There was no music school near where she grew up, so when she went to learn electric guitar she ended up at a studio known for hosting metal guitarists. She was sixteen. The instrument was an old Fender handed down by an uncle who played as a hobby.

She asked her first teacher for a pop-punk song. He laughed, and then started her on blues and classic rock, which in practice meant "Stairway to Heaven". She has said it felt far too long, over seven minutes, and boring to her at that age. She turned up wanting Avril Lavigne and got the fundamentals.

The influences, by period

She describes her influences in the order they arrived: Avril Lavigne while she was learning, Korn and Placebo through her emo years, Arctic Monkeys and Foals when she started her first band, and Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin from the teacher's end of it. In a 2024 interview she added Phoenix, Fred Durst and beabadoobee.

The three bands she names in short-form interviews are the Smashing Pumpkins, Korn and Two Door Cinema Club. The third does not obviously belong with the other two.

The early clips

Her earliest clips are sixteen Instagram posts from 2017 to 2020, all with Korean captions and no audience to speak of. They line up with the interviews almost item for item.

The blues is there: Stevie Ray Vaughan's "Pride and Joy" in August 2017, captioned as the first blues she had played in ages. The first band years are there: Arctic Monkeys' "Fluorescent Adolescent", filmed in London in spring 2018 and posted the following January, on a Fernandes. Around it sit Rage Against the Machine's "Bombtrack", Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Give It Away", Royal Blood's "Figure It Out", RADWIMPS, Papooz twice, boy pablo, Yungblud and Twenty One Pilots.

Korn, from her emo years, doesn't turn up until November 2022, fifteen years later and once people had started watching.

Her bands show up as well. Through 2018 she was posting guitar from Havana, Varadero and Egypt while playing in Seoulmoon, including their single "해 뜰 때 까지". In 2020 and 2021 she was posting 24Hours tracks, one of them a second guitar part laid over her own band's song.

The interviews wouldn't lead you to Radiohead or willow, yet she has tagged seven covers of each, level with Korn. The full count is in who MEMI covers, counted.

The gear

Two Guitarnet demos put a guitar on camera with a name attached: a Heritage H-150 with a Bigsby, playing "Guitar Pick" in December 2023, and a Sterling SUB AXIS 3, playing "NY(f)C" in January 2024. Both are on the media page.

Her own hashtags name the rest. By number of posts: Gibson 156, Fender 95, Telecaster 63, SG 28, Les Paul 27, Ibanez 18, Yamaha 18, Stratocaster 16, Schecter 9, Les Paul Custom 8, Squier 5, Epiphone 2, PRS 1. One guitar can carry three of those tags, so the numbers show how often each name turns up in her posts and say little about how many she owns.

Two of them have a story. The first Ibanez was a gift, in October 2022. In December 2022 Chil Label built her one.

On the amp and software side: Neural DSP in January 2025, Victory Amps in June 2025, and a Paradise Guitar Studio plugin through Universal Audio that she said in March 2026 she had been running for three months.

She told JoySauce in March 2024 that she had never counted her guitars but could see eight of them in her room, and that she prefers old ones, because you can feel the difference when you touch them.

Her own account of it

"Practice or technical things can be important. Now, when I play and make songs, I realize it's not too important to do technical things. The vibes, the guitarist's identity, and inspiration are very important." A year later, to Bandwagon: "I don't think I'm the type of guitarist known for flashy, technical solos."

The 2018 clips bear that out. Nobody chasing technique spends a year posting "Give It Away" and "Figure It Out" to an audience of nobody.

Who noticed

Her 2024 SXSW press notes list Fred Durst, Phoenix, Oli Sykes of Bring Me The Horizon and Good Charlotte as having commented on or shared her playing. The 2026 UK coverage adds Limp Bizkit and Beabadoobee.

Some of that runs both ways. She covered Limp Bizkit's "Rollin'" in March 2025 and Good Charlotte in June 2025, and she had played along to Bring Me The Horizon's "Mantra" back in 2018, four years before anyone outside Korea was looking.