Getting the Total Experience: An Interview with EE

Much of Korean music and culture has been pretty conservative up until pretty recently and even still is in some ways, making it difficult to be different and expressive. How is your unique style of music and art received by people in Korea?

little e: This has been one of my biggest challenges since I started playing in bands in the 1990s. Because of Confucian ideas and culture, artists like us have little opportunity to be on stage. So it is hard for us to make music and perform as EE in Korea. But I hope artists like us will continue to grow in number, continue to create more, and continue to be more accepted by people.

Big E: Ultimately we do what we do because we like it. Nobody can make us stop. And regardless of how many people like our art, we’re going to keep making it.

Your live shows have a lot happening, who coordinates the different parts of the shows? Is there anything new you’d like to try out that you haven’t been able to yet?

little e: Some people think that artists just sing and perform for a few minutes and have lots of staff members to help them. But that doesn’t happen with us. Once we book a performance, the two of us work out all the details from A to Z together and spend weeks making and arranging everything for the show. Sometimes there’s more that we want to do during performances, but we’re limited by time and resources because there’s just the two of us putting everything together. That’s one of the reasons why we put so much into our music videos.