Gamin Creates a Wild New Universe Blending Korean and Western Sounds

Gamin Kang, who performs under her first name, is a master of Korean wind instruments including the piri flute, sheng-like saenghwang and taepyoungso oboe. She’s made a career out of cross-pollinating with magical, otherworldly, centuries-old Korean folk themes. Her latest album Nong – Korean for “jam,” more or less – includes several collaborations with western ensembles and composers, a bracing and often entrancing series of mashups that hasn’t hit the web yet. Her music is unlike anything else in the world – and she hopes this will springboard more collaborations like it.

The album’s opening piece, Mudang – meaning “shaman” – by Theodore Wiprud is an alternately playful and sternly emphatic piece for quavery piri and string quartet. The ensemble Ethel aptly emulate the low rhythmic insistence of the traditional janggu drum and then flutter and flicker, echoing the soloist’s reedy blue notes throughout this strangely resolute mashup of traditional Korean themes and 21st century western string quartet idioms.

On the Courtship Displays of Birds-of-Paradise, a triptych by Anna Pidgorna begins with The Black Sicklebill, its contrasting textures, cascading chords and suspenseful ambience from the reeds of Michael Bridge‘s accordion and the saengwhang, along with ominous knock-knock effects. In part two, Parotia, it’s even less clear where the keening tones of the saengwhang and accordion diverge, at least until jaunty staccato chords and droll birdsong accents kick in. The Princess Marcia (an imaginary species invented by the composer) turns out to be both shy and ostentatious, with a coy sense of humor.

Violinist Omar Chen Guey and cellist Rafi Popper-Keizer join the bandleader for William David Cooper‘s Two Pieces for Piri and Strings. The strings mimic both the quavery intensity as well as the ghostly haze of the piri in the first part; the variations afterward alternate between anxious leaps and bounds, plucky accents, plaintive resonance and then a stark dance. It’s arguably the album’s most striking interlude.

Eun Young Lee‘s Bagooni – Korean for “basket” – features both the piri and saenghwang along with the string duo in a starkly glissandoing, insistently shamanic but playfully contrapuntal and expertly interwoven tableau. Longtime downtown New York jazz artists Ned Rothenberg and Satoshi Takeishi join the leader, who plays both piri and taepyungso in the album’s concluding, blues-based improvisation. The contrast and tension between the Korean reeds and Rothenberg’s bass clarinet and sax over Takeishi’s hypnotically undulating, folk-influenced percussion is bracing but also conversational, through Rothenberg’s keening duotones, a spine-tingling taepyungso solo and a blazing, syncopated coda. In a year where music was sadistically and abruptly put on pause (or potentially on “stop”) by the lockdowners, this wondrously intense album testifies to what can be accomplished when artists are unmuzzled and free to associate..

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Irresistibly Colorful Improvisations from Korean Trio Saaamkiiim

More today from fascinating new Korean label Mung Music, dedicated to taking some of that country’s strangest and most beguiling improvisational sounds to a global audience. One of their initial slate of releases is Ma-Chal (Korean for “friction”), the debut album by electroacoustic trio Saaamkiiim, streaming at Bandcamp.

There are four tracks: Pointy, Moist, Creepy, and the title cut. Pointy begins as an eerily keening series of electronic loops joined by jagged incisions from Yeji Kim’s haegum fiddle. Sun Ki Kim’s drums and small gongs range from suspenseful, to shamanic, to irrepressibly amusing. The improvisation builds to a series of very funny triangulated interludes – maybe that’s why it’s pointy.

Moist has Dey Kim’s stalactite drips and minimalist piano licks paired with an icy mist of cymbals and shifting sheets of sound from the haegum. The rhythm grows boomier and more insistent along with the fiddle: is this iceberg going to rip apart into a million pieces? Just the opposite, as it turns out.

How creepy is Creepy? Increasingly so, as monster-breath sonics push coy evocations of birdsong from the haegum out of the picture and the funereal gong grows more frantic. Gritty, straining tension and looming atmospherics pervade the early part of the title soundscape, then it gets amusing. No spoilers.

