Armed with Clippy EM272 stereo microphones and undisclosed instrumentation, the South Korean sound artist Suk Hong elides the boundaries and ellipses between the performed and overheard on his new album Pedigree for the Otoroku label. Reedy synthesizers, pipe organ drones, oscillating sine tones and percussive static rippled through by a late burst of mallets seem to merge steadily with the litany of sounds which he captured as he walked and commuted around Seoul, with his microphones all the while hanging from his backpack.
These found sounds might include the bustle and yell of street food vendors, sputtered coughing, snorting animals, office workers on their own daily commutes, conversations snatched only in passing or the applause which emanates from an impromptu performance space or concert hall, subway announcements, people snoring and the tinkling of keys from a piano bar. In short Pedigree gathers up all of the bustle of the modern city, from its psychological tics to its biological processes, and from its novelties and throwaways to the sense especially in a metropolis like Seoul of an all-encompassing mechanist hum.
Yet such is the intensity of focus and so indiscriminate are the sounds relayed by Suk Hong that Pedigree, which becomes more curious with every listen, takes on a patient and meditative quality, embodying both a sense of anxiety and its sheer release. Suk Hong says that the album is ‘about what’s been passed down, the pedigree of our people, hastily constructed to pick up the phase of the west’, adding that the beauty which he finds in his city’s streets inhabits both the good and bad sides of Seoul, which become inseparable. Adding to the air of refined disquiet, the cover image for the album focuses on a mural and table setting from the Sariwŏn Hotel in North Korea.
