🐣 JREAMS — SEOUL

This is a bright electronic patchwork, an irregular mosaic of sounds, crackling tracts of airy modulated synth sounds touched with abrasion, a collage of differently pitched slices of sound that rainbow nocturnally or overcastly with a pastel-grey hue, impacting like hazy memories. These sounds get stitched together with a wealth of samples, a moneybag of it, mechanised glonks and clops that scritch-scratch trickling and boldly waterfalling throughout—colossal textures. Created by US-based Jreams, this track is called 'Seoul', and fittingly features samples of a lady speaking Korean, as well as found sounds taken from around the country itself.

"I found Korean culture fascinating and decided to take a trip over there and couch surf around Seoul," Jreams says, explaining the background of the track in an email to YES/NO. "I reached out to this radio station there and got a spot to play on Seoul community radio and then was invited to a few shows after that were all hip hop and electronic focused. I started making [this] track while I was over there and finished the rest of it when I got back to the states."

He concludes: "I wanted to showcase how great of a place Korea is."

The video for the track, pulsing with boomerang-esque forward-reverse scenes, glitching mashes of colour, and shots of the bustling city life of the Korean capital, fits the music itself, the beat sounding like bookcases falling down flights of stairs against explosions of colour, the grit and hard angularity of the place mixed with the airy dreamlike feel of its technological wonderland ideals and aspirational aesthetic that seeps into the population's everyday style.

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• 🔔 'Seoul' is taken from Jreams' Letters To Jupiter EP, which you can listen to on SoundCloud. Alternatively or additionally you may purchase this collection of sounds from iTunes if you like.

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🐣 YAEJI — DRINK I'M SIPPIN ON

The space here runs off into the distance like an endless profusion of cut-out apartment blocks and the black sky blanketing it all above with dim hundreds of lights below and the receding traffic, lonely open urban caverns and canyons; it is the silken void between angular concrete, the difference between tangible feeling and architectural corners, spirits and shapes—humans, the distances between them. This is the vital crux of 'Drink I'm Sippin On', a moonless city and its skyward turrets and those who inhabit the harsh environment, and how this landscape is conjured by its creator Yaeji. Each soft explosion of bass is the ghostly shape of a tower popping into your periphery, the trap-flavoured scuttling needling hi-hats the bird's-eye view of buglife people swarming and cars lurching, and smart snares cracking with the unforgiving tarmac, the flat pavements, the signs traffic lights the metal and glass and cement.

All of it is placed like building blocks with a minimalism, a brutal but soft stark sparseness, that allows this literally awesome sense of space to gush through and into the cityscape like a waterfall, like a dam destroyed and the flood pouring in lakeishly, oceanic; but it is not water, though it is as fluid as it. Yaeji's vocals come in here, the sea of soul that makes up the spaces between the percussive pillars of the beat, her voice in Korean and English somehow harsh as it whispers almost abrasive fizzing with satin smooth texture and the reverb of it dropped into this expanse and sweeping and deepening and besides this the catchy hook is the haunting reminder of rhythm and individuality, a lone isolated voice, amidst the illustration here of non-rhythm and non-individuality, of sprawling structures and the giant of humanity in all its multiplication. The spirit of Yaeji, though expressed through a hushed susurration, grows and fills the gaps between the coldness the bluntness of the beat, a single person speaking in a silenced crowd.

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• 🔔 This wonderful track is taken from Yaeji's EP2, her second release this year, a six-track offering that will arrive into the world for your listening pleasure on 3rd November via Godmode.

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🐣 GENIUS — 2226

The dust that this track kicks up the dust caught in lances of light coming in through a boarded up window the dark humid nature of it and the basement punk feeling of it the slapdash half-asleep DIY dream of the track sloshes against your ears like an old pair of jeans. It is in the harsh comfort of this track, its vintage photo smouldering cigarette atmosphere, where inexplicably a subversion of this sort of music dwells. Garage rock, abrasive punk-flavoured guitar music features lyrics that are blunt, to-the-point, aggressive. But in this, '2226' by Busan-based band GENIUS – that is 지니어스 in Korean – the lyrics are so cryptic that they are practically non-sequiturs. It begins with the biggest of all: "Hey dear brothers and sisters / Today I don't wanna take it / Don't make me a bird / Don't make me an ashtray."

