“The beauty of Jiha’s work lies in the spaces she leaves to evoke imaginative moments in the listener”
–The Guardian
Park Jiha, the acclaimed Korean composer/multi-instrumentalist, makes patient, immersive music; music that illuminates the essence and texture of the natural, living world.
On her fourth album, All Living Things, her mastery of Korean traditional instruments is intricately woven with deeply personal compositions and a deft use of contemporary sonics. Terms like post-classical, ambient or even cinematic are useful, entry-level tags, but they only scratch the surface of this album’s shimmering, contemplative soundworld.
All Living Things is a tender and profound meditation on the miracle of life. It is suffused with reverence and gratitude for the chance to simply be a living being on this planet at this time. To be a part of the natural cycles of life. To belong in the universe. It’s an intimate sound portrait of what she calls “a hardly explainable sentiment of feeling alive.” Jiha writes: “Take a deep breath and step forward, consciously, into an ordinary morning. Feel the ground beneath your feet and the life in your body, through the movement of your limbs. All Living Things begins with this: a singular connection to the earth that with awareness becomes a connection to all things; the cycles and continuities of life that help to process feelings of uncertainty with hope.”
Park Jiha explores this vision through idiosyncratic and deeply personal methods. Like its critically acclaimed predecessors, Philos (2018) and The Gleam (2022), All Living Things features her playing every instrument, meticulously overdubbed and layered in the studio to create sumptuous sound worlds. Once again, drawing on her background in traditional Korean music, she employs an array of instruments largely unfamiliar to most western listeners: the pir....... more