Magical, Otherworldly Korean Improvisation From Baum Sae

Some of the world’s most fascinating and strange music has been coming out of Korea lately. Upstart record label Mung Music are fixated on bringing some of these amazing sounds to a broader audience, not only digitally but also on limited edition cassette and 10” vinyl with original artwork. Perhaps the most individualistic and fascinating of the initial crop of releases is the new ep, Embrace, by Baum Sae (Korean for “Night Birds”), streaming at Bandcamp. Imagine Morphine at their most stark and surreal, with a woman out front singing in Korean: and that’s only a small part of the picture.

The offbeat cicada-like exchanges between pansori singer Borim Kim and geomungo bass lute player Gina Hwang in the first song, 여름 (Summer) reflect the lyric’s pastoral melancholy. The melody strongly evokes Moroccan gnawa music, at least until Kim goes up the scale toward melismatic drama.

The second number, 화 (Anger) is a duet between Kim and drummer Soojin Suh. It’s shorter but much more dramatic and closer to traditional pansori, recounting the execution of a brave individual who dared secondguess a bellicose Chinese emperor. The final cut, 가느다란 선 (Thin Line) slowly and spaciously rises from Suh’s temple bells and Hwang’s suspenseful geomungo, through rather brooding variations on a traditional work song from the Jeju Islands. For all its shadowy ambience, those basslines are catchy!

You will be hearing more here about several other artists on the label in the near future.

Eunhye Jeong and Her Quartet Make Haunting Improvisational Music Out of Otherworldly Korean Pansori Themes

Pianist Eunhye Jeong‘s CHI-DA quartet’s live album The Colliding Beings – streaming at Bandcamp – is like nothing else you’ll hear this year. With an otherworldly intensity true to the spirit of the epic Korean pansori tradition, the group reinvent those stark, dramatic themes as jazz improvisation. What’s most striking is that Jeong brings in the great pansori singer Il-dong Bae, whose stern, melismatic vocals shed eerie microtones and soar over the instrumentalists in more muted moments, and interact with them when the music grows more stormy. The greatest pansori singers are known for their individualistic interpretations, so there’s always been an element of improvisation in the tradition, and Jeong seizes that mightily here, with a relentless unease and a fondness for lower registers. This is dark music.

The concert is a series of longscale works that conclude with a relatively brief, six-minute number. The group – which also includes cellist Ji Park and colorful drummer Soo Jin Suh – open with the almost eighteen-minute Jeogori, based on a historical song popular among diasporic Korean schoolchildren in Japan. There’s a lot of stark conversationality throughout this performance, beginning with murky resonance and quickly giving way to a little leaping around. The drums introduce a suspensefully muted backbeat as the cello scrapes the lows and Jeong colors the music with enigmatic close harmonies and sudden bursts. Bae’s gruffly impassioned intensity eventually recedes for a persistently flurrying, funereal Atrocity Exhibition beat contrasting with all the agitation overhead; then the vocals take over the rhythm. Mysterious lulls and gritty declamations serve as a contrasting backdrops for spare, rather bleak accents from the band.

The ghostly, anguished Return to Life begins with snowbanks of white noise from Suh’s drumheads punctuated by icy piano droplets, shards and wisps of sound from the cello as Jeong goes to stygian lows. A flickering franticness that recalls the macabre compositions of Michael Hersch develops, rises and falls, Jeong using every texture available, both inside and outside the piano, from a menacing drone to furtive scrambles and fragmented, circularly percussive phrases, Bae lingering like a spectre outside the window.

The centerpiece of the concert is The Hope Landed. In about twenty-six minutes, Bae is an often anguished, desolate voice in the wilderness, Jeong a persistently restless presence, Park and Suh the shadows lingering behind. There’s infinitely more going on: dynamically shifting variations on an insistently troubled, stairstepping Messiaenic passage; a long, aching vocal interlude with atmospheric, lurking cello and leapfrogging piano; chilly, ambient dips to stillness; surreal handoffs and echo effects; heavy, severe block chords from Jeong; and a hint of a ballad at the end.

The Sacrifice is dedicated to the victims of the 2014 Sewol Ferry disaster. Calm/acerbic contrasts between cello and piano build tension, then back away elegantly for Bae’s mournful intonations: this music transcends any linguistic limitation. The grim crescendo midway through, seemingly where the overcrowded boat capsizes and everything goes flying, is arguably the most intense point of the show. They bring it full circle, elegaically.

