Seoul Community Radio, 202518 Images
Hear the words Korean music and one’s mind inevitably goes to K-pop. But, lurking beneath Korea’s most lucrative export is a musical underground infused with imports: gabber raves in jimjibang saunas, MPC hip-hop jams in local BBQ joints, and Korean grime and garage MCs that can go toe-to-toe with the UK’s best. In recent years, these globetrotting encounters have begun to define Seoul’s nightlife and, at the heart of it all is a platform that FKA twigs recently crowned ‘the NTS of Korea’: Seoul Community Radio (SCR). It’s time to enter the K-Bass.
Despite its hefty reputation, SCR actually owes its formation to a series of accidents. The radio station, a go-to destination for all things Korean dance music, was founded in 2016 by northwest Londoner Richard Price – known to most as Rich SCR – a veteran raver who, just a few years before, had zero intention of ever even visiting Korea.
“I had a pretty standard UK upbringing. I went to the school that they modelled The Inbetweeners on, I think that tells you all you need to know,” Rich tells Dazed. “Back in the early 2010s, I was doing what a lot of people were doing in London – trying to balance doing some music projects with raving and living in a big, expensive city, and I ended up getting a ‘proper job’ to make ends meet.” That ‘proper job’ took the form of a content creator for Korean tech giant LG Electronics, which, after a stint in New Delhi, eventually saw Rich land a role at the company’s head office in Seoul.
Despite initially only viewing the interview as a ‘little holiday’, Rich quickly found himself captivated by Korea’s emerging club scene, which was then just beginning to build momentum. “Back in 2015, I would tell people in the UK that Seoul was popping, and they would raise an eyebrow and mutter, ‘Is it like ‘Gangnam Style?’” recalls Rich, who created a SoundCloud page to promote these early DJs importing techno and bass music into the country. “Weirdly enough, the suggestion to branch out into a proper radio station actually came at an after-party in which German techno legend Move D was dishing out some sage advice.”
Rich immediately knew the location he wanted for the studio: Usadan-Ro, the seedy backstreets of Seoul’s lively Itaewon nightlife district. It was an area reflective of the global encounters SCR aimed to celebrate: Islamic food shops, biker hangouts, queer nightclubs and tattoo parlours in a country that, to this day, still forces most tattoo artists to operate illegally. In Rich’s words: “It was the perfect mix of outsider cultures in Korea.”
SCR’s studio opened its doors in early 2016, live-streaming Monday-Friday online as one of the first adopters of the new, digital radio format. Their unique roster of hybridising Korean DJs and international artists saw them win Best Radio Station (Asia and Middle East) at Mixcloud’s 2017 Online Radio Awards. The following year, they were selected to represent electronic music at the inaugural DMZ Peace Train festival, promoting peace and unification on the border with North Korea, and later performing at the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang.
But, behind the scenes, running costs were piling up. A particularly bleak moment arrived in 2019 when Rich, who had recently quit his LG job to focus on the station, broke his leg while hosting an event, and no longer had insurance to cover the costs. A couple of weeks later, he learned that the entire Usadan-Ro district had been condemned, forcing SCR to move studios.
“That’s when the spirit of hustle took over,” says Rich. “We sought out our first brand collaborations with Nike, Obey and Jim Beam in order to raise funds to move to a new location with more potential.” From there, the station began to find its groove. As lockdown struck, SCR continued broadcasting, finding itself as somewhat of a bastion of electronic music in Seoul at a time when nightlife was non-existent. More importantly, however, the pandemic also gave way to one of SCR’s most significant innovations.
“We were thinking, ‘What can we do that’s not a rave that’ll get shut down, and people will be apart?’ The local barbecue place, Handoni, was struggling, and so we decided to do a seated DJ event there,” Rich recalls of the first instalment of SCR’s Community Service initiative, using the station’s roster and connections to power local events. “In Korea, nightclubs get a bad rap, but those events got good reactions from everyday Koreans. We got the bug for doing modern music events in traditional Korean settings, and started to get picked up in more mainstream outlets.” Soon followed SCR’s beach festival in coastal Yangyang, and their flagship JIMJILBANGDAZE sauna rave, complete with compulsory gowns and a ban on footwear. “Maybe we’re the barefoot party specialists,” says Rich, laughing.
It is through this embedding of SCR within the local community that the station became more than just the home of global dance music in Korea. This was particularly evident when SCR embarked on its first European tour earlier this year, with takeovers at SXSW London and Glastonbury featuring the likes of grime MC Blasé, Korea’s response to PinkPantheress, The Deep, and a host of UK-inspired Korean bass DJs, each entertaining the home crowd with their own takes on the sounds of the city. Rich may have once been submerged in UK rave culture, and the idea for a station may have first come from a German house DJ, but SCR has since become a beast of its own.
And, in Rich’s eyes, this significance goes beyond just Seoul’s music scene. “If we look at the makeup of each member on our team, and where we all come from, it’s actually a microcosm of what Korea might end up looking like in the future,” explains Rich. “In the past, you had the US Army bases, and foreigners who perhaps weren’t here for the best reasons, but recent years have seen a second wave of foreigners that really like to big up Korea and feel truly part of the country. Some have married Koreans and others, like our South African operations man, Zeno, might have roots elsewhere but went to school here and speak better Korean than anyone!”
“Musically, the acceptance of foreign culture is higher than it has ever been,” he continues. “Our panel at SXSW discussed how the country’s flagship export, K-pop, is now absorbing these influences, and them partnering with entities like SCR is a good indicator of that. This mixture might just represent what a future Korea could look like and I think that’s pretty exciting.” Rich has come a long way from the Inbetweeners school, that’s for sure.
Check out SCR’s exclusive 10 Years of SCR playlist, as well as a selection of pictures from the station’s meandering yet revolutionary journey (including their collaboration with FKA twigs last month), above.
