Hyunhye Seo’s record is certainly the best “eel” music we’ve heard for a long time, even surpassing the efforts of Winged Eel Fingerling on the guitar in Zappa and Beefheart bands, or even John D Morton’s chaotic and abrasive 1990s band The Electric Eels.
Seo is Korean but based in Berlin and used to play in Xiu Xiu (perhaps under the name of Angela Seo), an American post-rock punk band who I never heard, but they are highly regarded and have made many albums since Knife Play in 2002. I think Eel (ROOM40 RM4212) was made with piano, percussion, and something vaguely alluded to as “cavernous acoustic treatments”, but what interests me is how the music sets out to emulate the life cycle of these slippery monsters of the Sargasso sea. Hyunhye Seo doesn’t talk about her music in the liner notes, preferring to supply details of the spawning season and migration patterns of these elongated, wormlike beasts, and even makes historic references to Freud and Aristotle as she points out the supreme mystery of the eel, i.e. we don’t really know for sure how they manage to breed. To illustrate the trend of her thesis, we have this very dark, energised music where the lower registers of the piano are the least of our problems, and the uncanny soaring universe sounds she manages to capture on ‘Eel I’ will truly stir the imagination. Admittedly ‘Eel II’ is more sedate in its approach, but it’s still a choppy ride in a motor boat across a strange purple sea that few can refuse.
I would wish for more creators like Hyunhye Seo, who evidently thinks there are things greater than her own ego that are worth composing music about, and wastes no words on self-indulgent introspection or detailing her sensitive feelings. Very good indeed. Make mine eel. That’s a Moray. (01/06/2023)