At other times, however, the lyrics are in their simplicity quite blissful: "Today I don't wanna drink beer / It makes me full / I just need hot water in the big cup." To hear such strange poetic words floating along to scratchy sweeps of lo-fi guitar, to attitudinal scoops of bass and racketing drums, it was refreshing. When we asked the creators of this gently raucous track about the concept behind the song, the guitarist replied enigmatically, "I want to be happy with my dear brother and sister. That's it." According to the email we received back, many of his lyrics revolve around "rebirth and transcendence." For such big ideas to live in this short tract of grunge-tinged guitar music feels like a reflection of inebriated philosophising, the persistence of big thoughts no matter who or where you are, the discovery of the meaning of life half-drunk at the bar; the song's final line, "We can… be happy more", echoes hopefully like a mantra.

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• 🔔 This is taken from the band's August 2017 album 별바다 (Byeolbada, i.e. Sea Of Stars), released on Korean label BGBG. This you can purchase via the GENIUS Bandcamp. You can also watch on the video for '2226', which was directed by Soohwan Swan Park. The artwork, a folded 1000 won note, was created by a photographer named 김기조 (Kim Kijo).

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NEON BUNNY FEAT MARK REDITO – ROOM314

Mark Redito (the artist formerly known as Spazzkid) features on this latest track from South Korean singer and songmaker, Neon Bunny (real name Lim Yoojin). It's called 'Room314' and it probably has nothing to do with this book entitled The Battle for Room 314: My Year of Hope and Despair in a New York City High School, nor anything to do with this film called Room 314 (might do though). It's a towering sweet romance of a track.

As NB alternates between singing softly in Korean and singing in English the touching refrain 'if you like me now it's fine, why don't you stay here with me? / maybe you will like me tomorrow, why don't you stay here with me?', fluttering chords lead into instrumental sections alive and electric with energy, buzzing synth and aching melody playing in these parts where unbridled emotion bursts in waves. Decorations throughout the track include gentle chimes and wonderfully placed dynamic drum fills – the skittering beat, chopped samples of Yoojin's voice, loving chords that fill the last half a minute of the song – little moments where your heart swells with love for the care and attention that's been placed on making this sound as perfect as possible.

Swaying between brooding calm and floods of frenzied feeling, the track reflects in this sonic twoness the nervous trembling and out-of-body vibes that swirl in your body in anticipation of romance, the wild longing, and the unreal moments that fly timelessly afterwards; being on the edge and then tipping over; kinetic human emotion, physical unending passion.

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• 'Room314' is taken from Neon Bunny's recently released album Stay Gold, which you can listen to enjoy and download for 9$ over here on Bandcamp.

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SUNGJOON KIM QUARTET (SJQ) – NO. 2

Ah I found this ages ago and have been meaning to share it ever since. I'm not usually a fan of crazy jazz, or maybe I don't know what jazz is. Can jazz be anything? Does it have to sound jazzy? Hmm. Maybe this is "contemporary" jazz. I found this because I don't really subscribe to many people on YouTube and the one person I do subscribe to is this guy from South Korea who films lots of music and culture stuff.

Anyway yeah, this is the Sungjoon Kim Quartet (or 김성준 쿼텟) performing a track simply called 'No. 2' – except this time around it's a sextet, with an additional saxophonist and a zither type thing. This is actually called a yang-geum, which is a traditional Korean instrument, and this would make more sense in this instance given that SJQ (as they are known) is a South Korean entity of jazz.

It's headed up by jazz saxophonist, Sungjoon Kim. After graduating from Berklee College of Music in Boston, he moved to NYC and sat in on many jam sessions, taking the new experiences back with him to South Korea in 2010, where he makes music and teaches as a professor at Soongsil University and Baekseok University. Jun Kim is on guitar, Doc Skim is playing synth bass, and Woongwon Hahn is on drums. This is SJQ. The girl playing the yang-geum is possibly Hwiseon Choe and the additional (tenor) saxophone guy might be Jeeseok Kim.