They close the concert with Curtain Call, a return to contrasts between shamanistic beats and poltergeist piano blurts, and shivers from the rest of the ensemble. Even if free jazz is a little outside for you, the roles are so clearly defined and the playing so focused here that fans of dark sounds in general should check this out.

In Her First New York Solo Show, Seungmin Cha Invents a Riveting, Brand New Kind of Music

It’s impossible to think of anyone other than Seungmin Cha who could make a tiny dinner bell sound more menacing than she did at her first-ever New York solo concert last weekend. Or for that matter, who could get as much sound as she did out of a single Korean daegeum flute, sometimes serene and verdant, other times acidic or even macabre.

“Can I check out your rig?” an interested concertgoer asked her before the show.

“Sure,” she replied. On the floor in front of her were a couple of large pedalboards’ worth of stompboxes, hardly limited to reverb, delay, disortion, chorus, flange and an envelope filter. Hardly what you would expect a virtuoso of a centuries-old folk instrument to be playing her axe through.

“This is a guitar rig,” the spectator observed. “Is that a volume pedal?” 

“It’s a total guitar rig,” Cha smiled. “That’s a distortion pedal. For my vocals.”

But this wasn’t a rock show. Instead, Cha invented a brand new kind of music right there on the spot. This particular blend of ancient Korean folk themes, western classical, jazz improvisation and the furthest reaches of the avant garde might have only existed for this one night.

She began by slowly making her way in a circle around the audience. It took her a good fifteen minutes, playing subtle, meticulously nuanced variations on a gentle Korean pastoral theme. On one hand, this might have been a welcoming gesture, a comfortably lulling interlude. More likely, Cha was getting a sense of the room’s acoustics for when she really cut loose.

Which she did, eventually. At one point, she was getting two separate overtones out of the flute, without relying on the electronics. As it turned out, she’d been talking shop with her special guest, clarinetist Ned Rothenberg, before the show and he’d shown her a couple of overtones. Which, maybe half an hour after learning them, she incorporated into the show. Can anybody say fearless?

As Cha built her first improvisational mini-epic of the night, a mist of microtones wafted through the space, sometimes light and tingling, sometimes mysteriously foggy. Slow, judicious bends and dips flowed through a mix that she eventually built to a dark deep-space pulse, the flute’s woody tone cutting through like a musical Hubble telescope somewhere beyond Pluto but unwilling to relent on its search for new planets. Yet when she sang a couple of resigned “my love’s gone over the hills” type ballads, her vocals made a contrast, low and calm – until she hit her pedal to raise the surrealism factor through the roof.

As it turns out, Cha can also be very funny. She began an improvisation inspired by a snakelike Alain Kirili sculpture on the floor in front of her with a sort of one-sided Q&A…then decided to pick it up and play it as if it was a flute. Grrrr!! This thing is evil!

Rothenberg joined her for a lively duet to close the show: he tried goosing her with a few riffs early on, and she goosed back, but it became clear that she wanted to take this in a more serious direction and he went with it, adding judicious, mostly midrange, confidently bubbling motives while Cha took a slow, similarly considered upward path. It was a playful way to close what had been an intense and sometimes harrowing journey up to that point. You’ll see this on the Best Concerts of 2017 page here later this year.

Cha flew back to her home turf in Seoul the next day, but a return to New York is in the works: watch this space.

Jen Shyu Debuts Her Spellbinding, Relevant New Suite at Roulette

Ultimately, Jen Shyu‘s mission is to break down cultural barriers and unite people. In her own work, the singer/multi-instrumentalist has assimilated an astonishing number of styles, both from her heritage – Taiwan and East Timor – as well as from Korea, Indonesia, China and the United States, among other places around the world. Last night at Roulette she celebrated her birthday by unveiling a bracingly dynamic, otherworldly surrealistic, envelopingly beautiful new suite, Song of Silver Geese, a characteristically multilingual work combining the strings of the Mivos Quartet as well as vibraphonist Chris Dingman’s Jade Tongue ensemble with violist Mat Maneri, bassist Thomas Morgan, drummer Dan Weiss and flutist Anna Webber.

