10: How does it feel having to work together during Christmas time? (laugh)
T.O.P : We feel sorry for each other. (laugh)

10: I feel bad that I'm interviewing you as well. (laugh) It’s been a week since you resumed your activities. How has the reaction been so far?
GD : We have to accept that we’ve been on a long break. (laugh) In the past, we really felt the heated response we'd get at once but it doesn't feel quite the same now that it's been two years since we've been Big Bang. I think that from now on, we'll receive attention from people depending on how we do. If necessary, I might appear in some variety shows to attract attention so that people will watch us perform.
T.O.P: I’m not quite sure yet. The album was released just yesterday and it's great to hear that a lot of copies have been sold so far. But I think it’ll take some time before I will really start feeling it.

10: How does it feel to perform on stage for the first time in a while? It's the first time just the two of you are performing together.
GD : I was nervous on our first televised stage performance but the burden has been lessening since then and I've been enjoying myself more. And when we pre-record performances, it'll leave us exhausted because we'll shoot three or four times over but it seems the best cuts always come out during go. On the first take we'll be overly conscious of the fact that we'll be on television so only do planned movements which isn't fun but then at the end, when we've almost given up and just move as we please, the best cuts seem to come out. So we'll usually try to take to the stage with a heightened mood in order to maintain that condition.

10: So you're “HIGH HIGH” just like the title of your song. (laugh)
T.O.P : Yes. We talked with our dance team a lot as well because we wanted to appeal with something more comfortable and free rather than putting on a uniform group dance.
GD : Idol groups are basically defined as doing pre-arranged dances and wearing matching clothes. But we decided that we will try to put on more natural performances and make people think that idol singers too can show their apply in such natural ways. It’s more fun showing something different every time than repeating the same thing over and over again.

10: But Big Bang has danced pre-arranged moves before. Although you two seem to be set on capturing the audience by showing them that you know how to have fun on the stage.
GD : The biggest strength that Big Bang has is that although we are a single team, we each have our individual styles. And we're a single team but we can create a new form of synergy depending on how we re-group ourselves. That’s what we wanted to show people and rather than focusing on where the camera is, we want to communicate with our audience during that moment so we decided we have to lift the mood as much as we can. I believe it’s our duty as singers to make our fans enjoy our performance from beginning to end and leave them exhausted when they're leaving after watching us. So we want put on performances that'll even make viewers at home jump up and down.

10: I think you were like that particularly for your first performance [as a duo unit] at cable music channel Mnet's Asian Music Awards (MAMA). There really wasn't anything that was set up on stage and you two performed as if you were just skimming the stage.
GD : We really didn't have a single stage effect, that’s for sure (laugh). No equipment and fireworks weren't allowed.
T.O.P : But we're Big Bang and we've been performing for five years now which means we're bound to have learned something during that time so we half jokingly said, “Hey, let’s make it through with our accumulated expertise.” (laugh)

10: And it worked with your expertise? (laugh)
GD : We were in Macau so we wanted to leave a strong impression on even the people who don't know us. We also wanted to challenge the mindset that the stage can only feel complete when singers move around on it a lot -- we wanted to show people the weight and presence that can be felt by a single person standing on stage. So with nothing prepared, we said, "Let's kill it.” (laugh) I’m sure crowd felt it. We had also had our company's CEO, Yang Hyun-suk, pressuring us through text messages...

10: Pressuring you? (laugh)
GD : He wrote, “You guys will be scolded if you mess up on stage.” We had no choice but to do well that day. (laugh)

10: Yang definitely seems to push you hard. (laugh) But not everyone will have such thoughts just because they're pressured to.
GD : I think it has to do with a sense of owning the stage. On music programs alone, there will be as many as 30 groups waiting for their turn to sing, which means each team has three minutes or so to prove themselves. When you’re on stage, you have to own it because once the performance is over, it’s no longer yours. An owner is free to act whatever way he wants to at home, no matter how many people have gathered there because you’re the owner and I think you also get to accept people’s response from an owner's point of view. I think that is why I can perform on stage with confidence.

