Books, blog and other blather

Category: Uncategorized (Page 4 of 7)

New Theme

I’m trying out this new theme for the blog. While I liked the old one well enough, it was terrible at customizing, and was too small to read comfortably. Besides, this theme has a bit of pizazz.

But if anyone has any input, I’m always happy to hear from you.

Shin Joong-hyun Like You’ve Never Heard Him

I’ve been listening to an early copy of Light in the Attic’s Shin Joong-hyun retrospective, BEAUTIFUL RIVERS AND MOUNTAINS: THE PSYCHEDELIC SOUND OF SOUTH KOREA’S SHIN JOONG-HYUN, 1958-1974, and so far I am really impressed by it. The sound quality is noticeably better than the CDs currently on the market, even with the compressed versions I have, with better range and dynamism (and now recorded at the correct speed).

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Light in the Attic Records tell me that they made new transfers of Shin’s songs from the original vinyl (the original masters were apparently burned by the government back in the 1970s), then remastered everything in the United States. The result is Shin Joong-hyun much closer to how his music is supposed to sound, and if you have only heard his music on CD, the difference can be pronounced at times.

Other people have also been listening and apparently are impressed. Mojo magazine’s most recent issue (October) has named the retrospective their Reissue of the Month, giving the CD 4 stars and comparing Shin to Phil Spector. Sadly, Mojo is not available online (at least not for free), but you can read a couple of excerpts from their review here.

Attic will also be releasing a digital EP of Shin’s music, SHIN JOONG-HYUN, FROM WHERE TO WHERE: 1970-1979, and I quite like it, too. Both collections contain severals songs that I have not heard before, with an emphasis on Shin’s more rockin’ and psychedelic songs.

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BEAUTIFUL RIVERS AND MOUNTAINS contains 14 songs, including many of Shin’s best, such as “The Man Who Must Leave” (떠나야할그사람), “The Sun” (햇님, a personal favorite), and of course “Beautiful Rivers and Mountains” (아름다운강산). There is just one song, “Moon Watching” (달마중), from his debut album, Hiky Shin, but it was interesting to hear something Shin recorded way back in 1958. And there is a good overview of the various singers who have recorded with Shin over the years — Kim Jung-mi, Kim Choo-ja, Lee Jung-hwa, Jang Hyun, Park In-soo, Bunny Girls, and Kim Sun. “J Blues ’72” is really good, imho.

WHERE TO WHERE has seven songs, but they are also all very solid, including “Grass” (잔디), “What Am I Going to Do” (나라고 어찌하오), and the Music Power version of “Beautiful Rivers and Mountains.”

These releases are not perfect — the anglicizing of the song names is a little rough, for example. And Shin’s history in the liner notes is a tad credulous, and could have used a bit more rigor. But these are mostly quibbles, and overall the releases are great, a huge recommend for anyone interested at all in the music of the period.

The vinyl version of BEAUTIFUL RIVERS AND MOUNTAINS comes out Sept. 6, and the CD version will be released Sept. 24. WHERE TO WHERE will be available on Sept. 25.

And I just learned that another American label, Lion Productions, also has a couple of Korean rock albums on the way, including Kim Jung-mi’s NOW. Apparently Lion is going to similar lengths as Attic to get their releases just right, so this could be a great few months for fans of this amazing era in music.

Struggling Writers

A generation ago, struggling writers who needed a bit of cash might try porn — fast, trashy writing that was generally artless, but it paid the bills. Today, they have news aggregators — pretty much the same thing.

Six (Hundred) Degrees of Wikipedia

Over at XKCD, Randall posits an interesting theory:

Wikipedia Trivia: If you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at “Philosophy.”

So let’s try, starting with, say, K-pop:
K-pop -> musical genre -> genre -> literature -> fiction -> narrative -> Latin -> Italic Language -> Indo-European Languages-> language family -> language -> communication -> meaning (philosophy of language) (oh so close) -> Aristotle -> Greeks (doht! getting colder) -> nation -> sovereign state -> state -> social sciences -> umbrella term -> superset -> mathematics -> quantity -> property -> modern philosophyphilosophy

It works! I was going to try two or three more terms, but that was way too much work.

