wiki’s debut EP [sun] puts five tracks made in noticeably different ways on the same record. “sun, sun, sun” appears twice, once in the studio and once live. “World Wide Processor” comes from an older release and stays close to its earlier form. “H.Q” was assembled from separate improvisations recorded without either member hearing the other. goh-woo has a phrase that ties a lot of this together: “no version is final.”
wiki are a two-piece experimental rock band from Seoul, South Korea. goh-woo handles vocals, guitar and sampler, while Haein Lee plays drums and sampler. Their own introduction is short: “we write rock. we play loud.” [sun] came out on July 24, 2026 through MOrecords distribution, following the Bandcamp release [wiki way: 1st demo].
wiki produced the record themselves. goh-woo wrote everything except “H.Q”, which is credited to both members. They arranged, recorded and mixed the EP together, Haein mastered it, and goh-woo made the artwork.
Keeping both versions of “sun, sun, sun” was an easy decision for goh-woo. He does not see playing a song again as reproducing an earlier performance exactly. Choices made in another room or on another night can move it somewhere else, and he wanted both versions to stay on the EP.
The studio take was shaped more carefully around the song’s existing structure. Haein describes its mix as using an arrangement style common in pop music, giving the track a sense of stability. The live recording leaves more of the exchange between the two musicians intact. In his words, there are places where they are “almost fighting with each other at times, and harmonizing at others”.
There are still things they keep fairly fixed for now. The structure and length do not change much yet, although they might decide before a show to play it more chaotically or push the ending further. goh-woo thinks of “sun, sun, sun” as three chapters, with guitar, drums and different samples taking the lead at different points.
“I think there still needs to be a feeling that all those scenes are ultimately moving in the same direction,” he said. “We’re all in the same car, going for a drive.”
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Rehearsal is where those choices start moving around. wiki do not make new samples while rehearsing. Their SP-404s already contain sounds needed for particular songs, alongside other sources with no fixed place in the set. Those can turn up when something happens to work in the room, and the collection changes gradually over time.
They also do not spend rehearsal repeating finished songs until every part is identical. The set order can change. Connections between songs can change. A sample or drum rhythm tried almost casually can end up being used that night. The equipment and the room also affect how they approach a performance, so they use rehearsal to work out how the songs should move in that particular space.
There are no paper setlists on the floor. Their songs are long enough that they cannot fit many into one show anyway, and so far they have simply memorised the order.
One of the spaces between those fixed songs eventually got its own name. Writing “improvisation” between song titles on a setlist looked too serious to goh-woo, so he started using “H.Q“. It stands for “Headquarters“, a brief return to base where wiki can reorganise their sound, tone and approach before going back into a song. Haein spent years assuming it meant “High Quality”.
Once they decide to play it, there is no later test that can cancel it. “If we say, ‘Let’s do H.Q,’ and then we do it, that becomes ‘H.Q’,” Haein said. They can hear weak parts afterwards, dislike the result or choose to leave a recorded version off an album. The performance still keeps the name.
goh-woo connects that with accepting a choice after the moment has already passed. He can make notes to himself about what he wants to try next time, although he admits he usually forgets them by the next show. Haein has an even shorter definition: “‘H.Q’ is like a promise to spend a certain amount of time with a certain attitude.”
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Length stays loose. They might agree on about five minutes, or decide beforehand that they will keep going if things start flowing especially well. They have not reached that second point yet. There has never been an “H.Q” where both wanted to keep playing far past the planned time because neither wanted to stop.
The [sun] recording changed the usual setup. Haein was tracking drums for another band when the session finished early. He checked with the other members, then asked the engineer to leave the recording running for about six minutes. He knew roughly how long he had and knew goh-woo’s playing well. He did not know what would eventually be placed around the drums.
goh-woo did not listen to Haein’s recording. At home he recorded six minutes of guitar, then waited until the next day and made another six-minute pass with sampler and effects without replaying the guitar. He opened a new Ableton project, connected the effects, SP-404, interface and instrument, put a clock beside him and recorded once.
The sampler pass was the trickiest because some memory of the guitar from the previous day remained. He tried to get away from it.
“So, in a way, you could say that three people participated in ‘H.Q’ on this [sun] album,” goh-woo said.
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Putting the tracks together required a small amount of timing editing, which the band openly acknowledge, and very little additional work in the mix. The final version runs 6:44. They did not record several attempts and choose the best one. This was the attempt.
The separation also tested something they already relied on when playing together. “Even when you don’t know what the other person is doing, you respect their playing itself and make your own decisions based on that trust,” goh-woo said.
Haein heard moments in the finished track where separate rules of rhythm and dynamics happened to meet. He thinks the time they had already spent playing together may have left both of them with enough shared timing for those coincidences to happen.
