Name: Jaeyong Lee aka Closet Yi
Nationality: South Korean
Occupation: Producer, DJ
Current release: Closet Yi's new EP Cloudborne 888 is out via Clasico.
Recommendations for Seoul, South Korea: It’s funny that I ended up spending the longest time trying to answer this question haha. I’m very considerate with my recommendation list when I have guests here and it varies a lot depending on each person’s vibe so I’ll just simply tell you my favorite food place to go. Hwanggeum Kongbat (황금콩밭). It literally translates as ‘golden bean farm’ and it is known for the best tofu. It’s another level. Try the simple steamed tofu, or have it with braised pork or as a spicy soup! Sometimes Korean food can be hard for vegans since we use a lot of animal based seasonings and broths, so in that sense it’s a perfectly safe choice too.  
Topic that I am passionate about but rarely get to talk about: I’m actually a bit of a quiet gardener! Just a small collection of herbs on my balcony, but I get so much joy out of watching them grow. It’s not exactly the most practical hobby for someone who disappears for gigs a few times a month — really need a good friend group to water them when I’m out — but when I get to harvest and cook with them, it feels so rewarding.
Basil is a must since it’s so expensive here, coriander grows like it’s showing off, and thyme and rosemary are basically the chill, low-maintenance jobs.  

If you enjoyed this Closet Yi interview and would like to stay up to date with her music and upcoming live dates, visit her on Instagram, Soundcloud, and bandcamp.

For a deeper dive, read our earlier Closet Yi interview.
 


The path to becoming a producer is a process - but from many interviews, I am under the impression that there are nonetheless one or a few defining moments. If this was the case for you – what were they and why were they so incisive?

I would say it was half self driven and half peer pressure to be honest back in around 2018.

As you dig through more as a professional DJ, I got to see more DJs putting out their own productions which made me curious to explore Ableton and Youtube tutorials. I think that was a pretty natural mind flow for me.

However, I also had a couple of producer friends that subtly encouraged me to push forward and actually release some results. You know there’s a lot of skilled people who are masters of their gear, but actually never put out anything. My friends warned me about that and really set me the goal (like a deadline) to actually make something conclusive and start my career as a producer.

I can’t agree more on that idea ever since then!

Tell me about one or two of your early pieces that you're still proud of (or satisfied with) in terms of production – and why you're content with them.

‘Bird Emporium’ that I released as part of the All My Thoughts compilation is an early work that I’ve done in 2019, but shows the strength of my skills playing and tweaking samples.



I think it really expresses well my love for textures and silhouettes of sounds and patterns, and also gave me the confidence of being able to find a starting path of what I wanna develop.

In how far, would you say, was your evolution as an artist connected to the evolution of your music set-up and studio? Were there shared stepping stones?

Hmm maybe this might not be the answer you expected, but I wanna talk more about the environment that I was in other than the technical set ups for this question.

The ‘set up’ that I had was always shared with different people, first I had a group space, then I moved into a new one with Jesse You, and now I’m sharing my space with two close producer friends.

Keeping producers in the similar boundary close to you is really helpful not just for intellectual sharings, but also it obviously makes you able to share and discuss your goals and agonies about your career and especially helps an introverted, shy person like myself. I highly recommend it!

There are artists who can realise their ideas best with a traditional – or modified – piano interface, others with a keyboard and a mouse, yet others by turning knobs or touching screens. What's your preferred and most intuitive/natural way of making music and why?

I live by dance music (or electronic in general), it's very physical music compared to other genres. So I always start with a rhythm or pattern sequence that triggers my instinct to groove.

Maybe I have one or two pieces where a key theme sample or melody triggered me, but most of the time it’s the other way around.

From the earliest sketches to the finished piece, tell me about the production process for the Cloudborn 888 EP, please.

My process usually starts playing with simple drum patterns — a sketch of rhythms that interests my body.

For the recent Cloudborn 888 EP, it was a loop I built late at night, almost like an automatic response from the body. From there, I kept layering textures, pulling sounds apart and flipping them, until the sketch started to speak its own words.

Once I have that core, the rest is about shaping the architecture of the track: sculpting dynamics, letting silence and transients play as important a role as the core sounds themselves. I try my best to mix along the production, because at the end the mixing itself defines the texture and atmosphere of dance music so you wanna start it right from the first place.