Top Korean Music of 2010

Well, 2011 is well underway, but I am still putting together my thoughts about 2010. This certainly is not a complete list, but it is a short list of recommendations of some good Korean indie music that I came across. Hopefully the music scene can keep up the momentum and turn it into more mainstream success soon. But to give you a quick rundown here:

1) DJ Soulscape – More Sound of Seoul
Far and away the best album of the year. DJ Soulscape mixed together a huge smorgasbord of great Korean music from the 1970s, most of which you’ve never heard before. It’s as educational as it is fun, and all-round brilliant.
(Yes, this was released in late 2009, but it was such a great album, full of wonderful and obscure Korean songs from the 1970s, I am putting it in this list)
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Then, in alphabetical order:

Apollo 18 – Violet and Red
One of Korea best rock/post-rock bands today put out two interesting albums this year. Red was a re-release of last year’s album, but completely re-recorded and with a few extra songs added (thanks to the money they earned from a KOCCA grant, after their Hello Rookie win in 2009). Together with 2009’s Blue, each album has a slightly different feel, while still being a unified sound.

Glittering Blackness, Fall – EP
Glittering Blackness, Fall is one of the most interesting of Korea’s many instrumental, “post-rock” bands. Their EP is just four tracks long, but each is a surging blast of noise and swirling progressions.

Jambinai
One of the most unusual new bands around, Jambinai uses Korean traditional instruments, but cannot really be considered “traditional” music at all. With their ambient, surging style, they are closer to post-rock than anything from the Joseon Dynasty. But their use of Korean traditional instruments makes their sound incredibly haunting and captivating.

Lee Sang-eun – We Are Made of Stardust
With her 14th album, Lee is quite a veteran of the Korean music scene. But while some of her albums can be repetitive, and sometimes boring, this is one of her most creative and lively in quite some time. A little uneven, sure, but most of the songs here are quite pleasant and catchy. Even more surprising, her voice sounds clearer than it has in quite some time. Has recording technology found a way to reverse the effects of 20 years of smoking? No idea, but this was a good album.

Lowdown 30 – Another Side of Jaira EP
Growling blues rock, like the Black Keys. Not all the songs work, but the best are gravelly, heavy fun. The first song Jungdok is especially good.

Oriental Lucy – Midnight Hotel
More quirky and electronic album (and Portishead-like) than their first EP, Oriental Lucy is more alternative/indie rock, like the kind of thing you might hear on KCRW or some college radio station in the West like that. At times more New Wave sounding, singer Soohee’s brings their songs an unusual urgency and energy.

Sunkyeol – EP
A moody, acoustic ambient release, I found Sunkeyol a pleasant surprise. I am not sure what I was expecting, but their album was surprisingly moving for such a simple sound. I am told it was actually recorded in 2006, but just released last year.

Swimmingdoll – 8winningdoll
One of the more interesting and unusual entrants into the post-rock, shoegazer genre. Swimmingdoll songs start out pleasant and haunting, but then jar with odd atonal shifts and dubs.

In general, I think 2010 was a very good year for Korean indie music*. I had not even noticed until I started putting together this list, when I kept rediscovering one solid album after another. Not simply strong in one genre or another, the Korean music scene is more diverse than I can remember it ever being, with great hard rock bands, acoustic, postrock, dance and whatever Jambinai is.

But one strange thing I have noticed is that, in general, Korean bands’ recordings are is much stronger than their live performances. When I first got interested in Korean indie music, back in the 1990s, the opposite was very much true. Considering I live in Europe these days and do not get to Korea often, this is a development I am happy with. But at some point, bands are going to have to develop stage presence if they want to break out of the Hongdae underground (especially if I am going to keep running the Korea Gig Guide).

For more opinions on top Korean albums in 2010, you can check out the Korea Gig Guide, where I share my thoughts, along with contributors Shawn Despres, Dain, and Kim Jongyoon of Scatterbrain. You can also read some interesting columns over at Philip Gowman’s London Korea Links — Anna Lindgren, Saharial, and Philip himself.

