By It’s our Bandcamp Picks of the Week, featuring a pair of exciting Korean albums, including HWXXNG’s fusion’ish alien club mix K-CORE and the Parannoul side project mydreamfever’s final entry in the six-part “Music To Relax w/” NTS series, 6. NOISE IS THE NEW SILENCE!
HWXXNG – K-CORE
Genre: Deconstructed Club, Traditional Korean Music
Favorite Tracks: “Neo K-Core,” “Cyber Shamanism,” “AI Language & Jangdan”
Club music often induces a trance-like state. With enough loud, pounding drums consistently hitting your eardrums, enough warm bodies moving through the area around you, and possibly enough mind-altering substances running through your body, it can become spiritual—almost like church.
HWXXNG (aka Jaeho Hwang) is a Berlin-based, Seoul-born DJ bringing these spiritual elements even closer to club music, specifically merging deconstructed club with traditional Korean shamanic music. Shamanism as a healing practice is deeply involved with ritualistic music and dance, and the shamanic music of Korea has specifically had notable influence upon Korean culture and traditional music. K-CORE might sound like a far cry from any of the traditional Korean music recordings you might find online, but the natural timbres of traditional Korean instruments ensure that the record stays rooted within the shamanic arts, as well as other traditional Korean song forms.
As we all know, Korean popular music has become severely westernized. With K-Pop taking the world by storm and Rumi branded on the side of every McDonald’s happy meal, Korean culture has taken an unbelievable amount of Ws, but K-Core imagines a different, lost possibility for the future of global Korean music. The uncompromising janggu rhythms displayed on the opening track “Neo K-Core” revive Korean ancestry in a world that has forgotten it, as the drum patterns interplay with chopped-up chanting. Chopped-up samples of ritual instruments and vocals layer on top of each other, creating a futuristic world tied to the rhythms of the past. The pounding drum rhythms in these songs portray the Korean musical tradition of jangdan, which has been easily recontextualized as club-thumping, four-on-the-floor bass hits. The results of HWXXNG’s experiments can feel off-putting at times as they toe the line of the uncanny valley, sometimes twisting and shifting samples enough for them to become wholly unrecognizable. But this uncomfortability never feels like the product of artist intention, rather a product of unfamiliarity. Especially as someone with a primarily western European music listening background, listening to K-CORE is refreshingly alienating. Even as a big fan of HWXXNG predecessors like Arca, this world that HWXXNG has created is purposefully antagonistic towards someone with my upbringing. Some samples are probably only recognizable to those who have studied traditional Korean music, and HWXXNG has clearly studied well.
“Cyber Shamanism” brings the album’s concept to life with pitch-shifted percussion sounds arranged into bouncing and repetitive melodic phrases. It is a heart-racing and anxious display of hard drum music that never lets up. It beautifully realizes the future/tradition crossover with simple execution and breathtaking intensity. “2045 Apocalypse” has such an extreme mix of sharp vocal chops that the resulting collage distances itself from the human form. It sounds like it could be coming straight out of the mouth of the statue on the cover, all tangled in wires and hooked up to discarded and antiquated electronics. Is it a disturbing image, or is it just too unfamiliar to be understood? The record can be found on Bandcamp.
mydreamfever – 6. NOISE IS THE NEW SILENCE
Genre: Harsh Noise, Spoken Word
Favorite Tracks: N/A
This week I had the pleasure of finishing Parannoul’s six-part “Music To Relax w/” NTS series, released under the name mydreamfever. The sixth and final installment came out earlier this month, and to wrap up this series, he cutely names this installment as a foil to the first, which was called SILENCE IS THE NEW NOISE. Where the first excelled in presenting drone, ambient, and beautiful field recordings to create pangs of nostalgia and bliss, the last installment turns everything on its head and presents music that some might not be able to “relax with”: harsh noise. For a series that has dipped into many corners of the ambient and drone music umbrella, (the second one takes a dive into Japanese IDM and glitch, the third is fuzzy post-rock, the fourth is ambient folktronica, and the fifth is a dreamy ambient piece about flying on a plane), it makes sense for him to end it off with an onslaught. As with the other five albums, Parannoul has a suggestion for how the record should be consumed, but this time he is a bit less specific: “You can try listening at a very low volume, under a blanket. If you wish to blow your eardrums, please raise it higher. There is no right answer.” I chose the second option.
The album consists of two tracks, the title track “Noise Is the New Silence” and “Heartbeat Is the New Rhythm.” Both are over 20 minutes long. This might be a hard album to sit through if you aren’t into noise music and ESPECIALLY if you aren’t into ASMR. That’s right, this album has close-to-microphone whispering, scratching, extreme binaural panning, and harsh drone sitting beneath it all. Personally, I’m in the anti-ASMR camp. I have always found it disturbing. I hate the feeling of someone being right in my ear, like something is scratching my eardrums out. It might not be an album I can relax to, but luckily I can find a whole different and unintended reason for listening to this album, which is that it makes my skin crawl for an hour.
NOISE IS THE NEW SILENCE is undoubtedly well recorded. The whispers are crisp and well placed, and the underlying noise varies in intensity throughout, preventing tedium. When a nearly 30-minute harsh noise track doesn’t become too overbearing, you’re doing something right. It is like a deep-tissue message for the cochlea. Letting it all wash over you is a valid option, but I’d recommend a more active listening. The wild melodic patterns and loops surrounding each track are dark and enthralling. They feel confined in space and time, bouncing around the mix with no possibility of escaping. Even if I knew Korean, I doubt I’d be able to make out much of what Parannoul is whispering, but the noise below him is full of the same social isolation and industrial claustrophobia that he explores through his main catalog. And yet, he frames this as music to relax to. To each their own, I guess.
At least the other track on the record ditches the whispering in favor of a more rhythmic presentation of the glitchy industrial noise. Even though the whispering makes me intensely uncomfortable, I still end up going back to the first track more. After relaxing with Parannoul for five albums, maybe it’s the change of pace I needed. If this doesn’t sound like your vibe but you still want some music to relax with, check out the third and fifth albums in the series. All six mydreamfever projects are available at a pay what you want price on Bandcamp. [Jess Williams]
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