In January 2020, as part of BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction, Verity Sharp presented a special collaboration between Korean multi-instrumentalist Park Jiha and writer and performer Roy Claire Potter; the two had never met before. Recorded at the BBC’s Maida Vale studio, the session is now being released on Digital/CD/Vinyl.
The radio notes for that session introduce Roy Claire Potter as being influenced by linguistics and performance theory – her work examines what it means to articulate. For this session, they brought a selection of texts to talk through, pick from and try out. Park Jiha performed on a Korean hammered dulcimer called a yanggeum, a saenghwang (an instrument made of 24 slender bamboo pipes attached to a bowl and played like a harmonica), and a double-reed bamboo flute called a piri, which sounds similar to an oboe.
The album is being released via Cafe OTO’s in house label OTOROKU. Listen to Saenghwang for The Milky Boys below. The album features original artwork, Three Boys by Claire Cansick and includes liner notes by Frances Morgan.
Park Jiha released her debut album Communion in 2018, which Phil Vanderyken described as “A masterful exercise in understatement, dynamics, and harmonic inventiveness.” Her 2019 album Philos, was reviewed by William Patrick Owen, he described the follow-up as having a greater focus ‘with drawn out rhythms intermingling with spacious soundscapes.’ He concludes: ‘The album creates a world not quite at ease with itself, calling for pauses and spaces to be moments of reflection, not for inaction. In this sense, it possesses a more substantial spirituality and timelessness, creating a distinct soundworld that is both heavy with memory and possibility.’
Here she is performing Light Way from her most recent album, The Gleam, a meditation on the intersection of music and light.
Notes on this release:
Park Jiha plays the saenghwang, yanggeum, and piri, and Potter adds words to the improvised music. Together they unfurl a scene slowly before the listener, rich and focused, shifting your field of vision and drawing you in, elsewhere. It’s impossible not to follow, not to look for where they point.
Although the details are fine, the space each artist gives one another and their instruments, their language, is given to the listener in turn. A careful melody picks out a route for words with no fixed meaning, a body with no fixed direction, and we are invited to listen and see a kind of music made visible in its inference.
Pre-Order via Cafe OTO (27 May – Vinyl | Early June for CD)
Park Jiha on Bandcamp: https://parkjiha.bandcamp.com/