Ensemble Mik Nawooj (EMN)’s Hip-Hop Orchestra Experience is part concert, dance party, and club night featuring original music that samples from classical and hip-hop—all presented in an underground setting like the New York scene that birthed hip-hop. Their music uniquely challenges the MCs and classical musicians pushing the boundaries of both hip-hop and concert music, creating something completely new. The program includes seminal works of Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven, deconstructed and reimagined with funky rhythms and rapid-fire rhymes.

Led by composer/pianist, JooWan Kim, the Hip-Hop Orchestra ­Experience featuring EMN creates Metamusic by sampling principles of Hip-Hop and Classical. Executed with resident MCs, a lyric soprano, woodwinds, French horns, strings, piano, and drums, the music is rigorous, nuanced, accessible, and free from the dogmas of Western European concert music aesthetic.  The result is seamless tête-à-tête with "textures swimming through the sound...like the world's fastest ping-pong game" (Pitchfork) and is considered the "cutting edge of hip-hop" (Huffington Post). 

After a successful performance of a novelty piece which featured an MC and chamber ensemble, Kim had a profound shift in the direction of his writing. He felt that he found a way out of the stifling contemporary concert music aesthetic in this new way of composition. JooWan crystallized his ideas into Method Sampling, a principle of borrowing or sampling of rationales from related as well as unrelated fields, then reframing them into one's own system.

In 2010, JooWan Kim recruited his best friend from college, Christopher Nicholas to push the project forward in a serious way. Since then, EMN attracted some of the most excellent classical musicians and MCs in the SF Bay Area while gaining national attention from outlets such as BBC, ESPN, Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, NPR, Pitchfork, NowThis, and more.