On the occasion of her latest release, titled “EP2,” Natalia Barr of Interview Magazine spoke with Kathy Lee BHA ’15 (aka Yaeji) about how her training in visual art has shared her music career.
Barr writes: “Yet without her visual background, her dance music career might never have existed in the first place.
“‘I think a lot of my influences came from things that are not music,’ she explained, when we met up for an interview last week. She credits her unique sonic palette to ‘anything visual that I saw growing up.’ The 24-year-old covered a lot of ground during her childhood—she was born in New York, and then moved to Atlanta. Her family later moved back to South Korea, where she studied at an American school. She briefly attended school in Japan, and then moved back to Korea again. Eventually she returned to the States to study conceptual art, East Asian Studies, and graphic design at Carnegie Mellon. By moving around so much, she says, ‘I learned a lot that probably influenced my music in terms of how open-minded I am, and how down I am to try weird stuff.'”