Shyu opened with a series of judicious plucks on her Korean gayageum lute, then switched to piano, Taiwanese moon lute and eventually a small Indonesian gong. Throughout the roughly hourlong piece, dancer Satoshi Haga struck dramatic poses when he wasn’t moving furtively or tiptoeing in the background when the music reached a lull.

The storyline, according to the program notes, involves the interaction between two characters from Timorese and Korean folklore, both known for their disguises, in addition to an iconic Taiwanese freedom fighter and a Javanese schoolgirl who was tragically orphaned at age six in a car accident.

Spare exchanges between the strings and the gayageum grew to an uneasy lustre evocative of 80s serialism, Cellist Mariel Roberts’ wounded, ambered lines eventually giving way to sinister microtones from Maneri. Shyu’s switch to the moon lute signaled a long upward climb through a dreamlike sequence punctuated by Weiss’ increasingly agitated rumble and the flutter of the strings, texturally ravishing yet troubled.

Shyu’s uncluttered vocals were just as dynamic, ranging from a whisper, to an imploring, angst-fueled Carol Lipnik-like delivery, to an insistent, earthy, shamanistic growl and pretty much everywhere in between. The big coda, seemingly meant to illustrate the fatal crash, built to a pandemonium that came as a real shock in view of the lustre and glistening atmospherics that had been lingering up to that point.

The performance ended with the ensemble members performing a candle ceremony of sorts and then walking out through the audience as Shyu sang a mantra: “I am alone, but not lonely; Life has no boundaries when every place can be home.” Something for everybody in the audience to take home.

Shyu’s next performance features another premiere,of a dance piece at 7 PM on April 21 at the Czech Center, 321 E 73rd St. Those who were lucky enough to catch this performance would probably also enjoy the concert of rare, delicately haunting folk music from Amami Island, Japan, played by Anna Sato and Shogo Yashi at Roulette on May 14 at 8. Tix are $25/$21 stud/srs.

Norian Maro’s Deliriously Entertaining Korean Harvest Spectacle Keeps the Crowd on Their Feet

You might think that a drum-and-dance troupe performing an ancient Korean peasants’ nongak harvest festival celebration would draw a mostly Korean audience, right? Friday night at Flushing Town Hall in Queens, Korean ensemble Norian Maro (whose name translates roughly as “Premier Performance”) had an unmistakably multi-ethnic, sold-out New York crowd, ranging from in age from kids to their grandparents, on their feet, cheering and stomping along with the irresistibly kinetic performance onstage.

The show reached a peak and then stayed there for its final twenty minutes or so, the performers clad in bright costumes and wearing caps topped with streamers on a swivel. The group members charged with the task – pretty much everybody – first spun their heads in a semicircle to activate the swivel and get the streamers flying in big arcs behind them, all the while spinning around the stage, and also playing intricate polyrhythms on a diverse collection of drums at the same time. And nobody onstage could resist a grin as they worked an ecstatic call-and-response with the crowd – and made it all look easy. How they managed to do that without losing their balance, or the beat, or a lot more, was mind-boggling. As a display of sheer athletic grace combined with musical prowess, it’s hard to imagine witnessing anything more impressive in this city in the past several months.

Norian Maro premiered the piece, titled Leodo: Paradise Lost, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival last fall. It’s a metaphorical tale of the cycle of renewal, personified by a lithe dancer who gets caught in an ocean undertow and then comes face to face with the sea gods, among them a strikingly decorated dragon figure requiring two group members to keep him on his feet. After some very vigorous resuscitation, she’s transported to a magical isle where she comes to life again. One of the women in the group sang the narrative in Korean, in low, mysterious, otherworldly microtones, a revealing glimpse of the ancient, mysterious roots of dramatic Korean pansori singing.

As meticulously choreographed and spectacularly athletic as the dancing was, the stars of the show were the drummers, on a series of janggu drums ranging from a big, boomy tom, to a metal gong, to smaller metal hand drums that provided both clanging and mutedly shimmering tones. The star among all the players was a petite woman with a double-headed drum slung over her shoulder that was almost as big as she was, which she played in two separate time signatures at once, at one point firing off long volleys with a single mallet on both drum heads. Of all the players onstage, including Jong Suk Ki, Jung Hyeon Yung, Min Kyoung Ha, Sungjin Choi and Yoo Jeong Oh, she seemed to be having the most fun. Although one of the guys in the group had an equally good time with a tassel that he swung about fifty feet into the crowd, then later spun and spun until he had it flying from the roof to the floor of the stage, practically cartwheeling to keep it in motion.

