Music is life

Seoul Train, born Jun Seok Kim in South Korea, adopted to the Netherlands and now based in London, UK, is an award-winning musician, composer, producer, DJ and artist.

Since the age of 6, Seoul Train has been playing music. He started out on the piano, debuted as an MC in 1996 at the Racism Beat It Festival, NL, became a producer in 2001 and DJ’ed his first gig in 2004. His music was used by MTV Europe to promote the VMAs that year and in 2007 he played B’estival with the band TrackAddicts, a live band signed by George Clinton’s WeFunk Records that caught the attention of Pharrell Williams who was said to have muttered “Cool tunes, cool tunes…”

After almost a decade of touring throughout the Netherlands, he moved to the UK in 2011 to study for an MA in Audio Production at the University of Westminster. After graduation, he worked from Soho Studios, MVLS Studios and designed and built OnDaBeat Studio and Coolio Productions Studio.

Seoul Train became an authority in K-Pop and K-Hip-Hop and started playing events throughout the UK but also played in the Netherlands, Ireland and Estonia. He also played at London Fashion Week, hosted the Changwon K-Pop World Festival and regularly works with the Korean Cultural Centre in London.

When he went from slightly visually impaired to legally blind in 2017, Seoul Train saw only one way out: going back to uni. He got a second Master degree in Ethnomusicology at SOAS, where he learned to play the Janggu, a traditional Korean drum. He is featured in the short film “Kut” by Insook Chapell as traditional drummer and played the Janggu in InYoung Lee’s play “Surviving Strangers.”

Seoul Train composed the music for the Hot Hanbok / Cool Glass show, held at the International Festival of Glass 2022, which was filmed and made into a documentary. The documentary won “Best Documentary” at the Korea International Short Film Festival and the Busan New Wave Short Film Festival.

Currently Seoul Train is writing and creating new music in between taking bookings for 2024.