As for non-Korean stuff… It is hard to keep track of releases, but here is what I could recall really enjoying:
Black Keys – Brothers
Grinderman 2
Holy Fuck – Latin
Janelle Monáe – The ArchAndroid
Japandroids – Post-Nothing (yeah, this was 2009, too, but I just heard it in 2010 and I loved it, so I am including it)
Naked and the Famous – Passive Me, Aggressive You
Robyn – Body Talk
Stromae – Cheese
Tron OST
Zoey Van Goey – The Cage Was Unlocked All Along
——————
*The rise of Korean indie music this year also boosts my little (and not very serious) theory that the success of Korean movies and music are inversely related. The better one does, the worse the other seems to do. Last year, Korean music was really good, but movies were remarkably mediocre. Go back to the 1950s, and it seems like, again and again, whenever one areas gets better, the other takes a dive. Movies flourish in the late 1950s, then drop off in the later 1960s—around the time music takes off. Then Park Chung Hee kills of the great Korean rock scene in the 1970s, and soon after movies make a small comeback (well, the 1980s were a tough time artistically in Korea for all art forms, I think). The 1990s saw music rise up again, then crash spectacularly after the financial crisis, just as movies going on their amazing run. It’s spooky, I tell you.

Some Online Writing

Just in case anyone is interested, these days I am doing a little writing for the website Korean Content.

Korean Content was launched by the Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA) in late October 2010 to build awareness for Korean content abroad. In addition to my occasional contributions about music, movies and whatnot (such as this one, and this one, and this one), a variety of other contributors write about all manner of Korean content.

There was even an article by my old boss, Lukas Schwarzacher. It looks like he is working as a professional photographer these days, having started a new company 1st District LA. I also came across a nice little article about him here. Anyhow, it is great to see him around again.

Wikileaks

So, Wikileaks has disclosed another big swatch of documents, ranging from the Middle East to Zimbabwe, from the 1970s to just a few months ago. And I understand the need for secrecy in governmental and international affairs, and as such, Wikileaks is breaking the law and doing bad things. But somehow, I cannot shake the feeling that in the long run, the open disclosure of what is really going on with governments around the world is a net positive and a good thing.

In fact, when I look at the financial criss, the war on terror, environmentalism, or any of the major issues we face, I think more transparency and accountability would help them all.

(I intended to go trolling through Wikileaks, looking for Korea-related stuff, or anything relevant to things I have been working on over the past few years. But I was having trouble accessing the database, so I just posted this little note as is).

UPDATE: Okay, apparently Wikileaks was suffering from a DoS attack when I was trying to check it out last week. But it is back up and running now. I did some searching and came up with these Korea-related cables… Nothing too juicy, but a little interesting.

Leisurely Times in Chuncheon

I am spending a quiet couple of days just outside of Chuncheon, Gangwon Province, for the World Leisure Congress, the biannual meeting of the World Leisure Organization. And I must say, the hotel at the Elysian Condominium in Gangchon is pretty leisurely.

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There are seminars each day about various aspects of leisure culture (such as sports, tourism and health), and I have been invited to speak here, about leisure and art. Hard to believe that workaholic Korea is hosting a global gathering about leisure, but I guess that is symbolic of the changes Korea has been going through over the past decade or so — less about work, and more about life and lifestyle.

Since we are close to Chuncheon, I am going to try to use Hong Sangsoo’s THE TURNING GATE (much of which took place here) as a point of reference for some of my speech. No idea if this is going to work, but I am somewhat hopeful.

I have not been to this part of Korea in years, so it is nice to be here. Actually, this summer has turned into a bit of a countryside experience, with trips to Jisan Valley (for the rock festival), Chungcheong Province and Jeolla Province (including my first trip to the Damyang bamboo forest).

Anyhow, I just hope I can get back to Seoul before Typhoon Kompasu arrives. Yikes. I do not think a typhoon would be a leisurely experience at all.

Time Zones, Twilight Zones

I am back in Korea again. The biggest difference between Korea and Spain? The light. It is 8pm and it is already dark here. Over in Spain, there are still signs of light in the sky at 10pm. For me, I prefer to have the additional light in the evening.

Okay, maybe that is not the biggest difference. But as I look out over western Seoul from my 12th floor window, that is the one that comes to mind.

* * *

By the way, the Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival had its big press conference yesterday, announcing their lineup for this year. While I was sad to miss it (after going to so many over the years), I was rather impressed by much of the selection.

PiFan has even managed to snag a World Premier for its opening night film — the Hollywood remake of THE EXPERIMENT, by Paul Scheuring (of the TV series Prison Break), and starring Adrien Brody, Maggie Grace and Forest Whitaker.

This year’s PiFan runs July 15-25.

The-Experiment

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