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Artist: Jin Sangtae
Album: Extensity of Hard Disk Drive
Label: Balloon & Needle
Format: CD
Price: $15.00
Order: bnn22
Tracks:
1. Fixed
2. Extension
3. Room For Space
Time: 55:21
About:
Jin Sangtae has been active in experimental music scene in Seoul, South Korea since 2004. He appeared on 5 modules series(www.themanual.co.kr) with Ryu Hankil, Taku Unami, Mattin, Choi Joonyong, and Park Seungjun. He is runnig a small live space called 'dotolim' organizing concerts.
From his experience as a part-time worker in Yong-san electronic market, he has developed his way of playing electronic goods such as radio, laptop,computer power, and hard disk drive. On this album, he used two hard disk drives as speakers. When feedback sound goes into the hard disk drives they vibrate and emit sound. Jin Sangtae picked up those sounds in his studio. The result is a mixture of sound from electronic signal and physical sound from hard disk drive ticking, creating a broken groove with the ambience of the studio.
<review by Brian Olewnick>
Jin continues a recent interest of his in overt rhythmic elements, mechanical but gritty at the same time, playing amplified hard drives. Though the rhythms are static, the sound envelope around them is by turns billowy, rough, grainy, feedback-laden, making for an intriguing dichotomy for the listener to deal with. Sometimes things become almost primitively tribal, albeit a faux kind of primitivism I associate with bands like Birdsongs of the Mesozoic. It's rocky and disjointed listening, not easy, and though I'm frankly not sure if this particular avenue is going to be one I'm prone to enjoy negotiating in the years to come, I'm glad there's someone out there testing the environs.
<review on Vital Weekly 652 by Frans de Waard>
Jin Sangtae (who actually recorded the previous disc reviewed:bnn20) worked as a part-timer on the Yong-san electronic market in 1994, and its there where he found his interest using hard disk drives and radio's as the source for his improvised music. On this CD he limits himself to using just two hard disk drives, disassembled and 'manipulating the vibration that occurs when they emit sound', all captured with a microphone, so that the space has a say too in the whole. Its not easy to imagine what Sangtae does when he plays these, but the music makes a great impression. Surely we can say that this is noise. The sound is loud but utterly 'dry', almost like acoustic noise. Rhythmic, buzzing, feedback like (but never forming a real wall of sound) and it makes the drives almost singing. Not easy noise to sink into, but highly demanding music. At the length in which it now arrives - three tracks, over fifty-five minutes - is however a bit long - almost like an endurance test. Perhaps a bit shorter would have increased the intensity a bit more.
(Balloon & Needle) |
