- A gorgeously grotesque, industrial-leaning take on Korean folk music, presented by Subtext and Unsound.
- "Large waterfalls create a thunderous sound, while the smaller waterfalls create a much calmer, water-running sound," Ahn Sook-sun, a pansori virtuoso and national treasure of South Korea, explained in a Great Big Story short. "I practise to resemble these sounds." Pansori is a form of Korean folk music from the 17th century that used to be played on the streets to a mostly working-class audience. Although not a master of pansori like Ahn Sook-sun, South Korean producer bela has crafted a particularly grotesque, gripping take on Korean folk music with their new album Noise and Cries. This avant-folk interpretation is more likely to appeal to those raised on electronic music—and alienated by the modern world—than aficionados of the original form.
Pansori performances have three main components: a singer, a percussionist and an audience. Together, the singer and percussionist tell stories about nature (known as sae taryeong) or travellers bringing good fortune (jung taryeong). Traditionally, these would play out like an opera, taking hours to get through. Noise and Cries is only 30 minutes long, charting a jagged course through sudden changes in mood and a helter-skelter of Korean folk rhythms (jangdan)—a bit like a seasoned DJ jumping between different tempos and rhythms.
"The Sage" is closest to traditional pansori, taking its inspiration from jung taryeong. Bela's demonic vocals snake forward like a poem with no refrain—and little more than the sound of clattering sticks to accompany it. Contrast that track's marching, raw percussion with the distorted, galloping kick drums on "Deathwill" that jolt through dramatic shifts in BPM, or the beatless ambient of "풀이" and "Noise and Cries." Their lilting glossolalia and cute, spiralling synths trade "나락" and "Deathwill"'s hectic mood for peace so the album ends up having a circular narrative that rocks back and forth between light and dark.
But a storyline, no matter how novel in form, is nothing without engaging characters, and bela plays a monstrous role here. Their dry rasping and guttural gurgles on "죽음이 두려울 때까지" are desperate though somehow barely break above a whisper, sounding like The Lord of the Rings' Sméagol and his alter ego Gollum hissing at each other in the dead of night. The use of double-tracking here also blurs the vocals into a third, more ambiguous persona and I imagine this would impress even a traditional pansori singer like Ahn Sook-sun.
The caption on that Great Big Story video says that, rather than striving for perfection in pansori, "the only way of mastering the ancient art is for each singer to build [their] own authentic sound." Noise and Cries's authenticity lies in its defiance of perfection. It's a world-class interpretation of a traditional musical form that subverts the idea of life split into binary orders of loud and soft; modern and traditional. Noise and Cries also underlines the potential for pansori to express the real nitty-gritty of what it is to be human in a post-postmodern world. It is both a scream and a whisper, a large and a small waterfall.
Tracklist01. The Sage
02. Deathwill
03. 죽음이 두려울 때까지
04. 풀이
05. Confluence Loop
06. 나락
07. Noise and Cries