MEMI gives the same origin story in most interviews, and it is a good one. An uncle who played guitar as a hobby handed her his old Fender when she was a teenager. She started playing at sixteen, went on to study music at university with guitar as her focus, and ended up lead guitarist of the band 24Hours. Before that, and alongside it, she played in Seoul Moon.

The other detail she returns to is a concert. At eighteen she saw Avril Lavigne play in Korea. For a lot of guitarists of that generation the formative live show is a metal band; hers was pop-punk, and it shows in the songwriting more than the playing.

The bands she names as influences are the Smashing Pumpkins, Korn and Two Door Cinema Club. That is three very different rooms, and it is a more honest list than most artists give, because the third name does not flatter the first two.

The gear, briefly

She collects old guitars and has said plainly that she prefers them: something is different about them, and a used instrument carries a history a new one does not. There were eight in her room at the time of the JoySauce interview. This site does not hold a verified rig list, and rather than assemble one from freeze frames of video, it holds nothing. If you have documented gear information with a source, send it in.

Checking the story against the archive

The useful thing about a 525-clip cover archive is that it can be checked against the interviews.

Korn shows up seven times, which matches the stated influence exactly. The Smashing Pumpkins do not show up in the tagged counts at all, which does not mean she has never played them, only that she has not tagged one. Two Door Cinema Club appears sideways: undercovermartyn is one of their song titles and turns up in the tags, which is how the site's cover matcher learned to exclude it from a naive search for the word "cover".

What the interviews do not predict is the rest of the table. Radiohead at seven, willow at seven, Paramore at five, Coldplay and Metallica level at three. Avril Lavigne being the formative live show explains Paramore better than Korn does, and nothing in the interviews explains Radiohead.

The fuller version is in who MEMI actually covers.

Who has noticed

The endorsements are worth listing because they come from opposite ends of the same table. Bring Me The Horizon, Limp Bizkit and Beabadoobee have all given her a public nod. A nu-metal institution, a metalcore band that became a stadium act, and an indie songwriter. That spread is the same spread the cover counts show, which suggests the people paying attention have read her more accurately than the "Korean nu-metal guitarist" shorthand does.