The Korean Cultural Service, who staged this show, have a series of enticing concerts and spectacles coming up here. The next one is by Korean classical pianist Eunbi Kim playing works by Debussy, Fred Hersch, Daniel Bernard Roumain and others at 7 PM on Feb 26. Admission is free, but you have to RSVP, the sooner the better: and make sure to get to Flushing Town Hall’s historic Gilded Age auditorium, about five blocks from the last stop on the 7 train, at least a half hour early in order to claim your seats.

An Exhilarating Celebration of Ancient Yet Sophisticated Korean Sounds at Symphony Space

Saturday night’s celebration of traditional Korean music and dance staged by Sue Yeon Park of the Korean Performing Arts Center  at Symphony Space featured sounds that were as cutting-edge as they were rustic. Korean pansori singing, and much of Korean singing in general, employs microtones and trills and downwardly bent notes that would baffle an awful lot of western musicians. In her gritty, expressive contralto, like something of a Korean mountain-music counterpart to Tina Turner, iconic pansori chanteuse Shin Young-Hee made it look easy throughout a rather macabre-tinged excerpt from the 19th century love epic Chunhyung-ga. Famous Korean percussionist Lee Kwang-Soo – a gregarious and engaging guy with an edgy sense of humor – led a drum troupe through a thunderously hypnotic, subtly polyrhythmic benediction of sorts. Virtuoso Gee-Sook Baek teamed up with drummer Soung-Jae Cho, who spurred her on through a rivetingly spacious, suspenseful performance on the gayageum, a twelve-string lute that throws off otherworldly tremoloing tones and seems like it could be a predecessor of the sitar. Meanwhile, the night’s emcee, a musicologist from Seoul, reminded the crowd that all this music dated from an era when there was no distinction between performer and audience: participation is pretty much mandatory. All this did nothing to discourage the commonly held notion that Koreans are the 24-hour party people of Asia.

There was plenty of drumming, notably a skull-pounding interlude to open the second half of the concert by the Rutgers Korean Cultural Group, to rival the kind of explosively shamanistic Brazilian sounds produced by BatalaNYC. There was also dancing, lots of it. Park herself took a solo, a graceful number that saw her practically disappear into the stage, facedown, at the end, the folds of her silken costume edging closer and closer downward. It’s one thing to do the splits, Chuck Berry style – it’s another to hold that position in place. Park was doing that twenty years ago and clearly hasn’t lost any athleticism in the ensuing two decades, no small achievement.

A bevy of women swayed and gently exchanged places throughout a stately fan dance, serenaded by the band offstage. Several of the drummers wore ribbons on a swivel affixed to the rear of their uniform helmets, which they spun by moving their heads quickly, side to side – how they managed to keep their footing, keep the ribbons swirling, and keep time, without losing their balance or running headfirst into the the back wall of the stage, was impressive, to say the least. One of them finally made a circle of the stage, spinning faster and faster, leaning in toward the center in a more explosive take on what Turkish dervishes will do at the peak of a musical number. The night’s final performances brought a full musical ensemble together with the dance/drumming contingent (there was a lot of overlap among them, the night’s organizer included); tersely intense geomungo (six-string zither) player Mi Jin Park being a standout among them.

The Korean Peforming Arts Center and their house ensemble, Sounds of Korea, stage frequent outdoor concerts during the warmer months, from Lincoln Center to Little Korea just south of 34th Street and points further south as well; bookmark theirwebpage if sounds as sophisticated yet ancient as these are your thing.

The Suwon Civic Chorale Make an Exciting, Cutting-Edge NYC Debut

It’s possible that the best globally-known export from the South Korean city of Suwon is its Civic Chorale, who made an exciting and eclectic debut in New York at Alice Tully Hall last night, meticulously directed by In-Gi Min. That a lush, vividly poignant arrangement of the Agnus Dei section of Samuel Barber’s iconic Adagio for Strings was not the highlight of the program testifies to the diversity of the rest of the bill and the choir’s otherworldly power. In both the 20th century and traditional Korean pieces, both Asian and Western scales were employed, typically within the same work.  Both Korean and American composers were represented, and although the Korean works surpassed the American material in terms of edgy harmony and intricate polyphony, every arrangement had something unique and often unusual to offer.