By the time the piece feels finished, it’s less about perfection and more about whether it carries the atmosphere I was chasing from the very first sketch. That through-line — keeping the initial spark alive while building structure around it — is what defines the production process for me.

Late producer SOPHIE said: “You have the possibility with electronic music to generate any texture, and any sound. So why would any musician want to limit themselves?” What's your take on that?

Absolutely! I love that you brought up SOPHIE and completely agree with the beauty of electronic music. Actually that’s exactly the reason that enabled me to have the drive to craft my skills towards.

I’m self taught, but do have a background in science so this endless possibility based on signals and wavelengths felt to me like an approachable and fun subject to dive into!

Tell me about your aesthetic preferences for picking effects like reverb, delay, compression, chorus etc … - what was the role of these effects in the production of your current release?

Effects are essential to my sounds, giving them identity by creating textures and characters. It’s not just an addition to use for pattern transitions or build ups, but for me a way to shape sounds.

I have some preset DIY packs of a layer of delays, ensemble chorus, saturation, and pannings that I use subtly for almost all of my sound designs. I really enjoyed using this for my recent Cloudborn 888 EP and although I know I can’t use this forever, I like the idea of it and will settle with this workflow from now on.

I do wanna shift this with some new plugins, even some hardware effectors but will have to see how it goes along!

Producers work with sound in a very direct way for very long stretches of time. What are some of its qualities that you appreciate now more than before, and how do you try to bring these to the fore in your work?

I used to think of sound as just building blocks — kicks, bass, hi-hats, synths — obviously because it’s dance music to trigger body movements.

But now I’ve started appreciating its more fragile, almost textural qualities. The way a transient breathes, the way silence between sounds creates its own kind of rhythm — those details have become more important to me than the big gestures.

By letting a reversed kick feel slightly imperfect so it leaves a trace of human touch, or by making space for tones to decay in a way that feels like architecture rather than just utility. It’s a shift from thinking of sound as ‘parts of a track’ [...].

And of course that gives a better completion to the track both functionally and emotionally.

The current production process allows for fast and infinite variations. Can you tell me about how you deal with this potential for the infinite and what ultimately decides on how many iterations to create and which version to release?

I totally agree with your viewpoint, and actually that infinite possibility is what makes the work more interesting to me. Variations and different transition points are key to club music, and little changes can really be the key aspect to make diggers and listeners purchase a song.

The key here is to be careful not to be in your safe zone, because otherwise you end up having a habit of structuring things in the same way. It’s inevitable - humans are creatures of habit.

I try to have a few key reference tracks in this sense to break my pattern and adapt certain variation techniques and make them my own thing.

Production, as opposed to live performance, can be a lonely process and feedback from listeners isn't always tangible. What is it about it that gives you satisfaction?

Production has always been like that. So solitude isn’t really a negative aspect, to me anyways, but actually a safe place for me to escape from the outside craziness.

When I’m working alone, the satisfaction comes from building a world. The reward after releasing the track is slower, so I try to be patient with it around the time it gets released. Putting out music is not like cooking retort food in the microwave.

The music lives on the web forever, and I try to treat it as a byproduct of myself floating in outer space somewhere, unconsciously.

We can watch videos on production, take producer courses, and exchange deep insights on gear forums. Amidst these options to improve one's chops/skills, how do you keep things playful?

Well, regarding the music genre that I’m into, I can’t emphasize enough the importance of having a proper hearing environment with good speakers. It’s not just for ‘improvement’, but having a better acoustic room opens up so many frequencies you can distinguish and stimulates your creativity.

Of course I used to work in bedroom environments with shitty speakers, and at that time maybe it was good enough. But leveling up speakers and room acoustics made me enjoy making music so much more!

AI is already capable of making something most people would recognise as music. I am curious, though, and will keep this question somewhat broad on purpose: What do you think that means?   

What excites me more is how these tools expand the technical boundaries for independent producers.

Mixing and EQing used to be a huge barrier — hours of trial and error, expensive studio time, or specialist engineers. Now, AI-driven plugins can suggest balances, tame frequencies, giving artists more room to try new things and not get swamped in technical bottlenecks.

The human part — taste, intention, storytelling — is still irreplaceable, but AI allows those qualities to come forward more clearly because the technical hurdles are lowered.