10: I can see that that sense of ownership has been reflected into your new album because there seems to be a story to the first six tracks. You introduce yourselves in the "INTRO," with “HIGH HIGH” and “OH YEAH” have fun on stage, and then you come down from it begging a woman “Don’t Leave.” (laugh)
GD : Us, as well as YG, and Big Bang in particular consider the flow to an album very important. If an album is one complete work, we believe there has to be some sort of a natural flow to it to a certain extent. So we start big, gradually somber, cut it off with "KNOCK OUT" and then show our individual styles. We always pay a lot of attention to these things.
T.O.P : It's actually been a while since we made our solo songs. It was decided later on that we'd include our solo songs in our project album. My songs are from when I was working on film “71 Into The Fire (2010)” and KBS drama “IRIS (2009).”

10: And that's even more so why unlike your solo songs, you had to maintain a consistent vibe to the songs you two worked on together. How did you discuss on the direction you would take your album?
T.O.P : I think it just came to us instinctively. Instead of saying, “Let’s take it like this, this time," we just went to the studio and stayed up several nights writing up lyrics and recording songs. In the past, we'd get together after GD records the parts he has made and I've recorded the parts I've made, and then make the necessary changes and additions, but this time, we gave advice to each other on what could be improved and a lot of the musicians we work with helped us out as well. I think this may be a product of YG's instincts. (laugh)
GD : That’s actually what our unit is about. Before making this album, I was working on Big Bang’s album and since it'll be the first we're releasing in a long time, I wanted to try a lot of things so I experimented with a variety of units including me and T.O.P, Taeyang, Seungri and Daesung, Daesung and me, and Seungri and Taeyang.


10: I think the other units would've been interesting as well.
GD : But it turned out that they're all busy with their individual activities and appearing on variety shows. (laugh) Only T.O.P and I had some time to kill so we ended up working together and producing the most songs together. (laugh) But our other projects were getting pushed back so Yang suggested we try various experiments for Big Bang’s music in the mean time and then have Big Bang's album itself contain songs with all five of our voices instead of in units. So that's why Seungri's song, which was actually supposed to go into Big Bang's album, will be released in his upcoming solo album and we're releasing our songs separately as well.

10: So it seems like your album came about by coincidence but how did you two actually make music together? It seems like you two had entirely different interpretations of “BABY GOOD NIGHT"?
GD : He has changed his name to e.knock now but that song was made when I was over at Kush's house. I was just hanging out with him when he played the arrangement for "BABY GOOD NIGHT" he'd made, asking me what I thought about it. I took it from him as soon as I heard it. (laugh) Then I came up with the melody that I thought would go with it, humming up the part that goes "Baby good night" and T.O.P added the rap to it. Then I added more lyrics to it, singing for the first time with this album. We made "DON'T LEAVE" after that.
T.O.P : That was the first song we completed together for the album. GD had been working on Big Bang's album and when I joined him after getting done with film “71 Into The Fire,” we recorded this song first but the result was satisfying so we started working together lot after that. In that sense, I think "BABY GOOD NIGHT" was how are album came about.
GD : For that song, the first thing we did was to come up with its theme. We thought of what song we would sing to our lovers if we had one. So we came up with the lyrics imagining that I was caressing my lover's hair while she sleeps, and then added the melody to it. We also wanted to make a very sexy song and I also wanted our song to be one that people would turn on when they want to create a romantic atmosphere with their lovers. (laugh)

10: Is that the reason you included narration in French for "BABY GOOD NIGHT"?
GD : I've done a lot of narrations for Big Bang's album and my fans probably won't mind hearing me do them again but I felt that other people might be sick of it. (laugh) I also wanted to give the song more of a movie-like vibe to it through the dialogue between a man and a woman, as well as use a language that goes better with the song's sound.

