Tingling through the machine
As Kimchi Princi, rapper and poet Gina Karlikoff crafts stories about romance and the internet. Isabella Trimboli meets the musician IRL.
Words Isabella Trimboli | Photo Elliot Lauren | October 2016
Kimchi Princi’s “Internet Friends” is not a typical rap music video. Dressed in a translucent pink jacket and earrings engraved with her name, the twenty-one-year-old rapper from Sydney cavorts and pouts in a pristine public bathroom. After accidentally dropping her phone into the next-door cubicle, she befriends @ilovebrucewillis, a fellow Sydney-based artist who boasts a 100k following on Instagram. What follows is a distinctly contemporary social conundrum: do you feign ignorance or admit you know one another? But Kimchi and the Instagram star don’t fret. Instead, they make the bathroom their own dance club and jump and grind while Kimchi laments, in an autotune croon, that her love interest is too scared to leave his “lil virtual shell”.
Social media gives us the agency to cut and paste and edit our own image. We can take time to compose the perfect email or tweet, but with that control comes the constant negotiation of our relationships. Dalliances over the internet can, as Kimchi raps on “Internet Friends”, make you “tingle through the machine”. Although, it is an ephemeral lust that flatlines once communication breaks down. As much as we can mould ourselves into what we deem “desirable”, there’s no way of really knowing what’s going on beyond our own screens.
At a cafe in Surry Hills, Kimchi tells me “Internet Friends” is about that cognitive dissonance: “I’ve just encountered too many people who I’ll talk to online and they’ll be like ‘Let’s do something’ and I’ll be like ‘Yeah, that sounds great’... And then it will come to [the day] and they’ll be like ‘oh sorry, forgot to reply, I’ve been busy’. And eventually you see them out you’re like, “Oh you’re not even hot... like, what are you doing?”
“As she expressed on Twitter recently: ‘You won’t find my heart on my sleeve, but you will find it on my SoundCloud.’ ”
Talking about the internet without sounding trite is difficult. The term “internet artist” is so loaded that it can obfuscate the validity of the work being created. For a twenty-something university student like Kimchi, the digital world is a logical extension of her IRL self. And yet she’s constantly branded with the term by the local music press. Kimchi isn’t perturbed by the phrase—she just sees it as arbitrary. She’s not going to lengths to cater to the millennial milieu, she’s simply using music to sift through her own shitty relationships, social media gaffes and identity politics: “This music,” she says, “is just a huge extension of what’s happening around me.” Or as she expressed on Twitter recently: “You won’t find my heart on my sleeve, but you will find it on my SoundCloud.”
Kimchi’s desire to unpack her real life experiences is written all over Just in my room, Just on my phone, her debut EP, released this June. Recorded in her bedroom, the work is a mix of spoken word and rap, accompanied by bass-heavy beats by local producers. Lyrically, it’s a five-song opus on navigating the highs and lows and grey areas of modern romantic relationships. On “Blood”, she rips into streetwear fuckbois (“Yeh you’re wearing Rick Owens/like it solved all your problems”); on “Shift” she tells the story of a sweet backseat tryst, and on “Wake Me Up”, she recalls an Instagram sleuthing gone awry (“Stalking skills confused with cheap thrills”). The EP is equal parts comic and brutally confessional in its candour; Kimchi charts romantic elation and seething heartbreak—sometimes within a single song. Letting her guard down, and showing this duality is important to her: “I like it when you can be tough but also vulnerable as fuck... because that’s how I feel a lot of the time.”
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Kimchi’s SoundCloud output only dates back a year, but music and words gripped her early on. She played classical piano as a child, and studied musical composition in her final years of high school. It was during this time that Kimchi discovered performance poetry, subsequently becoming a fixture at local readings and shows across the city. After school she formed a hip-hop group—Fat Man and Clitoris—with a friend. (“We’d go for walks and I’d just rap my feelings.”) Though a relatively short-lived project, Kimchi fell in love with the genre: it became a way for her to combine poetry and music, things she says have always been concurrent in her creative life.
Off stage she goes by Gina Karlikoff—Kimchi’s nom de guerre is a way for her to own her Korean heritage: “When I started [Kimchi Princi] I was learning a lot about cultural stuff, like what it meant to be from an Asian background and what whiteness was, because I never really thought about it in high school.”
Family plays an important role in her work. Her sister, Danielle Karlikoff, handles her accompanying visuals, from photographing her EP cover to directing and filming all her music videos. Because of this, Kimchi’s work has a tight aesthetic lineage—taking references from K-pop, pre-internet digital graphics and everything in between. “It’s a way of working where I feel comfortable,” she says of the creative partnership with her sister. “We can be really honest. I’ll do a rap for her and she’ll be like, ‘That sounds shit’, and then I’ll go do it again until it sounds good. We push each other.”
One of the sisters’ best collaborations is the video clip for single “Shine 4 Me”, which Kimchi released last November. The song was inspired by the their mother: a former nun-in-training from Waegwan in Korea, whose conservative views are often at odds with Kimchi’s romantic life. The accompanying video explores this conflict. While beginning in the traditional hip-hop sense—with both sisters appearing in the backseat of a luxury car—things suddenly change once Kimchi reveals to her love interest that the elusive “problem” isn’t him, or her—it’s her mum. “These white boys,” she sighs, and in an instant the clip cuts to a shot of Kimchi and her (real-life) mother donning matching Handoks—Korean traditional dress. While Kimchi may lament her mother’s extreme high standards (“She wants it all for her girl/ Sarangheo means nothing/ if you don’t have a diamond thing”), the song and visuals read as an acknowledgement rather than a criticism. Punctuated with Korean phrases and words, Kimchi gets where her mother’s coming from (“Gotta listen to the expectations/of the hungeul mal relations”) and if the “white boys” won’t understand, well... she’ll happily show them to the door.
“She’s beaming ear-to-ear and the audience eats it up, clamouring around her in a sweaty circle to record the action onto their Snapchat stories.”
When I try to steer our conversation to her early, more spoken-word output, Kimchi is keen to keep the focus on the present. She’s moved on. She tells me she’s heading to the studio to record new songs in the coming weeks. It will be the first time she’s recorded in a studio, which she says “feels like the most legit thing ever”. And what will her new work sound like? “I’d say Kimchi’s out of the room now. Out of the room and into the club!”
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I catch Kimchi performing in the club a couple of weeks later, for the official launch of her EP at Club 77, a dive bar turned late-night electronic club on William Street in Darlinghurst. There is no stage area, but Kimchi makes do. Wearing a black cheerleader skirt, fishnet stockings and a Calvin Klein bralette, she tears up her designated “stage” and doesn’t let up for the entire 30-minute set. She jumps onto leather couches and the DJ deck, spitting and singing with vigour and perfect rapper diction.
She’s beaming ear-to-ear and the audience eats it up, clamouring around her in a sweaty circle to record the action onto their Snapchat stories. With verses coming in thick and fast without respite, she’s right about her new stuff: it’s harder and faster than previous efforts, and all the better for it.
Her unbridled performance gets me thinking back to our conversation. I’d asked about the idea of a persona—whether there was any distance between Gina and Kimchi. She said she’d been asked that a lot, often after friends had seen her live. “It’s just a side of myself that I don’t always show,” she said. “It’s like, do you want to me to be at this coffee shop running up on the walls and giving everything? On stage I’m allowed to let my entire heart bleed and arse shake at the same time and that is so good to me. It fills me up.”
This piece first appeared in Swampland issue one.