Words by Mat Ombler

In the last four months of 2021, I’d bet good money that more people were listening to Jung Jae-il’s music than any other musician on the planet. If you thought making it through December 1st to Christmas Eve without hearing Last Christmas by Wham! was difficult, try making it through a single day towards the end of 2021 without hearing someone mention Squid Game. Impossible. 

Critics praised the South Korean TV series for its dystopian and often brutal social commentary on modern-day capitalism. When it became a global phenomenon almost instantly after its release, so did the music that Jung directed and scored. Netflix revealed Squid Game had become its most popular TV series ever within a week of its release, clocking 1.65 billion hours of viewing time in the 28 days proceeding. By comparison, the most-streamed Spotify artist of 2021 was Bad Bunny with 9.1 billion streams. You hear Jung’s music quite a lot in Squid Game (I’ll let you do the maths). 

“Working on a TV series is a tough job, you need to prepare a lot more,” he tells us from his studio over a Zoom call. The 40-year-old composer is polite (“please forgive me while I speak in Korean as my answers need to be very precise,”) and listens to every question that he’s asked attentively, before considering his answers and relaying them back through a translator. 

His answers are spoken softly, with the exception of a five-minute period where my cat joins us on the call, welcomed onto my lap by Jung’s enthusiastic cheers of “Lovely! Lovely!” Jung is a cat man through and through. “I worship cats,” he explains. “They’re beautiful.” 

Jung is one of the biggest musical icons in South Korea right now, but he’s somewhat of a mysterious figure outside of his country. His music is often tied with social commentary on South Korea due to the nature of the projects he works on. He’s built a strong network of high-profile film creators and producers, all of which provide a steady workflow, but many of his most important contacts were made during the time he spent playing in bands. 

When he was nine years old, Jung developed an obsession with rock music and was adamant that one day he’d be a guitarist in a big rock band (the multi-instrumentalist can also sing, play piano, bass and drums). When he turned 12, his music taste expanded and he started playing guitar in a death metal band. Other than the year he spent at the Seoul Jazz Academy when he was 13, Jung has no formal music training. One of his biggest influences is the UK death metal band, Carcass. 

“I still listen to them now!” he gleams. “I’m completely in love with death metal, to be honest. I work mostly on classical, sentimental and avant-garde pieces nowadays, but my roots are in rock. You might be able to hear that rock influence in some of my current work. “I'm quite old fashioned,” he continues. “I'm in love with a lot of old bands, and I know I cannot get away with calling Metallica an old band, but I love Metallica so much. Metallica gave me the biggest influence, and I also still love KoRn.” At the moment, he says he’s got Mantra by Bring Me The Horizon on regular rotation. 

Jung has spent over half of his life performing live, either on stage in bands or in theatre and musical performances. This is where Jung seems to be in his element the most. His first major claim to fame was forming and playing bass guitar in the South Korean funk band GIGS, which played a huge role in shaping the way he approaches now. 

“Through that experience, I was able to learn what it means to play in an ensemble, and what kind of roles are played by each person,” he explains. “The learnings that I had from this experience didn't just influence me musically, but from a human perspective and my personal perspective as well: How to build relationships and chemistry amongst people, and how you're able to create something beautiful when you succeed in building that chemistry.” 

The band, as most bands do, eventually split. When that happened, Jung decided to pursue his ambition of being an independent artist and released his first solo album in 2003, but it didn’t get the reception he was hoping for. “It ended up being an album unknown to anyone,” he explains. “I released the album because I wanted to be a singer-songwriter, as I was completely in love with electronic music by Bjork. Through that experience, I realised it’s a really challenging thing to do, and this led me to think that I should pursue my professional career as a musician with clients.” 

In 2014, Jung was working as the music director on Sea Fog, the film adaption of the stage play based on the real-life story of 25 Korean-Chinese immigrants being smuggled from China to Korea. He soon formed a friendship with the film’s executive producer Bong Joon-Ho, and when Bong started writing the story for his next project, Okja, the heartwarming story of a girl trying to protect her best friend (a mutated but very cute giant pig) from an evil conglomerate, Jung was asked to write the score. 

Released through Netflix, Ojka was, even more, a commercial success than Sea Fog. So when Bong was finished with Okja and moved on to write the social satire and dark comedy Parasite, Jung was asked to provide his services once again. The movie went on to win four Oscars, including the Oscar for Best Picture. Putting Bong and Jung on the same projects together seems to be a recipe for success. 

“I would say I'm a musical instrument of his,” Jung explains. “He has a really deep understanding of music and a certain vision of music as well. I am the person who is responsible for translating that vision into real music.” 