10: Are you saying that there are certain pronunciations that go better with certain sounds because GD, with all of your songs, it seems like you paid more attention to making sure you pronunciation mixes well with the sounds rather than making an effort to pronouncing everything accurately.
GD : People have pointed out problems with my pronunciation a lot since I was young but I thought about it a lot instead of trying to fix it. I feel that this is something I'm curious about as someone who listens to current music but I realized that songs become weird and their unique vibe gets lost when non-Korean songs are translated into Korean. It’s like how a movie seems different when it gets dubbed into another language. So I try tried to write the lyrics in Korean as much as I could but pronounce it differently. For example, I rolled my tongue more for pronouncing "round and round" in song "KNOCK OUT." I regarded my voice itself as an instrument so I paid careful attention to the effect that my voice is giving off.

10: I think that's why it seemed like you purposely affected your voice this time.
GD : Yes and I do it quite often. I tried as hard as I could to make it sound like an instrument and I also tried to make as many instrumental sounds as I could with my mouth.

10: T.O.P, you on the other hand, pronounce your words very accurately -- it's probably the most accurate you've sounded out of all of your albums so far. You've made the complete opposite choice from GD.
TOP : It wasn’t something I intended on, I just went with how I felt, but I have changed my vocalization technique. A lot of people listen to Big Ban's music so I want people to hear each and every sound, as if I'm talking right into their ears.

10: I think that’s how your voices work together to produce the songs we hear in the songs in your album. For example, in "HIGH HIGH" and "DON'T LEAVE," GD seems to be leading the flow of the sound rather than just rapping while T.O.P on the other hand gives impacts to the songs.
GD: T.O.P’s voice has weight and is very charismatic while mine is extremely light so I think we work well when I flutter around his grounded voice. (laugh)

10: But it's interesting to see that this is the album that two artists with such contrasting styles have produced. It's as if it reaches a bit beyond reality, that it's literally 'high.'
GD : Yes. That's the style we like.
T.O.P: We wanted to create music that is dreamy and with a sense of space.

10: Why did you choose to go with such sound? Both “HIGH HIGH" and "OH YEAH" seem to go beyond music one would listen to at a club to have fun and rather give off the vibe that you're 'drunk' with your music, as if you've reached a state of nirvana.
GD: We wanted to make music that can be pictured in one's mind, just by reading the lyrics, and we wanted to make music that is visual like a movie. It’s no fun simply enjoying yourself all the way from start to finish. During concerts as well, it is up to us to lead the crowd and in order to do that we have to know when to push, pull, loosen or tighten, because that’s how you create tension for excitement. So even during the short playing time, we changed the flow of the song and emotions expressed within it, and added in various effects to create ups and downs to make the listeners become immersed.

10: Is that how you brought the sense of space felt in clubs to life? You seemed to have made quite an effort to create the space at which your song is being sung as well as giving it different texture depending on what the song sings of.
GD: That's something we demand for in extreme detail. We don't say, “Hey, let's have that guy who's good at mixing work on our music” but instead explain everything saying, “Bro, this part has to ring more, as if we are singing from somewhere very far in the background and this part has to seem more as if we’re whispering.”
T.O.P : Our company also puts in the most effort into the sound mixing. Yang will sometimes do the mixing himself as well. For this album as well, the sound will seem different depending on whether you're listening to a CD or listening to the digital sound source because our boss personally took care of the sound mixing himself to suit the listening environment. (laugh)
GD: That’s why YG’s music is different depending on the generation you're in -- Perry’s generation, Teddy’s generation and our generation. Each producer will imagine of different sounds and that precisely is what gets reflected into the albums they work on.

10: That is why when you listen to "HIGH HIGH" or "OH YEAH," they sounded similar to Big Bang’s electronica style on the surface but it rather seems you two reproduced what goes on inside a club. And there may not be too many people who know how to enjoy themselves with the sort club that your song gives off.
T.O.P: We too knew we may be taking a chance. But if we had focused simply on the song's commercial success, we would've gone with the styles we did as Big Bang but we altered it a bit instead. And the first things we wanted to do was to present the public with our color to show who we are. We kept thinking that we need to seem different in some way since we're in front of the public for the first time in a while.
GD : Whether people know about club culture or not, I wanted to make them think, "Ah, so that's how you have fun in the club and that's how you move to this music to have fun" from watching our performances. We were confident that we could make people understand our music through our televised performance.

