The Band That Gave Up the Drum Stool, and the One Who Sat Down On It

Switching seats in a band is a bigger thing than it sounds.

Look at the credits for No Brain's 30th Anniversary Project Part.5, 'You've Fallen For Me', and the drums are listed as Dowoon. Hwang Hyun-sung, who always plays drums in No Brain, took bass and synth on this one. A month earlier, on Part.4 'Americano', Hwang Hyun-sung's credit read 'Chorus, Drums, Programming'. This time the drums are gone.

The stool was handed over. The drummer's own seat, for one song.

At 1:52, Everyone Stops

The most striking moment in this song arrives at exactly 1:52.6.

Until then the song runs flat as a wall at 154BPM. After the band enters at 2.7 seconds it sits around −10 to −12dB the whole way, barely resting. Then at 1:52.6 the drums and bass stop dead. The low end falls from 5% to 1% of the total, the highs from 20% to 4%. A single note with a fundamental at 110Hz rings very quietly for 1.3 seconds. The subtitles are blank through this stretch too.

1:54.1. The band comes back through that silence, all at once, and the second chorus begins.

It's a nice touch that a song featuring someone playing drums for the first time is built with a place where the drums disappear. Stopping is playing too. To empty exactly 1.3 seconds, four people have to be counting the same beat on either side of it.

Thirty-Three Seconds Shorter

The original is the opening track of the December 2004 album 'Stand Up Again!', and it runs 3 minutes 43. This remake is 3:10. Thirty-three seconds shorter.

Listen and you can more or less hear where it went. This version gets to the first line — "You've fallen for me" — thirteen seconds after the band enters, and the instrumental stretches at 1:17 and 2:18 last only about nine seconds each. They don't drop in volume; they run at the same −10.5dB as the chorus. Nothing sags.

And from 2:27 to 2:48, "You've fallen for me" repeats for more than twenty seconds. The subtitles don't change once across those twenty seconds. That space is left for a crowd. They cut where cutting helped and kept what was worth keeping.

One More Look at the Credits

Part	Played by
Drums	Dowoon
Guitars	Sungjin · Cha Il-hoon
Bass	Hwang Hyun-sung · Cha Il-hoon
Synth	Hwang Hyun-sung
Vocal	Lee Sung-woo · Sungjin · Dowoon

Dowoon didn't only play drums but sang as well, and Sungjin took both vocals and guitar. Lee Tae-seop mixed it at JYPE Studio. A No Brain song, mixed at DAY6's label studio.

Sungjin and Dowoon left this comment: "To think we'd get to do 'You've Fallen For Me' with the No Brain guys… it's an enormous honour for us!"

The Last Twenty Seconds Are Voice Alone

At 2:52 the band stops again. By 2:55.3 it has dropped to −74dB, almost silence. At 2:55.6 the word "fallen" enters with no low end under it at all, and 0.8 seconds later a single cymbal lands on top. At 2:56.9 the band returns for a last riff, and rather than a hard ending it fades slowly over seven seconds.

There is no movement in the video. Still portraits of Dowoon, Lee Sung-woo, Hwang Hyun-sung and Sungjin are set side by side in four vertical panels, with two lines of lyrics changing in black and white above them. There's nothing to watch, so you listen. That was probably the point.

This one is good for driving. 154BPM pushes without a break, it stops once in the middle and comes back, and there's a twenty-second singalong at the end. Alone in a car, you'll sing those twenty seconds.

You've fallen for me.