A. Typist is a project group formed in 2011 by Korean musician Hankil Ryu and writers lo
wie and Taeyong Kim. The group is interested in the unusual and sudden results of acts
of writing, exploring if writing can be another way of producing music/nonmusic works.
Investigating an unknown area between text and sound, they apply sound technology to
old typewriters and their own mechanisms so that, in addition to the original sound, a
sound derived from writing is produced. A.Typist's first works – Beckett's Typist, Profile,
and Descriptions for Other Things – have been released as three CD+Book sets in 2011
by The Manual and Mediabus.
http://themanual.co.kr
Hankil Ryu is a musician interested in finding an alternative musical structure in
abandoned objects like clockworks, typewriters and telephones. After discovering the
instrumental possibilities of a typewriter, he started to collaborate with writers lo wie and
Taeyong Kim. Since 2005, he organised a monthly event called RELAY and established
The Manual, his own publishing office.
lo wie has written screenplays and text for video works and now collaborates with other
musicians in making sound by writing text.
Taeyong Kim is a novelist born in 1974 in Seoul, South Korea. He majored in creative
writing at the Graduate School of Soongsil University and currently is Professor of
creative writing at Seoul Institute of the Arts. He has published two books of short stories,
Pig on the Grass (2007) and Pimp Story (2012), and a novel, Straight Out (2010), that
examines the fate of man in a world where language invariably betrays intention, yet there
is no choice but to use language to retain thought. One of his short stories has been
published in France under the name J'etais un Maquereau (2011, Cartouche). In 2008, he
won The Korea Times Literary Award and in 2012 the Moonji Literary Award.