The track, performed live at VELOSO in Seoul, is a mad slice of bustling energy, a large helping of hot and sticky music, sultry and humid, permeated with cool calm in the form of constant laid-back guitar chords, all the while the bulging bass supports beneath it all. It begins with saxophone flourishes, a kind of brass call-and-response, the yang-geum solo is particularly fresh, hearing it in this jazz context gives it a whole new meaning, a twist on tradition.

The guitar solo is a break in the craziness after some crashing dynamic punctation from the drums, a soothing oasis from the screaming saxophones, which soon itself bleeds back into high-energy, rapid-fire playing, building to a crescendo which drops us off full circle, to the ascending saxophones that played at the start.

Whew. I don't ever write about jazz and I'm sorry if you don't like it but you should give it a listen anyway, it's really cool. It's 11 minutes long but I'm sure you can deal with it.

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• And if you'd like to hear the whole album, it is a possibility. It's been uploaded to YouTube courtesy of the label on which it was released, ILIL SOUND.

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NEON BUNNY (야광토끼) – IT'S YOU (너여야) [VIDEO]

I have been spending most of today looking out of the window at the same view I pretty much always look at. It's greenish, pretty, flowery, but it's not inspiring me. And neither was anything I had heard up until now. Then I remembered that I had to check out this new Neon Bunny track. And I was cured! Cured of my malaise. Cured I say. Thanks to K-pop. Or K-indie.

Where are we now? Anyway, this is the THIRD Neon Bunny (real name Lim Yoojin) track I've heard and the third I've featured here. I discovered her at some point last year (with her song 'Oh My Prince') when I was actively exploring the Seoul music scene – and what a happy discovery! Since then, she's worked with fellow Korean producer Demicat on the song 'Singing Bird' from his Out Loud EP and, well, not much else that I know of. Until now! This song has seemingly appeared out of the blue as a purchasable single and it's called "너여야" (neoyeoya) or 'It's You'.

Like her past songs, this one follows in their footsteps with electro aplomb, fuzzy distorted saw-wave bass blasting in waves, losing its distortion outside of the catchy chorus, where Neon Bunny's gentle voice sings the hook, and where the beat bustles with doubled-up hi-hats in all its footwork flavour, snapping back and forth between cracking clap-snare combination and throttling kicks. Swept with waves of mystified chords and glistening delicate melodies, this is a song of contrasts: the sweet and softly sung vocals with their near-nostalgic pop sensibilities; the hard and driving beat drenched with harsh distorted synth. But it works wonderfully.

Hopefully, and I don't know if it's the case or not, this is taken from an upcoming album. It'd be nice to hear a full-length collection of songs from Neon Bunny. I mean, even an EP would do. But for now, the summery 'It's You' and its addictive, perfectly pop sound is just fine!

• And you can buy it for $1 (or more) over at Neon Bunny's Bandcamp page.

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DE LA SOUL – STAKES IS HIGH (DEMICAT REMIX) [FREE DOWNLOAD]

Oh wow look it's Demicat. Do you know Demicat? It's like totally fine if you don't know Demicat. He's a producer from South Korea who makes nostalgia-infused electronic music, from heady wistful dance to the retro fumes effusing from his hip hop-style tracks. I've written about him before, in conjunction with another South Korean artist, the singer Neon Bunny, on collaborative track 'Singing Bird' – this appeared on his Out Loud EP, released last september. You can buy that for the decent sum of $5 (or more) from his Bandcamp page.

His penchant for the retro, namely the indomitable sunny sound of the 1990s, comes through totally in this new track he shared with the world a few days ago. Created to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the release of hip hop trio De La Soul's debut album, 3 Feet High and Rising, the track is a remix of one of De La Soul's tracks, 'Stakes Is High', from the 1996 album of the same name. The original clacks hard with boom bap, tangled with gloss tendrils of bass, but Demicat's remix is an entirely different beast.

