PRECOCIOUS NEOPHYTE — MY ELECTRONIC IDOL

⌾ LISTEN TO MY ELECTRONIC IDOL BY PRECOCIOUS NEOPHYTE ⌾

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A shining candy floss sky, the sun merely a white blinding circle behind hefty clouds. It's the scene conjured by the warped scuzzy chill of 'My Electronic Idol' by South Korean, Chicago-based aritst Precocious Neophyte, aka Jeehye Ham. Imbued with shoegaze aesthetic, all fuzz and delay pedal, waves of guitar provide a soothing wash of noise while the chorus jostles with riffy muscle for an exercise in deftly dynamic balance.

In the tossed salad of it all there is a mingling of genres, the shoegaze sensibilities centre stage, while Ham's vocals summon the ethereality of dreampop, floating cirrus-like and carefree amid the din of distortion. The bass hums with laid-back psychedelic flair, wandering with the drums to create an effortless groove, a stoned-by-the-lake kind of feel that feels at once feels as awesomely aimless as it does pointed and present.

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• 🔔 'My Electronic Idol' is fresh, new music. It's the first track taken from Precocious Neophyte's upcoming album Home in the Desert, scheduled for release on 1st September on Graveface Records. You may pre-order it on Bandcamp, if you like.

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☟ Precocious Neophyte Internet Presence ☟
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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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☟ Yaeji Internet Presence ☟
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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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☟ GENIUS Internet Presence ☟
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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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☟ Neon Bunny's Social Media Presence ☟
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SEIFUKU – NEED U GIRL

This song is just like… Well when I first heard it… It's one of those songs, you know the type: an immediate all-encompassing feeling just seems to emanate effortlessly from the music, each sound playing its part in the effusion of whatever emotion happens to be in the process of being conjured at the time. Just as many musical minds over the centuries, even millennia, have done, this song wrestles listlessly with romance: matters of the heart lie at its core, lovelorn and dreaming.

It's funny you can get all this just from 2-minutes-8-seconds of indistinct music centred around a vague samples from an (internationally) obscure pop song. But that I suppose is where its strengths lie, in the shapes of meaning and intent moving beneath the smooth ambience of the track, like attractive alluring shadows of a mystery crush moving behind a curtain at a high-rise window as you look across from your own apartment… but this is fantasy.

Of course, the title helps in these matters of sonic semantics also; it's called 'NEED U GIRL' and it's by a producer called seifuku.

Founded on a bed of organ-feeling dusty-far-off chords, the heavy muffled thud of expertly placed kicks make up the gentle contours and curves of the track, playing call-and-response with a beautifully simplistic finger click cutting through the soft tide of sound, hi-hats ornamenting it with accented rattle, a brief section of muted bloops intersecting the unending slowdown sample of the chorus from South Korean singer-songwriter Taeyang's 'I Need A Girl'.

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☟ seifuku Social Media Presence ☟
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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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☟ Sungjoon Kim Quartet Social Media Presence ☟
Sungjoon Kim's Facebook • SoundCloud • Myspace • Bandcamp • ILIL SOUND • Twitter • Tumblr • YouTube • Wikipedia

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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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