“H.Q” also ended up as the only co-written song in wiki’s catalogue so far. goh-woo normally starts with the basic idea or shape of a song, although arrangements can change heavily once the two begin playing it together. Here the recording method itself led naturally to a shared credit. Haein puts it more precisely as the two of them co-writing under goh-woo’s production, since the original setup was his idea.
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At the other end of the record, “World Wide Processor (2026 Remaster)” reaches back to [wiki way: 1st demo]. It is the only song on [sun] with vocals, although goh-woo points out that wiki have quite a few vocal songs. They chose it because it has more words than the other candidates, runs only 5:04 and came with what he calls “a simpler sound with a different kind of energy”.
The earlier recording stayed in place because they already liked its form and rough texture. It also came from a different period of the band. [wiki way: 1st demo] only appeared on Bandcamp, with physical copies made by wiki themselves and sold at shows in Korea. Putting “remastered” in the title became a small signpost back to that release for anyone curious enough to look.
[wiki way] has its own set of rules. It is a series for releases where wiki can ignore the usual expectations around track count, length and how an album is supposed to be assembled. On [wiki way: 1st demo], they recorded five songs across four consecutive weeks. Week two had to differ from week one. Week three changed them again. By week four, the instruction was to play them completely differently.
All twenty recordings went onto the release, followed by a reversed version of track one, making twenty-one tracks in total. Most were recorded in one or two takes. The “demo” tag came partly from video games, with the release acting as an early version of wiki before the band became more organised.
The next [wiki way] has not been started yet, but goh-woo already expects it to centre on “H.Q”.
[sun] was made with another kind of release in mind. goh-woo calls it wiki putting their music “inside the language of the popular music market”. They kept the EP format, paid more attention to finishing the songs and thought carefully about streaming, artwork, the story around the record and the accompanying video. The aim was to make wiki easier for new people to enter.
“Of course, only as friendly as wiki can be,” he said.
He wants both directions to continue. The freedom of [wiki way] gives them somewhere to try different album rules, while [sun] gave them a way of taking the same band into a more widely distributed release.
The video for “sun, sun, sun” adds another long-running relationship to the EP. Syeyoung Park directed it using public archival and open-source footage. He and goh-woo had already worked together for years. Syeyoung helped with video projects when goh-woo was in another band, and goh-woo has acted in every film Syeyoung has made since moving into filmmaking.
They never discussed “H.Q” while planning the video. goh-woo still recognises something familiar in Syeyoung’s way of directing actors. On set, he often gives instructions in the moment and works with the reaction he gets instead of fixing every response beforehand. Their history meant neither needed to explain that instinct in much detail.
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The title [sun] came with a short line about moving through darkness without staying there. goh-woo wrote it quickly while preparing the text around the EP. There was no single event behind it. He wanted some human warmth in the introduction and did not want to bury the music under a large explanation.
Answering questions about it later forced him to think more carefully about why he had written it. He spoke about periods where people remain somewhere dark because leaving is difficult, because they do not know where else to go, or because they do not immediately realise where they are. If the record gives somebody even a brief feeling of reaching somewhere else, he is happy with that.
“It’s a little different from naive optimism. It isn’t bright because we don’t know anything. We know how messed up the world can be, and how cruel people can be. We also know how difficult it can be to keep making music or creating anything at all. And yet, in the end, you decide to finish somewhere hot and hopeful anyway.”
There was also something funny about having to account for his own sentence several weeks later. goh-woo admitted that he felt “a little embarrassed” after realising that something written fairly quickly had turned into a line that suddenly sounded beautiful once he started explaining it. He still prefers leaving enough room for listeners to attach their own feeling to it.
Haein ended up at a similar problem from another direction. If “sun, sun, sun” can keep changing, he began wondering how far they could take it while continuing to use the same title.
A book by Shin Yea-sul, “Objects of Music” (음악의 사물들), stayed in his head while he thought about it. He uses Beethoven’s Sonata No. 7 as an example. Different musicians can play the piece in different periods, places and ways, which makes the idea of one definitive original form difficult to pin down.
“I don’t think wiki’s songs have an original form,” Haein said. “There isn’t some original form or essence of ‘sun, sun, sun’ that exists somewhere. What remains is simply the agreement that ‘let’s call this “sun, sun, sun.”‘ And there is also a feeling that exists when we play ‘sun, sun, sun’ that can’t really be put into words.”
He still cannot name that feeling. For now, he thinks it may be the thing that gives the song its identity.
Then he cuts his own theory down before it gets too comfortable.
“If the song gets boring, we’ll probably just write another song.”
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