PARK JIHA - All Living Things
“Creative and singular” — Pitchfork
“The beauty of Jiha’s work lies in the spaces she leaves to evoke imaginative moments in the listener” — The Guardian
Park Jiha, the acclaimed Korean composer/multi-instrumentalist, makes patient, immersive music; music that illuminates the essence and texture of the natural, living world.
On her fourth album, All Living Things, her mastery of Korean traditional instruments is intricately woven with deeply personal compositions and a deft use of contemporary sonics.
Terms like post-classical, ambient or even cinematic are useful, entry-level tags, but they only scratch the surface of this album’s shimmering, contemplative soundworld.
All Living Things is a tender and profound meditation on the miracle of life. It is suffused with reverence and gratitude for the chance to simply be a living being on this planet at this time. To be a part of the natural cycles of life. To belong in the universe. It’s an intimate sound portrait of what she calls “a hardly explainable sentiment of feeling alive.” Jiha writes: “Take a deep breath and step forward, consciously, into an ordinary morning. Feel the ground beneath your feet and the life in your body, through the movement of your limbs. All Living Things begins with this: a singular connection to the earth that with awareness becomes a connection to all things; the cycles and continuities of life that help to process feelings of uncertainty with hope.”
Park Jiha explores this vision through idiosyncratic and deeply personal methods. Like its critically acclaimed predecessors, Philos (2018) and The Gleam (2022), All Living Things features her playing every instrument, meticulously overdubbed and layered in the studio to create sumptuous sound worlds. Once again, drawing on her background in traditional Korean music, she employs an array of instruments largely unfamiliar to most western listeners: the piri is a type of oboe; the yanggeum is a hammered dulcimer; the saenghwang is a large wooden mouth organ. Alongside these can also be heard flute, glockenspiel, bells, her voice and, crucially, electronics. “In my previous album, I used various techniques to produce unusual but still natural sounds from these instruments,” she says. “With this new album, I kept a natural sound and worked with various electronic elements to make the compositions sound fuller and more immersive.”
There’s a very deliberate conceptual journey to be enjoyed by listening to the album from start to finish. Park Jiha explains: “The process going from track one to nine represents an evolution from birth, growth, maturity, decline to death, seen as a cycle expressing hope and a beautiful uncertainty that I tried to bring into the music.”
It's this tantalising uncertainty that makes Park Jiha’s music so indefinable. Sure, there are hints of minimalism in the delicate, repeating patterns and percussive cycles. And of course, traditional Korean music provides a bedrock. But here, too, you’ll find the dreamy waft of ambient soundtrack music, the searching spiritual sincerity of New Age, the formal precision of contemporary classical, and the spontaneity of experimental jazz. It all combines in one of the most distinctive musical voices of our time, one that is fully engaged with the process of living and finding the wonder in sheer existence. “Life, as a beautiful voyage, is what always brings me to compose at some point,” says Park Jiha.
As for the listener, it remains up to them to find their own joy and meaning in the glistening possibilities presented on All Living Things. “Just as diverse as we are,” says Park Jiha, “we all have the ability to feel things and emotionally interpret them for ourselves. This is such a beautiful thing for me. I wish my music could be part of people’s lives and bring them hope.” With such crystalline beauty available to us, how can we not feel hope?