Adding snappy rising-heat electronic chords, muffled with lounge-smart nonchalance, and the hard punchy beat of electro combined with its deliciously distorted squelch of bass, grabbing at your ears in its jaunty pattern, dynamically twisted the sound, blanketing sound with a vacuum of treble, building it up with thin whooshes of sound, the track's loudness subject to the excitement of a house track, all the while with the original vocals ringing crisp and clear in what could easily be a freshly squeezed piece of music from right here and now. But it isn't. It's a slice of the well-loved past, lovingly collaged with torn electro, scraps of house, framed with beats plosive in their bulging rigidity.

Free download via Demicat's Facebook page. What's not to like? Go go get it if you want want want it.

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STRANGEHEAD ㄷㄹㅊㅅ (DREAM CHASER) [FREE DOWNLOAD]

For ease I am not going to be dealing with the Korean characters, although here is a fun fact: it's called Hangul and instead of being written straightforwardly, each word is a 'block' of these little characters. Isn't that fun? Someone should create some blocky typography of English in this way. It'd look nice I think. What am I saying? Who cares. The Hangul here - ㄷㄹㅊㅅ - if you want to know, is like an acronym or abbreviation, cause it's in letter and not word form, and says: d r ch s. DRCHS - a truncated form of Dreamchase(r)? I guess.

Anyway, in the depths of the night I found this song and I enjoyed it a lot so I am writing about it right now. It's probably really bad for LA trackmaker Strangehead because I'm writing about this in a not very good mood so I don't think I'll do the song as much justice as I normally would, however I do hope that you - whoever is reading, skimming, or ignoring this writing right now - enjoy the song no matter what gibberish I blather, what garbage words I tip-tap into this word box right here. Pls enjoy it. Let's call it 'Dream Chaser'.

Caught up as I was in the 80s synth dreamscapes offered by people's musical reaction to the film Drive and its College & Kavinsky-dominated soundtrack, the love of this type of music has never left me so the opening to 'Dream Chaser' is like a sudden step into an alternate world populated by electronic beauty and the tough undertones featured in games like Streets of Rage. However, this song is the kind of thing you'd hear once you've cleaned up the city in that game, don't you think? It begins as a foray into dubstep tinged by bleeping arpeggios and a smooth lead synth heralding good news.

Claps lead up to a lovely winding build-up awash with freestyle beats, snares roll and hi-hats buzz with insectoid surgicality, the second part of this song being marked by the fun vocal sample of "Readyyy... Go!". It's a plunge pool of low melodies bopping over wide Sonic-inspired chords, clean and smooth and delicious. A second "take-off" at like 1:38 sends us into fantastically happy world, where house piano chords stab and vox synth provides simplistic melodies (sounding like a K.K. Slider song from Animal Crossing). More dynamic changes - strings join the show for drama - claps in a frezy. Then everything suddenly fades out leaving you with candy-popping soft synth mixed with a pop song sample from where I don't know.

How nice was that? And with all the videogame references I've made it's clear that, whether intentionally or not, the often underrated, earworming videogame sounds have made their influence known. With the song levelling-up its atmosphere of fun and magic, the title seems very apt indeed.

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DEMICAT FEAT NEON BUNNY SINGING BIRD

Last time I said anything about music from Korea it wasn't about Psy but actually Neon Bunny, whose song 'Oh My Prince' caught my attention. It is a nice bit of pop with a retro atmosphere coupled with super catchy vocals - very nice.

And there I was the other day, thinking, "I wonder if Neon Bunny has done anything new," but before I could bother looking (I am easily distracted, OK?) I got an email from Neon Bunny herself telling me that she had indeed done some new stuff. Namely, she features on 'Singing Bird', a track from Seoul producer Demicat's new EP, Out Loud, which is on the whole a big snub to the onset of Autumn, carrying on instead the humid 90s pop/dance flavours that dripped onto our tongues this summer. One of my favourite flavours, so the EP is WELL worth a listen; it crosses French-touch-style rock-electro guts with lighter electronic noises to provide the perfect correlation between hard and soft. Please do listen.

