Jiyoung Wi is a multi-faceted artist from Seoul, Korea currently residing in The Hague, Netherlands. Jiyoungβs work can be situated within fictional literature, improvised music, field recording, and is interested in juxtaposing or disjointing these fields of practice through her sonic and literary methodologies. Jiyoungβs debut album π¨πππππ π¨ππ πͺππππππ, is a concise body of work that punctuates a beginning point to her work within the 12β LP format. The recording serves as one of the two releases concluding the three year sonic endeavor that is the ENXPL (Enmossed X Psychic Liberation) series. Having previously released recordings on compilations for labels like Mirae Arts, Eastern Nurseries, and Psychic Liberation, here Jiyoung hones a cinematic-like structure that exemplifies the biome within her craft. While presently Jiyoung is performing the systematic dismantling of a violin in her live improvisations paired with approachable boutique synthesizers, π¨πππππ π¨ππ πͺππππππ is a pairing of the inimitable Korg MS-20 and field recordings staged or captured by Jiyoung in Seoul and Busan, South Korea.
With three scenes per side, Jiyoung walks us through different geographical and spatial intimacies. Public spaces and intimate conversations are obscured and reconstructed.
Glass elevators, an unknown hotel lobby piano recital, office toilet rants, window side night bus travels, and multiple languages interplay with staged and unstaged conversations to transmogrify themselves into a world of Jiyoungβs view. Money, sex, relationships, and cultural parameters are at once idiosyncratic as well as disorientingly familiar to the listener.
As an extension of the series coined by Jiyoung as βSound Fictionβ, the album feels crisp, pressurized, and at times funny, at other times melancholic. As language, space, and viewing perspective shift, Jiyoungβs succinct album invites the listener to an aural world uniquely of her own viewpoint. While collecting source material relying on the outside world (conversations, elders, the closing track featuring Sungeun Lee), we have a listening experience that deeply illustrates Jiyoungβs perspective. The disjointed experience of someone maneuvering internationally to further develop a practice is encapsulated brilliantly here by Jiyoung with π¨πππππ π¨ππ πͺππππππ. Alongside Makoto Oshiroβs πΊππππππ , it is a perfect bookend to the ENXPL series.
Jiyoung Wi is a writer and musician based in Seoul and The Hague. She writes fiction in-between institutional and non-institutional contexts, and works with sounds in-between clubs and art museums. Her methodology involves building and breaking sonic narratives by arranging and re-contextualizing disparate sound sources ranging from field recordings to fragmented anonymous dialogue. She approaches sound and text as invisible experiences and phenomena, and is interested in the narrative symptoms that emerge when both are juxtaposed on the same axis. In a series entitled βSound Fiction,β she explores these symptoms operating within and without the art space. She has been co-organizing an experimental/leftfield listening event βSorrow Club Seoulβ since 2019.
credits
released January 31, 2024
AUDIO : JIYOUNG WI
VOICES : WINDY KIM, CARL G, Schang09
PIANO: SUNGEUN LEE
AUDIO FINALIZING : GLYN MAIER
LAYOUT : DOMINIQUE SAIEGH
PHOTO : GUSTAVO SAIEGH
Label founded in 2013, originally ran with Miguel AlvariΓ±o titled Primitive Languages as a cassette and record store project
in New York City. Operated solo by Nick Klein since 2019 under the working title Psychic Liberation out of the EU. PL is made possible with the distribution assistance of Fantastique INC USA, Industrial Coast UK, Tobira Records JP, Rope Editions SK, and Stellage Store RU....more
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