Korean composer and multi-instrumentalist Park Jiha seamlessly mixes traditional instruments with modern techniques and electronics to blur the lines between musical-history and modernism. On All Living Things we are drawn into an ambient world that is no nebulous cloud formation of sounds, but one meticulous constructed with loops and motifs and utilising instruments largely unfamiliar to western ears such as the piri (a type of double-reeded oboe), the yanggeum (a hammered dulcimer), and saenghwang (a large wooden mouth organ). Alongside these you can hear flute, glockenspiel, bells, and Jiha’s own voice all sympathetically filtered and enhanced through electronics.
Jiha says, “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.”
All Living Things is Jiha’s “tender and profound meditation on the miracle of life” and its “natural cycles”. Through music she seeks to connect us to nature and the elements even down to how the natural world is reflected in the song titles. The opening track ‘First Buds’ uses pops of the yanggeum to indicate new buds appearing, translating the fertility of Spring into sound. ‘Grounding’ has the feeling of someone stepping off the manmade path into forest and standing bare-footed to connect and find balance between the corporeal and the environmental.
Each instrumental has its place as a proxy for Jiha’s translation of flora and fauna, where the piri can be soft to show plants opening up as on the achingly beautiful ‘Bloom’, or have the reeds straining on ‘Blown Leaves’, ‘Eternal Path’, with its call and response to the yanggeum, and ‘Growth Ring’, all of which demonstrate the elemental force of nature. ‘Breathe Again’ weaves wind and stringed instruments in counterpoint and feels to me like the joy of filling your lungs with crisp air outdoors. Nature is preeminent all the way up to the closing track ‘Water Moon’ which uses glockenspiel to evoke water dropping, softly disrupting the reflection of a moon in a cloudless sky.
There is reverence and awe folded into the layers of this album; an honest celebration of the environmental world we seem to be bent on dismantling. All Living Things translates the harmony of nature into sound, seeking to connect our nervous system to the mycorrhizal network that promotes symbiosis between plants rather than conflict (often referred to as the ‘Wood Wide Web’).
I’ll leave the final word to Park Jiha “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.”
Live:
1 April 2025 - Cafe OTO, London
3 April 2025 – St George’s, Bristol
Park Jiha Socials: Website | Facebook | Bandcamp | Instagram | YouTube
Released through Glitterbeat Records.
Review by Paul F Cook
Keep up to date with all new content on Joyzine via our
Facebook | Bluesky | Instagram | Threads | Mailing List
1 comment