When I listen to 'Singing Bird', in particular, it is filled with that kind of atmosphere that is almost bursting with the potential energy that summer beams down upon us, and I feel as though the weather outside should be almost unbearably hot. There are noises in here, the occasional lead synth melody at the end of each couple of bars, for instance, that remind me of particular things: swimming pools come to mind - that feeling of lying on the grass in the sun after swimming. But that's not helping you is it?

But maybe it is. Because the song smells of summer. Its synth lead arpeggios glitter sultrily, like the sun on rippling pool, ambient synths fill the spaces between Demicat's funkily placed chord stabs as if a true summer haze wobbled down to the horizon, or heat warped the air above hot tarmac. Piano chords dot the song with a nice progression, as if each one could be a different cut in a film or... The beat is meaty, literally like chucking a hefty steak repeatedly on a kitchen worktop (if yo American or something else it's synonymous with your word 'counter'; counters are in shops here) - and a little touch that I like is the alternating sounds of the snare, heavier and lighter by turns.

Then of course, the cherry on top, the icing on the cake, the dot of the i and the cross of the t, is Neon Bunny's vocals - she breathes an extra breath of spirit into the song. She sings languorously, softly in contrast to some of the harsher edges of the song, decorating it with faint glimmers of pop aesthetic. Even her vocal melody sounds similar to something you would've heard on the radio as a younger person in the 90s. Lovely really.

Again: listen to the EP - especially if you liked this song.

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NEON BUNNY (야광토끼) OH MY PRINCE (왕자님)

I feel like crying because my laptop has become so slow that I end up waiting rather substantially when switching between windows, tabs, waiting for pages to load. Has it finally come to getting a new laptop? Probably not. a) I am impoverished. b) I don't want to waste something that kind of works. So anyway, with that aside over with, let's get on with it.

Today it is something a bit different to what you might be used to me posting. After seeing a program about TV in South Korea last night I decided that it would be interesting to have a look about South Korean music today. Wow. I have spent all day looking so far and I've barely eaten, just been sitting here clicking and getting frustrated at my slow laptop (yes when you need more than one tab on a browser open a fast laptop is preferable) and some of the music I've found is really nice. One thing I discovered was this song. A lot of places are classing it as K-pop and I suppose that's right: it's pop (basically) and it's K - Korean. Makes sense.

On the other hand, some people are saying it's K-indie. Korean indie. Who knows. Given that she's an independent artist, I'd say the latter to be honest. It's by a girl who goes by the name of Neon Bunny (real name: Lim Yoo-jin) and it's called 왕자님 ('Oh My Prince' ... I think). She's had to my knowledge only one album out, Seoulight, released in 2011 and a mini-album or closer to an EP last year called Happy Ending. She used to be in indie band The Black Skirts and recently, like this month, collaborated with electro artist Smells on the recent-ish song 'Listen To Your Heart'. Anyway that's all a whirlwind of information that probably doesn't mean very much to you.

So once you've listened to the song, you can see what I mean about it being pop. It sounds poppy, that's for sure. However it's more the retro-style kinda 80s pop that people like College are making - yes indeed, this song is kind of an upbeat version of the kinds of songs you'd find on the soundtrack for Drive. It's all there: the beefy drums whose snares I very much like, the soft analogue synth arpeggios, palm muted reverbed 'n' chorused guitars even make an appearance. What's different is the stuttering screech of synth chords in the verse and the ornamentation of the beat, lavished as it is with open hi-hats and the occasional clap. Neon Bunny's vocals are perfect, too, spreading a catchy melody veiled ever-so-slightly with far-off reverb.

It might not be totally "out there", but things don't need to be "out there" to be good. And this I do believe is good. It's really nice to listen to, has a catchy melody and a thumper of a beat supported by saw-wave bass synth that judders your brain. It's all pleasant though, a brightly coloured ride through a sunny sky. I'd be very happy to hear more from this artist. For the moment, though, this is just right for summer - and so it should be, it was released around this time last year. But this summer's better cause it's actually nice weather.

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