OPENING NOTES
I believe that we are all born musicians. I’ve been told that, as a baby, I cried during sad songs and laughed during happy ones. Before I understood words, I understood feeling. Nearly forty years later, that hasn’t changed.
This project begins there: with curiosity about what moves, inspires, and transforms us. Through essays, videos, curation tools, and listening gatherings, we’ll explore how music travels across time, cities, and cultures—and bring artists and listeners into closer conversation.
Jeff and I come to music from different but overlapping places. He is Chinese-born American; I am American-born Korean. He grew up playing bassoon; I played the cello. We’ve lived in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles. We’ve been deeply shaped by time spent in places like Bangkok, Seoul, and Paris; by sounds born in Detroit, Chicago, Germany, the UK, and far beyond.
I feel in my own life the same tension I see around us: yearning and excitement shadowed by uncertainty about our future. We’re building in this strange moment. In the 2010s, machines learned our taste and fed it back to us; now, machines can make music themselves. We want to cultivate a more active listening culture by creating shared experiences like the one that brought us here.
Jeff and I arrive at Wonderfruit’s Forbidden Fruit stage at 7 p.m. on Friday, December 12, 2025. For two hours under dim purple lights, I’m in a trance, transported by the intricate layering of rhythm and harmony. The mixing is meticulous, the energy builds without haste, and the sound is pristine.
That night clarifies what draws us in: music shaped by restraint. Its energy comes as much from what is withheld as from what is added. Patient transitions create space for contrasting sounds to meet: soft, jazzy drum textures brushing against an unyielding techno pulse; airy, ambient soundscapes floating over metallic, industrial percussion. Where these threads converge, tension builds and resolves, only to begin again.
We’re building a home for music chosen with care–music that is hard, delicate, chaotic, and beautiful all at once. A place where listening can open into love, expansiveness, possibility, and belonging.
We’re following what moves us, wherever it leads.
Come listen with us.
–John & Jeff
Forbidden Fruit Sound is an independent project and is not affiliated with Wonderfruit or the Forbidden Fruit stage. Its name was inspired by a formative listening experience we shared there in 2025.