10: But “HIGH HIGH” and “OH YEAH” were not composed by you two although they’re the title tracks to your album.
T.O.P: When we first started working together, we wanted to do more heartwarming music. But we needed to take the public into consideration to a certain extent and our CEO thought the same as well so we asked Teddy for his help. We set the direction the details to the songs would take but we somewhat needed to go with a style that people are familiar with.
GD : There actually hadn’t been that many of Teddy’s songs in Big Bang’s albums so far. We always talk about this with Teddy as well but it had been hard to work with him because composers with strong musical tendencies don’t work with each other a lot. But we came to realize that we couldn’t stay like this so we had talked with him from six months ago and reached a conclusion. (laugh) When we get a song from Teddy, he’ll pass a song to us after he comes up with the structure for it. He’ll take his hands off of it completely. Then we’ll talk again to him again to share our opinions. I think these are the two songs we worked on together properly.

10: That’s why “HIGH HIGH” very strongly exudes your style GD, even though you didn’t compose it. It’s as if the song changes a level at each new section.
GD: I think it’s because I start the song and when I come in strong, T.O.P will set the grounds for the song and when T.O.P comes in strong, I’ll set the ground for the song, which is why the song was fun. We didn’t want it to be boring.
T.O.P: I think that’s the result of our collaboration. We all have different styles so the whole process was about us adding our individual interpretations of the song if Teddy presents us with the basic direction. I think that’s why it felt a bit different.

10: But the response for "KNOCK OUT," which you don't promote much and "DON'T LEAVE" which you haven't sung on television at all, have gained response as favorable as that of "HIGH HIGH" or "OH YEAH." It’s not easy for songs like “KNOCK OUT” that has no melody and contains only rap, to get such response.
T.O.P: To be honest, I didn’t think the public would like this song. But at the same time, I also had a hunch that they might. It’s true that hip-hop element becomes more prominent when GD and I work together but we just wanted to do something that can be expressed at our age. While taking a break from our activities as Big Bang, I think hip-hop was the music through which we could express what we have felt and learned instinctively. We could’ve gone the easy way but we wanted to draw a bigger picture for ourselves.
GD: We aren't not confident when we release new albums, whether it be Big Bang's or Seungri's. What we’re not sure of is the rapid change in music trend. We'll release an album but people will only listen to the title song and forget about the rest of the tracks. In the past, we used to have this nostalgia for music like how old I was at the time and how it comforted me when I was with who. But now everything is decided within three weeks time and most people go “I only remember the chorus of the song.” I think we need to make people think of every song in an album as title tracks to catch up with this trend. And in order to do that, the overall flow and the quality of the songs have to be close to perfect.

10: So you’re saying that “HIGH HIGH" is not the only title track?
GD: We wanted to create an album in which some enjoy “HIGH HIGH" and others prefer “BABY GOOD NIGHT.” So we didn't put in extra effort into the title track. Of the songs we worked on with Teddy, we decided that the piece that is likely to be embraced by the majority of listeners would be the title track and tried to balance out the album by including other songs with different charms.

10: Apart from “HIGH HIGH” and “OH YEAH,” your album seems to have reached out to genres beyond electronica, such as hip-hop or something entirely different.
T.O.P : This is the album that contains most number of music that we wanted to do. Electronica alone sounds too cold and we get tired of that easily. We wanted to put a lot of effort into inserting what we felt throughout our singing career into each and every one of our songs by using new methods.

10: Couldn't you have been more adventurous then? If you had chosen “KNOCK OUT" as the title track, you could have presented a new style to mainstream music.
T.O.P: That’s what we're disappointed about too. You're allowed to use the term 'knockout' and curse in dramas but that's not quite the case with music. We want to promote "KNOCK OUT" too. (laugh)
GD: I’m not sure if it’s alright to say this (laugh) but I got the idea for "KNOCK OUT" while watching “My Name is Kim Sam-soon (MBC, 2005).” Kim Suna keeps repeating “It completely knocks me out, it's a knockout." I started composing the song based on that idea but the screening committee will not give it the green light. (laugh)10: That seems to be the most personal story of the songs to your album (laugh). But how does it feel to receive response to the music you two have most wanted to do? The lyrics also tell of your personal stories and it's all working with the public.
T.O.P: I think we had always wanted to create music of our own in which listeners have no choice but to recognize. So I think what we wanted to achieve the most through this album was to produce an album [so great that] nobody would say anything about Big Bang's music in the future, no matter what it's like.