But the creative process of imagining this music isn’t always an easy one. For Parasite, this was a long process of back and forth. Six different versions of Jung’s opening theme for the film were rejected until he eventually hit the mark on his seventh attempt with a hangover when he “sat down at the piano and just started to play without thinking.”It’s inevitable that projects of this size and scope come with a degree of pressure. 

“I’m always nervous when I’m working on a new film, regardless of how successful it’s going to be,” Jung says. “‘Will I be able to pull it off?’ ‘Will I be able to satisfy the creator?’ and so forth. A lot of these questions put pressure on me, but what I heard is that Hans Zimmer actually experiences the same kind of anxious state. He sometimes thinks about whether the director should use a different composer or not. 

“I think it’s the same for all composers in the field – regardless of how big or successful the film is – that all of them get very immersed into thinking about the best ways of working with a director to create something beautiful.” 

While the films that Jung works on share many of the same traits, his music is often a direct contrast to what’s happening on the screen. He describes his music for Parasite as ‘pseudo-Baroque,” while a lot of what you hear in Squid Game is performed by a mix of children’s instruments such as the recorder and castanets, accompanied by traditional Korean instruments such as the daegeum, janggu and sogo. 

The global recognition of Parasite opened up a lot of doors for Jung, although I suspect he already had the keys to a lot of them. His music was performed alongside footage of the film by a 37-piece chamber orchestra at a Live to Picture event in Los Angeles. He also got presented with opportunities for collaborations with other artists in other parts of the world. But the celebrations didn’t last for long. 

“A lot of requests came flowing in, but at the same time, not much has changed,” he says. “I'm still a person working in a studio, but with the success of Parasite, there also came a pandemic. So I was stuck at home, unable to travel or fly anywhere.”

For Jung, all of the things that he sought refuge and enjoyment in outside of the world of music had been suddenly taken from him. 

“As a consumer of art, I was stripped away of life's important joy,” he says. “I was unable to go to the theatres. I was unable to watch dance performances. And at the same time, I love to roam around European cities. I always do that – I am Korean, but my soul is also a Berliner – but I was unable to do that, and that made me feel like I was losing air.” 

Alongside cats, death metal and the arts, you can add Berlin to the list of things that Jung loves. It holds a lot of importance to him, especially as he happened to be in Berlin when David Bowie released his final album. “It’s the place where David Bowie created Heroes. He’s somewhat like an alien from another universe. Everything about him, like his figure, his music, and the steps he took in his life, if you think about every aspect of his life it makes you wonder if there will ever be another figure like David Bowie?” 

The more you explore Jung Jae-il’s music, the more his love – and respect – for Berlin makes sense. “The culture of how they face history, and you can hear so many different languages there, just like you would in New York, but in Berlin, there’s always a certain calm, natural and serene kind-of atmosphere.” 

Berlin is ultimately a city that has been built on memories. It does not shy away from history, and neither does Jaeil’s music. He is happy answering questions about the music in the films and TV shows he has worked on, but Jung’s face lights up when he is asked about the music he wrote for Round and Around, an audio-visual project highlighting historical moments in 1980s Korea to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the May 18 Gwangju Democratisation Movement.

Jung wrote 100 minutes of original music, most of it Accapella, featuring carefully chosen lyrics from the psalms of the Old Testament. The music itself is a sombre mix of neo-classical, ambient, post-rock and avant-garde, reminiscent of bands and artists such as Ólafur Arnalds, Nils Frahm's, Hammock, and This Will Destroy You. The human voice is his favourite instrument. “It is the most powerful instrument to touch the soul and the heart,” he explains. “That was the gist of the music of round and round. Of course, we had approaches from those musicians that you listed out, but then that all mingled into one big lump.”

Jung’s music was released as an album, the aptly named Psalms, and there’s one track called Memorare that stands out the most, which Jung considers the climax of the album. When Jung was asked in a previous interview about what the word memory means to him. His reply was “As an ordinary, mediocre original, I must not keep making mistakes.” I wanted to know what he meant by that.

“I am just an individual, an everyday layman, I would say. I wanted to send a message that we must not forget what happened in the past. There may not be so much that we can do because we are powerless as human beings, but the not-forgetting part could be a good start for all of us.”

Jung hasn’t given much thought to what he wants to work on next. As a composer, he’s created music in most genres and nearly all formats imaginable. There are many people that call him a musical genius, but Jung’s level of success hasn’t changed him in the slightest. When I asked about his plans for the future, he uses the question as an opportunity for self-reflection instead. 

“Since I’ve worked on so many genres, maybe I’m lacking some solid characteristics in my work. So I want to build some more solid layers to my music. That is what I hope for at the moment,” he smiles.