PARK JIHA - All Living Things - CD [FEB 14]

CD

“Creative and singular” --Pitchfork

“The beauty of Jiha’s work lies in the spaces she leaves to evoke imaginative moments in the listener” --The Guardian

Park Jiha, the acclaimed Korean composer/multi-instrumentalist, makes patient, immersive music; music that illuminates the essence and texture of the natural, living world.

On her fourth album, All Living Things, her mastery of Korean traditional instruments is intricately woven with deeply personal compositions and a deft use of contemporary sonics. Terms like post-classical, ambient or even cinematic are useful, entry-level tags, but they only scratch the surface of this album’s shimmering, contemplative soundworlds.

All Living Things is a tender and profound meditation on the miracle of life. It is suffused with reverence and gratitude for the chance to simply be a living being on this planet at this time. To be a part of the natural cycles of life. To belong in the universe. It’s an intimate sound portrait of what she calls “a hardly explainable sentiment of feeling alive.” Jiha writes: “Take a deep breath and step forward, consciously, into an ordinary morning. Feel the ground beneath your feet and the life in your body, through the movement of your limbs. All Living Things begins with this: a singular connection to the earth that with awareness becomes a connection to all things; the cycles and continuities of life that help to process feelings of uncertainty with hope.”

Park Jiha explores this vision through idiosyncratic and deeply personal methods. Like its critically acclaimed predecessors, Philos (2018) and The Gleam (2022), All Living Things features her playing every instrument, meticulously overdubbed and layered in the studio to create sumptuous sound worlds. She employs an array of Korean instruments – piri, yanggeum and the saenghwang – alongside flute, glockenspiel, bells, her voice and, most crucially, electronics. “On my previous album, I used various techniques to produce unusual but still natural sounds from these instruments,” she says. “With this new album, I kept a natural sound and worked with various electronic elements to make the compositions sound fuller and more immersive.” On All Living Things, her music has undertaken a decided turn towards sonic experimentation and contemporary sound design.

The opening track, “First Buds,” is the perfect example of this approach. As the title suggests, it feels like a gentle opening up, delicate and full of promise, the acoustic instruments intertwining with more elusive and otherworldly textures. The track that follows is “Grounding,” a hypnotic composition that evolves in luminous cycles and reveals Park Jiha’s stylistic debt to minimalism. “Growth Ring,” is a dialogic game between the saenghwang and piri, both instruments bringing a distinctive atmosphere to a composition that represents maturity; a concept that expands as the album continues. The first single, “Blown Leaves,” features a seductive saenghwang melody that is doubled by shimmering and escalating electronics. The record’s final track, “Water Moon” with its softly struck glockenspiel, creates a childhood, music box innocence that hints at new beginnings and a sense of having come full circle.

The album as a whole manifests Park’s deeply personal take on the lifecycle, evolving from birth to growth, maturity to decline and finally death. This conceptual structure deliberately encourages listeners to engage with the album from start to finish. As she puts it, the album itself is “a cycle expressing the hope and beautiful uncertainty that I tried to bring into the music.”

It's this tantalising uncertainty that makes Park Jiha’s music so indefinable. Sure, there are hints of minimalism in the delicate, repeating patterns and percussive cycles. But here, too, you’ll find the dreamy waft of ambient soundtrack music, a searching spiritual sincerity, the formal precision of contemporary classical, and the spontaneity of experimental jazz. It all combines in one of the most distinctive contemporary musical voices, one that is fully engaged with the process of living and finding the wonder in sheer existence. “Life, as a beautiful voyage, is what always brings me to compose at some point,” says Park Jiha

As for the listener, it remains up to them to find their own joy and meaning in the glistening possibilities presented on All Living Things. “Just as diverse as we are,” says Park Jiha, “we all have the ability to feel things and emotionally interpret them for ourselves. This is such a beautiful thing for me. I wish my music could be part of people’s lives and bring them hope.”

Tracklist: 

1. First Buds
2. Grounding
3. Bloom
4. A Story Of Little Birds
5. Growth Ring
6. Blown Leaves 
7. Breathe Again
8. Eternal Path
9. Water Moon