10: I’m sure your thoughts on music has changed a lot as well. You’re both heading more and more towards doing music that is of your personal taste and talks about yourselves.
GD: It’s been five years since we debuted as members of Big Bang but I think we’re finally feeling a sense of satisfaction. I’m sure it would’ve been difficult to make a hit out of “KNOCK OUT” had we promoted it when we first debuted. But it feels like we’re heading in the way we intended them to. I think that the more we present people with such music, the more they’ll naturally come to accept it. It feels like things are going the way we hoped and pictured them to be.
T.O.P: If possible, we’d like for our album to be remembered as a work of art, something that people can picture in their minds, instead of something they just forget about after listening to.
GD: And if I may add one more thought about Big Bang, we are aware of the rumors of discord amongst our members with our album getting pushed back. But we’ve proceeded with both our and Seungri’s album thinking they are projects leading up to Big Bang’s album. What matters is not who comes out first and in what way it happens but that we present the path we want to take. If you consider our performances as ‘shows,’ there’ll be the show us to put on, Seungri’s show, and Big Bang’s show and I’m hoping you’ll enjoy all of them. We get upset over such rumors but they also cause headaches when we talk about them.
T.O.P: Discord or whatever it is people call it, we’ve never even fought before. (laugh)

10: What will Big Bang’s next step be?
GD: Whenever we get together, we always say we should do heartwarming music. People may think that singers are supposed to do music that will relieve them of their exhaustion from everyday life but we want to think of things on a bigger picture. We live in a harsh world and people have changed a lot. We may still be considered young but there’s a definite difference even between us and the generation below us. So if we could, we’d like to change that through our music. That’s why we want to do heartwarming music and why the next album we release as Big Bang may be very different from what you’re expecting from us. At the same time, there are reasons people like us because we have a style that is unique of us and for the music we’ve always done so we’ll still have to satisfy those two prerequisites.

10: It somehow seems you two have become grown ups while working on this album.
GD: During the past two years we halted our activities as Big Bang, there had been various rumors about us but I think we rather matured a lot because of that, growing closer to each other and forming stronger bonds. We may still be young but it’s as if Big Bang as a group has become bigger. I can’t tell you everything yet but I think proving how big we’ve become will be more important than what music we do.

10: A bigger Big Bang?
GD: Our upcoming Big Bang album will involve us working with artists in various genres which will largely expand the scope of music we do. I’m excited to get to create a bigger framework for ourselves. For example, you can consider Diplo’s participation in “KNOCK OUT” as the start to it. And it didn’t get included in the album but we tried to work with Tiesto as well. Through such collaborations, we wanted to show the public that such attractive music exists and encourage them to listen to it. We’re not teachers of any sort but as people who know a bit about music, we hope our music will tell people, “What do you think of this kind of music? Try listening to it. And try having fun like this.”

10: Your job is always about showing something to others but it feels like that with this album, you found the balance between talking about yourself and what you show on stage.
T.O.P: We have definitely changed in regards to personality but I don’t think for the worse. (laugh) Our perception has broadened a bit which is why I think we were able to enjoy more freedom in making in this album. I don’t think how we rank on music charts will matter anymore.
GD: Because we produced the album ourselves. We’d be putting on an act if the lyrics to our songs were about things we didn't or couldn’t do but what we speak of are things that only we can speak of. So that’s what we tried to write about as much as possible. In the future, when people listen to our music, we’d like to make people think, “Yes, they’ll think this because they’re Big Bang” instead of “Oh, they actually know how to think like this?”

Senior Reporter : Kang Myoung-Seok two@
Photographer : Chae ki-won ten@, Lee Jin-hyuk eleven@
Editor : Jessica Kim jesskim@, Lee Ji-Hye seven@, Heidi Kim heidikim@