About
“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
“Music takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startles out wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence, and whereto.”
Minjae Kim is a guitarist, composer, arranger, story writer, lyricist, producer, and mixing engineer.
Minjae’s music style in progressive metal is mostly influenced by Dream Theater, Devin Townsend, Sons of Apollo, Liquid Tension Experiment, and Symphony X. He always experiments with many techniques from different genres, like jazz harmony, classical orchestration, and continuous change of key and time signature from progressive rock/metal in his music.
As a multi-instrumentalist, Minjae became an all-around musician. Being a violinist, he has deep knowledge of orchestral writing. Being a drummer and bassist also made him become more creative in arranging for the rhythm section.
As a guitarist, his guitar skills and technique were mostly influenced by Paul Gilbert and John Petrucci, who still influence Minjae today.
As a producer, Minjae is trying to imply his techniques from the metal realm on some conventional techniques from K-Pop to create creative, heavy, and moving pop songs.
Around the time he graduated middle school, Minjae applied to be a public exchange student and first came to America in August 2016. In high school, he played in the jazz band and took music theory, which helped him to develop his theoretical base of music before coming to the Berklee College of Music.
During the COVID-19 era, he had the opportunity to work as a freelance mixing engineer for talented freelance vocalists. He also had an opportunity to work for Upvote Entertainment company as a producer from February to July 2021. In Upvote Entertainment, he served MIDI data, designed music composition algorithms for AI, and produced music that was composed by AI. At that time, he released his debut single “Will”.
After graduating from Berklee, Minjae got a master's degree in art at BerkleeNYC. At BerkleeNYC, he produced a VTuber girl band project combining his progressive metal music with conventional K-pop music, mixing in both Dolby Atmos and stereo formats for his Cumulative Experience. Minjae had worked for POZALabs as an audio software engineer to develop audio rendering software using C++.
Minjae is currently working on the development of music and audio software, teaching music students, and writing music and audio theory books.