Taxi Blues and Other Dabang News

Here’s some surprising news!

Myoung Jae, with whom I used to play in the Dabang Band, informed me that a film that played at the Busan film festival, titled Taxi Blues, is being prepared for general release in Korea. The film features a snippet of the band’s performance of the original song “Taxi Blues” (one of Myoung’s babies) as well as having the whole song play over the closing credits.

So anyone in Korea, if you want to see my OST debut — meaning the first and probably last time anything I’m involved in gets onto an OST — make sure you see this film when it’s in a nearby theater. The movie itself might be a little dark — it’s a kind of documentary thing, apparently, where this guy installed a camera in a taxicab, and then drove around. Myoung described it as a kind of “seedy Seoul ajeoshi” thing. But he said it’s good. There’s a CD copy kicking around that I assume was given to Myoung prior to the film’s debut, and I’m curious to get a look at it.

And in other news, I recently talked with Myoung about providing digital copies of Dabang’s albums for download. Now that their commercial life is obviously over, he agreed, we may as well allow their noncommercial life to begin. Once camp is over I’ll take a look at non-commercial Creative Commons licenses and see which one fits our ideas best. I’m betting nobody would object to remixes and noncommercial cover version recordings, as long as we’re credited, which goes a long way to determining what kind of rights we ought to give users. But of course I’ll run it by Myoung and email Seong Hwan and Thai about it too, as that’s only fair.

And of course watch this site for news about when the site will come up. I’ll be posting full scans of the artwork and the CD itself, as well as lossless and MP3 forms of the CD, but not here. I figure it’s best to give the thing a site of its own, as well as contributing it to one or two free-music archives online.

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