Mask Dance (2017)
7 tracks, 55 minutes
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Korean music has been one of the biggest revelations across the music world of recent years. In the past decade or so, the South Korean government has put so much effort – and money – into promoting the country’s musical culture of all different forms. Most visibly, K-pop has taken the world by storm, a phenomenon unequalled in pop music since the boy- and girl-bands of the 1990s. The effect has been felt on the world music scene too. It feels as if every year, another two or three Korean artists working with Korean classical or traditional music make themselves known across Europe and the Americas. And it’s not for nothing – each of these groups do something different and each of them do it in an incredible way. Just this year, I have seen performances by Kim So Ra (solo janggu (hour-glass drum) player innovating the classical style), Ak Dan Gwang Chil (a band turning folk songs from a region now in North Korea into sophisticated jazzy pop) and NST & The Soul Sauce featuring Kim Yulhee (a roots reggae/dub band backing lead vocals from the ancient epic sung poetry of the pansori). What a wild mix, and each of them were fantastic. Today’s album comes from another such group, and probably the Korean artists that have made the most impact on European world and jazz scenes in the last five years.
The music of Black String is somewhat hard to describe, because there are so many different ways that it can be described. Depending on what ear you bring to it, it is sophisticated math rock; it is free jazz in the Ornette Coleman mould; it is an eclectic mixture of Korean classical, folk and religious styles that date back many centuries; it is contemporary improvised sound art. The music is meditative, acidic, mysterious, aggressive, confusing, calm, powerful. Of course it is all of these at once. The ensemble is led by Yoon Jeong Heo from the geomungo, the ancient Korean fretted zither. Other traditional Korean instruments are provided by Aram Lee on the daegeum and danso flutes and the yanggeum metal-stringed zither and Min Wang Hwang on the janggu and other percussion and voice; with a very different sound is Jean Oh, an electric guitarist with a jazz background who plays his instrument with as much distortion as possible and liberal use of the whammy bar, as well as contributing electronic sounds. As much as each musician is a master of their own instrument in their own tradition, each one of them is taken in a new direction. They play using unorthodox techniques, they use their instruments as much as noisemakers as musicmakers, they bring in bubbles of influence from unlikely places. From all of it comes forth music that is immediately recognisable as deeply and traditionally Korean, but as viewed from a different angle. Black String are pioneering this new wave of Korean improvised art music and, by doing so, creating a whole new tradition with those that came before.
It’s so exciting to see all of the impressive new talent coming out of Korea every single year, with each artist bringing something new and astonishing to the table, and playing every conceivable type of music, too. The pool of these artists seems inexhaustible. It’s indisputable that South Korea is now one of the musical powerhouse countries. And you know why? Because their government doesn't only value music in a way that means lip-service is paid to its importance as part of a wider culture while slashing music education, creating a hostile environment for music venues and generally making funding for musicians increasingly rare and hard to come by (thanks, nine years of Conservative leadership!), but instead literally value it by pumping actual money into music programmes, consistently, for years. By paying musicians to make music or empowering those who can, and by letting those musicians create new sounds that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. By funding those artists to travel abroad to play at festivals, make tours or present at professional events. By running those festivals and music professionals’ events in South Korea in turn, to bring the world to the music as well as vice versa. It’s really simple: if you make music a national priority, you get incredible, international-standard music out of it and a valuable national export to boot. Black String are just one particularly compelling example. It’s a methodology that could and should well be considered by many other governments around the world. Listen up!
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