Beyond being simply entertaining, this ensemble can be very funny. The audience chuckled throughout a drolly choreographed Vivian Fung arrangement of a Malaysian monkey dance – guys against the girls – and was equally tickled by not one but three works illustrating birdsong – which the group delivered with an amazing verisimilitude in full-blown stereo. Gyun-Yong Lee’s Bird song featured two pairs of soloists trading off with both each other and the ensemble, with spine-tingling moments from both high soprano and low bass as species from a roc to a phoenix were depicted. By contrast, Eric Whitacre’s Lux Aurumque and Little Birds gave the group a chance to show off their ability to work lustrous, minutely jeweled magic.

The ensemble opened with a rousing yet nuanced arrangement of Airiramg, the only national song that’s a curse, meaning, essentially, “leave me and your feet will hurt before you’ve walked a couple of miles.” The Kyrie from Jong-Sun Park’s Airirang Mass bristled with eerie close harmonies and low/high dynamic tension. Keeyuong Kim’s Dona Nobis Pacem, an elegaic tone poem of sorts sung in the Asian pentatonic scale and dedicated to the victims of the poison gas attacks in Syria, grew in waves to rather harrowing crescendos

The group paired amped-up folk songs: the anthemic, somewhat predictably nostalgic Gagopa (Wishing to Return) and a lumber camp song which literally lumbered, a grim illustration of the arduous conditions faced by rural laborers as the singers literally panted in unison  Then Jeeyoung Kim’s Miserere brought back the austere close harmonies and angst

After the Barber, the group sang Shenandoah with a wistful, towrering sway – it was the most traditionally Western piece on the program. The program concluded with Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho, delivered with an icepick staccato almost all the way through, to the point where the high and low registers diverged for an all-too-brief, showstopping explosion of voices.

Ancient and Avant-Garde Korean Sounds From Janya

This page might not be the first place you’d expect to discover an ensemble that made their stage debut at the Kennedy Center, but the pleasure is yours, if you’re in an adventurous mood – or if you speak Korean. Avant-garde Korean quartet Janya (meaning “to be born”) premiered there last spring: they sound like Bjork playing ancient Korean court music. Frontwoman Lola Jung Danza is an idiosyncratic, original singer, sometimes coy, sometimes completely in your face. She whispers, growls, and gets misty and ethereal with a bluesy nuance: she may come from a jazz background. Other than one absolutely triumphant, soaring solo by daegeum (wood flute) player Seungmin Cha, the melodies on this group’s debut album don’t move far from a central tone: as in south Indian music, the dynamics and rhythm are front and center rather than melodies themselves, making much of this very hypnotic despite the insistent rhythmic intensity of Woojung Sim’s janggo (Korean drum) and Eunsun Jung’s gayageum (zither). The tonalities are rustic; the often jagged, abrupt shifts in rhythm, cadence or theme are contemporary.

Most of Danza’s lyrics are in Korean, although she also sings in English on a couple of tracks, the first a matter-of-factly crescendoing anthem on a theme of newfound existential awareness, its narrator eventually deciding to embrace her fate of deciding how she wants to fill in the space between the “tick” and “tock” of the clock. Whithered sets agitated, Siouxsie-esque vocals in conversation with the drums and zither, building to a gently rolling gallop, while Generations features jazzy scatting and sitar-like bent notes from the zither. A tense, unresolved atmosphere lingers from song to song, notably on the slowly swaying Epic, where the vocals playfully shift lower as Danza runs them through a pitch pedal. Their signature song juxtaposes scrapy, cello-like zither against an ominous drum drone which eventually brightens, quite unexpectedly, while Mother ponders the life of immigrants in the role of the “other” in a new society, eventually building to a triumphant resolution. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the apprehensive No Escape, where Danza’s mantra is “love hate love hate,” the instruments building on a jazz-tinged three-chord riff which is the closest thing to western music here. Strange, intriguing, compelling stuff: they’re playing Drom at 8:30 PM tomorrow, Jan 6.