit. Right now, in the top five on the Billboard Hot 100 chart you can hear songs that present either slower tempos or less polluted production, like a smooth jam that reminisces the old days of Michael Jackson and Motown and an easy listen, dembow riddim oriented song yet still cleanly produced by the current king of love songs, for example. K-pop is known for occasionally gathering inspiration from what is trending in America. If the slow-down of music is truly coming, how will K-pop respond to that?

The year 2017 might be another turning point for K-pop, and it’s already heading to its second quarter. Being the most relevant girl group at the moment, Twice just might be in the front row of the beginning of a trend of calmer songs, although the elements of cuteness will hardly die. After all, K-pop constantly has to reinvent itself, but some things will always be there.

What are your thoughts on the future of K-pop girl groups? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below and be sure to subscribe to the site and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr to keep up with all of our posts.