The A-side Sessions presents: No Room No Sweetener

On a Saturday afternoon that felt far too brief, the longing for live music was put to ease as solo artist Juhuhn Kim of No Room No Sweetener plays the debut set of our mutli-media series, The A-side Sessions.

The A-side Sessions bring together artists whose music will attract listeners that lust for the soulful feeling of live music and conversation. The sun was hitting just right as the puzzle pieces of our production fell into place, creating a golden ambiance for Juhuhn and our Editor-in-Chief, Sunny Sangha to sit down and discuss family, friendship, and the inner tickings of musical inspiration. 

Check out the interview below, as well as No Room No Sweetener’s performance of “Deep Sea.”

Sunny Sangha: Hey y’all! Welcome to our first A-side session, with No Room No Sweetener, or Juhuhn.

Juhuhn Kim: Hello, I’m Juhuhn. Nice to meet you guys. 

SS: I’m Sunny, the Editor-in-Chief of The B-side and before Juhuhn starts jamming and playing, we’re gonna do a little interview real quick. So, first thing I wanna say is, I honestly love your music. It’s really, really good. If y’all haven’t checked it out, y’all should start streaming it. I just want to know, do you have any favorite songs of yours? 

JK: I like “Two Days”– it’s on Spotify and stuff. I made it with my friends Adam and Dominic, who are in a band called Inside Mood and a band called Coral 9, which has him in it. 

SS: Oh, Marcos! Come on the camera real quick, say hello. 

JK: Come on the camera Marcos! This is my friend. He makes music too. 

Marcos Hoy: *waves*

JK: And yeah, I don’t know, that was the first song that I really worked on with other people. I made that in San Francisco ‘cause I go to school there at USF. That was one of the first times that I felt like comfortable working on a song with someone else. It’s just special to me. 

SS: I love that. So, I realize from your music and your Instagram feed, you love collaborating with your friends, which is so sick. How would you describe the relationship between your friendships and your music production?

JK: We’re a collective. We collectivize everything. We’re all together.

SS: So would you say you’re part of a larger project of musicians?

JK: Yeah. We all boost each other up, we all play in each other’s bands. Whatever we need, we all got each other. 

SS: How many of you there are total?

JK: Nine. Haha, yeah nine of us. 

SS: Oh, sick. I want to ask you about your genre of music, but first I want to ask you about the genre of the collective. How would you describe the genre of the collective?

JK: Oh man, that’s hard. We all really like soul music and jazz music, punk. Me and this dude named Riley, who’s the lead singer in a band called Coral 9, he’s also part of our collective. We just started playing music in high school together. 

SS: Are you from the Bay?

JK: Yeah. We went to Dublin High School together. So yeah, we’re both from the East Bay. We started our first band together; it was like indie-rock stuff. So you know, that definitely still has its influence there. 

SS: Are most of the folks in the cooperative from the Bay? Are you all Bay area locals?

JK: No, we have like some people in Miami, we have some in SoCal. Where’s Dominic from? Oh yeah, Missouri, Missouri. 

SS: Oh, wow that’s really sick. How did you guys all meet? How did you become a music collective?

JK: I guess we were all just like friends of friends. Just, like, whoever played music, like eventually we were gonna meet, so it just so happened that we all meshed well together. 

SS: Were you guys, like, oh let’s find each other or let’s make this?

JK: So, there was me and Riley, the lead singer of Coral 9, a band you guys should checkout. So there was us in high school, then I went off to college at USF, where I met Dominic and Adam, the people who I talked about earlier, who are in Inside Mood. So I had music friends in San Francisco and I had music friends in East Bay, and Ally and Alfonso are the two people who I was talking about earlier from Miami. They used to be the East Bay with us, so it was like, we might as well just converge ‘cause we’re all into the same stuff, we’re all making music. 

SS: I like that. You all just came together. How would you describe your personal genre? We’ve talked about it as a collective, but how would you describe No Room No Sweetener?

JK: Aw man, I don’t know. I feel like nowadays it’s really hard to put a genre onto music because we live in a streaming age. You can listen to whatever kind of music you want, whatever you want. So I feel like the music coming out today is just like a mish-mash of everything, you know. So I never know how to really answer that question. 

SS: Do you have any influences in your music? Do you have any mainstream artists or any indie artists who you really look up to or who you see come out within your music?

JK: Yeah, recently I’ve been really into this girl, her name is Orion Sun. I’m not sure of her pronouns, they could be they/them. I’m trying to be respectful. But, she’s amazing. She came out with two albums and they’ve been all I’ve been listening to for like the past four or five months. 

SS: Who were your favorite musicians when you started in high school?

JK: I was listening to a bunch of Current Joys. That’s what I was super into; that’s why I have this looper pedal on. The band Current Joys was originally just a guy playing guitar with a looper pedal, so I was like, alright, that’s what I wanna do. So I got one, and now I guess I’m kind of returning back to my roots here.

SS: That’s sick. I love that. I really, personally, enjoy your song “Wolf,” and what I wanted to ask about was your creative process in general, but before we do, I want to ask about your creative process in making “Wolf.” Where did you see the first draft for that come alive?

JK: Oh, man. I barely even remember this. I think it was over winter break, whatever year it came out. Winter break of that year. I wanted to put out a project, but like, I guess “Wolf” is about parental issues—a wolf and his little pup. I guess I don’t want to dive completely into that, but yeah, it was about the relationship between father and son in comparison to, like, cute little dogs. 

SS: Where would you say you get the inspiration for most of your music? Would you say you go through like lived experiences and that’s where it comes from? Or do you draw inspiration from different sources?

JK: I feel like it’s always with people. Everything has to be about my relationship with something else, whether it be romantic, platonic, familial. I find most of my inspiration from the ways I interact with other people. 

SS: What type of relationships have inspired you the most, or lit a creative light in you?

JK: Honestly, I would say that’s pretty hard for me to say, I don’t think I’ve really discovered that yet. But as of recently, like in the last year, I’ve found that it’s been a lot of familial stuff. It’s just something that I’ve spent so much time thinking about. I’ve lived with my family, so I’ve had a lot of time to think about my relationship with them.

Article by Natalie Gott