Review | By Jack Chuter / ATTN:Magazine
11min | snow
It’s disarming to hear a piano played like that. I mean it as a high compliment, but the melody on opening track “snow” carries the slow, plodding concentration of a grade 1 practice exercise. It’s simple to the point of being tuneless, and perhaps that’s the whole point: when the façade of composition is removed, all that’s left is an instrument resounding in a room. My focus settles on how pedal sustain melts the notes together, or how the accompanying brush kit skims over keys as pebbles on placid water, or how a layer of microphone noise lingers over the mix like frost on a window. The fact that the second track, “gust”, opens on a succession of arpeggiated cascades and cut-up percussion only affirms my theory: the opening track, while still pleasant on its own, is a means of listener calibration, stimulating an awareness of tonal quality that frames the understanding of the album thereafter. The record is not only a duet between pianist Jiyeon Kim and drummer Sang Yong Min, but a dialogue between human intention and the feral interventions of environment and circumstance. […]