Spirals, Circuity, and a bit of Bling – diana

At the break of dawn, I sense time as a tangible substance held in gentle billows of melancholic blue. Like an air pocket where the past and present collide in a dazed anticipation of the approaching day. It is in these moments of suspended yet meditative stillness that I find “a malicious witness to our viral memories” (2023) lingering. Suk Hong devises an alchemy of sound, capturing the gradation from the early twilight to the haze of artificial blue light glistening in the awakening city.

Each of the six tracks in the album contains its own microcosm–sonic landscapes melded together by superimposing layers of sounds, cut up and distorted. The lilting soundscapes are jagged in form, restless in movement, and grounds for identiless melodies to clash in dissonant harmony. Opening with ‘From Software to Hardform,’ pathways begin to form along the reverberations of high-pitched twangs and murmurings of elongated noise. I discern the notes as individual, embodied forms searching for their place in the sprawling expanse of a phantom acoustic world concocted by Hong. Patchy medleys strive toward spatial coherence.

The tracks are produced using various sounds from a vast repository of audio recordings made readily available online for purchase and use by different users. Hong harvests an array of instrumental music to build his composition. Creating an ensemble of wind and string instruments, he dissects “whole” sound as a sum of its parts. The structural form of the recording, such as the pitch, melody, rhythm, and timbre, is adjusted arbitrarily until unrecognizable to the original. Hong then laboriously sorts and categorizes the resulting altered sounds into folders with file names referencing their characteristics. The collection of distorted recordings rest untouched for some time. Such time away from the newly developed audio tracks is a wholly necessary step for the producer to gain agency of his subjectivity. Fermented in the timeless soil of the digital, the sounds become ingredients awaiting activation and re-arrangement to take its final form as packaged consumables.

Symptomatic of the contemporaneous generation, Hong’s production process can be understood through the lens of curation and abstraction; or a mimetic lyricism of his time, where music is essentialized to 15-second snippets and functions to accompany videos dramatizing, or romanticizing, the phenomena of the everyday. Songs loop in perpetuity and circulate in iterations among the boundless community of social users, who become fluent in a musical language of shared emotional vibrato. Music manipulates the visual, and the barrage of images and videos trigger auditory hallucinations. Hong employs this mutual language in the album. Particularly evident in ‘Maparam’ and ‘Built Ecologies,’ the intro and the organic drone sound in the tracks, respectively, are in fact complete songs compressed into mere seconds. Can music be conveyed as images, and can music be experienced in “full” within a matter of seconds?

Despite the well-rendered collage of sounds, a sense of unease permeates my skin. With no repetition of melody nor consistent beat, the tracks offer not a single hook of sentimentality to latch onto. Hong’s quick-witted editing ties together the plucking of bulbous arpeggios, the crass strokes of brush against the metallic grooves, and the swelling of ethereal chords stimulating the surrounding air with an unfamiliar atmospheric effervescence. Hong seems to play on the conditional reflex of musical innuendos that inundate our experience of the world mediated by media and its devices. He counteracts the circuitry of the digital where seamless connections rely on the generation and transmission of rapid, immediate, constant, and direct reactions.

At the same time, ‘We Sleep Where We Fall’ is a rare terrain where sound travels to tingle sensations, extending trails of empathy towards its listener. Against the grandiose legato of sustained bow strokes, Hong’s voice gently interjects halfway through. Akin to the way he edits instrumental recordings from varied sources, Hong sifts through his own writings and threads bits and pieces of disparate ideas loosely together. The resulting narration tenderly speaks of wanderings under the night sky, memories as frost on the ground from which flowers bloom, constellations as songs that will be forgotten, and the rubbing of one’s eyes shut to see further ahead. No matter its illogic, the string of surreal images harmonized with the music is conveyed with cinematic presence and cadence. Hong embraces the malice of “the cut;” literary and musical semantics are spliced together to instigate a surge of an all-consuming nostalgic reverence that tricks one to believe its manufactured beauty.

Dwelling as a brief, winding fissure between the tracks, ‘Welcome’ is an alley that leads to the airy blurs of the album’s finale, ‘Highrise of Homes.’ These last two tracks head toward a clash, where empathetic tenderness is cut short by audio data that have been reversed and that punctuate in curt streaks oozing every bit confident. Traversing the sonic landscape, the fleeting clusters of full-bodied notes surge forth with great momentum before spiraling back to the feathery undertones of the album’s beginning.

The first rays of the morning sun crack the blue-filtered solitude of dawn. Glints of light travel in exaggerated, linear lines along the grid plan–a motherboard, or a small universe. Hong’s production of music is a search for “pure,” elemental qualities of sound. And I am reminded of the mass extraction of minerals and energy that far precede our time on Earth, assembled and polished to become unitized mediators of our desire to remember, transmit, translate, and connect. All it takes is a bit of bling to remix the passing of time.