DAL:UM
Coexistence
GERMANY GLITTERBEAT / tak:til GBCD161 (2024)
Excellent set of instrumentals performed by the duo of Suyean Ha and Hyeyoung Hwang, playing traditional Korean zithers – the gayageum and the geomungo. I think their achievement has been to combine the traditional folk music and instruments of Korea with influences and ideas from modernism, including minimalist composition and improvisation from jazz.
The two musicians broke away from the Seoul Metropolitan Youth Traditional Music Ensemble, and while DAL:UM was first founded in 2018, by the time the pandemic was winding down, these determined musicians had developed enough of a strong identity and sense of where they wanted to take their music and their unique sound. There are influences here coming from unexpected places – visual artist Cornelia Parker for one, a TV documentary about deep-sea diving on another – and while the liner notes find parallels with a Chopin nocturne, I can also hear echoes of Satie in the very satisfying ‘Dodry’ with its peaceful centre of serenity. But it’s much harder to account for the elliptical phrasing and astonishing intervals in the playing on ‘Poison and Antidote’, music of such confidence and precision we can only wonder – how did they get to this point?
While these zithers may sound exotic to Western ears, the inventive approach of DAL:UM speaks a more universal language. Perhaps Suyean Ha and Hyeyoung Hwang don’t worry too much about techniques or genres, nor are they troubled by conventional Western string-playing expressions like vibrato, and are instead guided by their simple philosophy: “how can we harmoniously coexist with the life surrounding us?” This beautiful music indicates they are succeeding in finding the way. (23/09/2024)