Park Jiha
Communion

South Korea is one of the new musical frontiers, among the most fertile and creative territories in recent years. Forget K-Pop or Gangam Style, we're talking about something else here, and it’s significant that this album is released on Glitterbeat, a leading label devoted to the most cross-pollinated world music, particularly with alternative rock or experimental sounds.

Following projects like Jambinai and Black String on the international spotlight, it’s Park Jiha’s turn. The musician and producer delivers an instrumental album in which she alternates with some traditional instruments like the piri, a double-reed bamboo flute, the saenghwang, a kind of mouth organ where instead of metal reeds, there are bamboo tubes of different pitches, or the yanggeum, a type of dulcimer played with hammers. The lineup is completed by Kim Oki on tenor sax and bass clarinet, John Bell on vibraphone, and Kang Tekhyun on percussion.
“Communion” is more akin to a contemporary classical music album rather than a world music album, closer in this sense to the productions of Philip Glass, minimalism, and serial music, or even ambient.

The most immediate sensation is precisely that of encountering an ambient album but played live, with acoustic instruments, and a really minimal use of effects except for some reverb for the environments. The sound of the yanggeum is quite common throughout Asia, found in the range from China to Japan and all the way to Bali, and it is already a trademark that geographically places a certain type of music from the very first listen. Definitely more surprising is the saenghwang, which dominates “Throughout the Night,” duetting with the bass clarinet in a piece that represents a nice change of mood compared to the previous ones, given the instrument's pronounced melodic tendencies.

“Communion” is another evocative episode, once again built on the same instrumentation as before, a crescendo that wouldn’t surprise me to soon find as a soundtrack of some film, while in “All Souls' Day” we also discover jazz among the author's influences, in its most radical version, and, come to think of it, an album like this wouldn’t have been out of place in the catalog of labels like Tzadik or Winter & Winter.

There are only 7 tracks in this album, enough to make Park Jiha one of my choices of the year, even if the album is not exactly new, having already been released in Korea in 2016, it could still have a very long life.