Signals LP

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Okkyung Lee returns with a new album made in collaboration with Explore Ensemble, who recently featured on new work by Mark Fell and Beatrice Dillon. Here, they break down Lee’s knotty musical practice into illusory performance pieces which she then further unfurls into a sort of fantasy meta-narrative, where you never quite know what you’re listening to. If you loved Mark Fell’s recent ‘Psychic Resynthesis’ album for Frozen Reeds, or are into work by Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza or Henning Christiansen, this one’s for you.

Just last year, Lee’s 'just like any other day (어느날)', offered a highly approachable, skilful and deeply personal mediation on muzak and South Korean culture that subverted her own musical lore. While 'Signals' isn't directly connected, it further deepens her unique artistic outlook, hardening her political resolve. In an accompanying press release, Lee explains that it's more and more difficult to express her beliefs "without lyrics or long explanatory texts", a fact we've also been chewing over for aeons. So rather than let this issue derail her, she uses it as a springboard, considering the aesthetic "signals" she was working with and how they might be subverted, obscured or repurposed. 'Signals' was commissioned by Explore Ensemble and performed at Transit Festival in Leuven, Huddersfield's hcmf// and Luxembourg's Rainy Days. Lee doesn't simply take the recordings and clean them up for release, instead she uses the three live shows as the starting point for what's described as a "meta-document", editing them in her studio and blurring the lines between contexts with new musical elements.

Split into seven sections, one for each member of the Explore Ensemble sextet, plus an additional two-headed finale for Lee herself, the album repeatedly asks us to consider what it is we might be hearing. ‘Signals' rewards patient, attentive engagement where the music's "real and imagined acoustics" can be fully appreciated and comprehended. On opener 'Siwan', percussive sounds melt into eerie piano runs (provided by the magnificent Siwan Rhys) and thumbscrew-tightening strings that Lee offsets with feedback and a hypnotic AC hum. She upsets the balance, but it coolly pokes fun at the live experience itself, forcing us to question what's intended and what's not. Are we listening to a soundcheck? Has the performance even started? And when the track dissolves into 'Taylor', named after woodwind player Taylor MacLennan, the course of the album is corrected by breathy, animalistic flute blasts that blanket the scrapes and high pitched wails. 

Lee's own 'Wings / First Love' composition is used to sign off each side of the record; the first centres Lee's visceral scraping sounds, building them into a noisy crescendo that's countered by airy, levitational drones and fluttering piano melodies. And to conclude the dramatic second half, animated by Christine Anderson's baroque viola performance and Alex Roberts's doom-y bass clarinet, Lee muddles her themes with crowd sounds, using applause welded to low-end rumbles to create a disquieting "farewell".  

Always a treat with Okkyung, we’re there no matter where she chooses to take us."

- boomkat