The choice of music for a televised event in Korea recently caught my attention – it was all power and progressive metal. I didn’t think these genre’s had any popularity in this part of the world…but it was enough for us to investigate what the deal is with metal over there.
Ah South Korea. It’s hard to overlook this place. A major world economy, a large population, and significant cultural exports.
Most major economies in the world have interests in metal music be it one subgenre or another, even in Asia. Not to generalise, but Japan does have a well-documented love that neo-classical technical metal, and China had a nu-metal phase that developed into an interest of progressive metal. But what about Korea?
A country that actually does have a significant music industry exporting their pop-stars to the rest of the world. But, the country, unbeknownst to me, actually has no metal presence. We never see any Korean bands playing abroad, nor do we see any established metal bands ever playing Korea.
When European metal bands tour Asia, it’s more often than not that you will only see them tour Japan, and more recently a few dates in China. But it was something I saw that caught my attention that there might just be a bigger metal presence in Korea than at least I had initially thought. And yes it was something very nerdy.
It was a Starcraft II tournament on early in the morning that I was watching, broadcast straight from Seoul. And every interlude between matches the most unexpected music would be playing to set the tones. Avantasia’s ‘Lucifer‘ hit one interlude, while Myrath’s ‘The Needle‘ would be doing the other. It doesn’t finish there. There were snippets from Damnation Angels, Symphony X, Sinbreed and many more filling the players downtime slots to make the competition more excitable.
A Korean Starcraft match featuring power metal.
So clearly someone loves this music and feels it is quite adequate for the situation, and to be honest I thought it worked quite well. This power and progressive metal is broadcast to thousands of young Koreans and streamed to thousands of youths worldwide. The questions is though, is there actually a community that listens to this stuff on a regular basis?
South Korea does have some metal presence in metal bands such as Baekdoosan that look like the biggest one there, but I had never head of them before looking into it. But if power and progressive metal is broadcasted on a constant basis, surely there must be quite the few who enjoy this music, or at least a fair few that are willing to check the band out. It is interesting to see if there is any action or experiments taken by metal bands to actually try a headline show in Korea and gauge it’s response. I do know that metal bands have played the country before such as Nightwish and Rage, however both performances were part of a mixed genre metal festival in Busan.
Korean heavy metal band Baekdoosan
I do understand though that the industry wouldn’t want to take that risk of sending European power metal bands that far and have nobody be interested, but at this point with such a large exposure in Starcraft II broadcasts – there might just be opportunities out there.
I really would like to know what the metal community is like out there though. If there are any Korean metal fans out there – get in touch with us!
