INFO
| Established | 2014 |
| Place of Residence | Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland |
| Artform | Music |
| Decades Active | 2010s, 2020s |
ABOUT
Imugi 이무기 is a silky electronic-pop duo whose soft vocals seek to create a sense of cosmic escapism while simultaneously exploring issues relating to love, relationships, and the complexities of gendered and racialised identities in Aotearoa. Combining “future-leaning pop sensibilities and a crackling analogue aesthetic” the music also draws on elements across R&B, trip-hop, synth-pop and funk.
Named after a mythological Korean serpent that — by one account — has to survive a thousand years in order to evolve into a true dragon, the band is led by songwriter and vocalist Yery Cho and producer Carl Ruwhiu, who met in statistics class at Rangitoto High School. “Carl (stood out to me) because he would always come in late,” Cho has said. “He’d argue with the teacher. I was quiet, couldn’t express myself. When we started working together, I found a way to sing.”
In their final year of high school the pair started making music together. A year later, in 2015 they posted a song, ‘dizzy’ to Soundcloud. “We didn’t really think much of it,” Cho recalls. “And then the next day. We woke up and it had hit like 30k streams or something like that, and we were like oh my god, it’s a sign.”
Their debut EP, Vacasian (2017), stemmed from what Cho has described as “a lot of racial frustrations”. Dragonfruit (2020) extended this conversation, with one critic describing it as “unearthing the complex issues that all coloured migrant women face”. Alongside this, their music has also evolved, with the pair increasingly incorporating acoustic sounds in their work and finding the right "colour palette" to match the mood of each track. “It will always be electronically based” Cho tells DJ and music journalist Jess Fu in doco-series Amplified. “But we’ve always been a fan of fusing genres.”
The pair have spoken openly about deciding to leave their label, driven largely by their desire to have control over their image, as well as feeling defined by their ethnicity in reductive ways. Cho describes being constantly asked "what it was like being Asian". “It’s different when you have that conversation with another immigrant or another person of colour,” she adds.
Imugi 이무기 has performed extensively across Aotearoa, including at St. Jerome’s Laneway Festival (2019), Rhythm & Vines (2019, 2020), Splore (2021) and Flamingo Pier (2021).