Album: Park Jiha - All Living Things

Park Jiha is a super-talented and gloriously inspired Korean multi-instrumentalist. Her new album follows Philos (2018) and The Gleam (2022) and continues to mine a rich vein of Korean tradition, which she filters through a contemporary aesthetic. This isn't fusion, but the wonderfully original and beguiling exploration of a musical world in which sound, timbre, and form evoke the world of nature.

In cultures of the East – China, Japan and Korea – all languages (visual, verbal and musical)  are connected to nature in a much more direct way than in the West, where words describe at one remove, ‘programme music’ attempts to duplicate, and painting seeks to reproduce a naturalistic view of the world. Jiha’s music shares an essential quality with traditional calligraphy in that she embodies the same energies – the flow of life – as are expressed in plants, buds, flowers, leaves and trees.  There is no distance or duality here, but the intimacy of oneness and presence.

This may sound very abstract, but Jiha produces something bursting quietly with emotional impact –  raw emotion that hasn’t been prettifed or romanticised . There is  a sense of awe – at the beauty of nature, and the cycles of birth, growth and death.

There are no beats here, but pulses that mirror the gentle and constant rising and falling of life. The crystalline sound of the yangguem, a cousin of the santur  and hammered dulcimer, produces cascades of delicate sound. The saenghwang, a free reed mouth organ, is layered and heart-warming, as uplifting, though on a smaller scale, as the large pedalled instruments of our churches. Small is beautiful here, as Jiha conjures great beauty in relative quietness, with her sensitive playing of the piri – a double reed wind instrument that sounds a little like an oboe or a zurna, occasionally rising out of the more meditative whole.

Jiha is one of those artists who work alone – writing, producing, playing all of the overdubbed instruments and mastering the electronics that serve the world of analog ounds she works with rather than upstaging it. Each track plays gracefully with repetition, reminiscent of Western minimalism, which in turn owes a great deal to the music of the East. Music that focuses on the here and now, creating a magical sensation of stillness, while, in the hands of Park Jiha, progressing as well into more dramatic moments, giving each piece, the feeling of carefully crafted jewels, in an enchanting suite of music that she offers in this album.

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