Jeonramhoe

The song that won two college freshmen the grand prize and a special prize at the 1993 MBC College Song Festival. Four years later it was re-recorded for their final record, “Graduation.”

• Jazz-inflected harmony (chords that stack a few extra notes on the basic triad to deepen their color) lies beneath it all. It was an idiom rarely heard at the College Song Festival in the early 1990s.
• This was the pair's first collaboration, with Kim Dong-ryul writing the melody and Seo Dong-wook the lyrics. The division of labor that defined Exhibition began with this song.
• Listen to the festival original and the 1997 re-recording on “Graduation” back to back, and you can hear how much the voice and the arrangement firmed up in four years.
• The speaker drifts between dream and reality, talking as if to himself, which suits the calm, low-register way it is sung.

The title track of the first album, written by Kim Dong-ryul in high school, and the song that made the college duo known all at once. Eighteen years later, the film “Architecture 101” brought it back onto the charts.

• It opens with a piano introduction, and the strings layer in one by one. The trumpet solo in the interlude (a passage where a single wind instrument carries the melody alone) is often named the song's finest moment.
• Kim Dong-ryul is said to have believed a recording had to be finished in a single take, so he sang it just once and walked out. Hence the story among fans that the opening notes sound slightly flat.
• Rather than belting high notes, he sings in a low register, almost as if speaking. The voice of a monologue, looking back alone on a love gone by, comes from this way of singing.
• In the 2012 film “Architecture 101,” it served as the song that calls up memories of first love, and sales of the first album rose sharply after the film's release.

A song that preserves, just as it was, a studio conversation among Shin Hae-chul, Seo Dong-wook and Kim Dong-ryul. The mood between newcomers and their senior producer lingers on the recording.

• In the chatter mixed into the track you can hear, one after another, Seo Dong-wook proposing real horns, Kim Dong-ryul worrying about the cost, and Shin Hae-chul telling them to just do it.
• The live horn playing recorded at the end of that conversation (live brass — real brass played by musicians, not a synthesizer) lights up the song.
• The story goes that it was originally meant for the College Song Festival. Seo Dong-wook wrote the lyrics and Kim Dong-ryul the music.
• The version on Kim Dong-ryul's best-of album drops the chatter, which has made the first-album original, conversation and all, the version people seek out.

The title track of the second album, which the two made themselves after their military service. It pairs with the album's English subtitle, Strangers.

• Kim Dong-ryul handled the lyrics, music and arrangement alone. The character of the second album, made by newcomers who had once learned from their producer and now led the studio themselves, shows in this song.
• It deals with the solitude of someone standing alone in a strange place. It sounds far darker and heavier than the wistful first-love mood of the first album.
• Since Kim Dong-ryul conducted the string sessions himself on this album, the way the strings support the voice repays close listening.

It was not the title track but the eighth song on the second album, yet in the end it became the song that stands for Exhibition.

• A first-person confession, its true feelings voiced only with the help of drink. The speaker's wavering between hesitation and courage forms the emotional core of the whole song.
• A long ballad of more than five minutes, built to pile up feeling patiently, layer on layer, and let it burst in the chorus (the central passage repeated throughout a song).
• A separate version sung on the 1996 College Song Festival stage survives — proof of a song loved apart from its album.
• Coinciding with the spread of karaoke rooms across the country, it came to be commonly named the song to sing for a confession.

It was on a demo tape from their high-school days, and it was the song that first brought the two together. Only on the final album was it formally recorded.

• Noh Young-sim played the piano. Kim Dong-ryul, who always played the keys himself, concentrates on singing in this song.
• Seo Dong-wook heard this song and sent in a written response, and that is where Exhibition began. The song of the beginning, then, ended up on the album of the end.
• At “A Walk,” the 2025 concert in memory of Seo Dong-wook, Kim Dong-ryul sang it alongside “Etude of Memories,” and the song took on a new meaning.

The title Exhibition gave to their own final farewell as the breakup approached, and the title track of their last album.

• Kim Dong-ryul conducted the strings, and the album's description even listed the genre as orchestral. The strings spread out wide, giving the farewell its weight.
• Kim Se-hwang, guitarist of N.EX.T, played guitar. The ties formed with musicians in Shin Hae-chul's circle carried through to the very last album.
• A song that sends off school days and youth. It sounds entwined with the real paths of the two, who went their separate ways.