Park Jiha: The Gleam
K-Music Festival 2022
Thu. 24 Nov. 8 pm / Stone Nest, Shaftesbury Avenue
Park Jiha stunned audiences and critics alike with her Glitterbeat album Philos, described by The Guardian’s 4-stars review as a ‘relentlessly creative approach to playing’. She returns with her third Glitterbeat release The Gleam a gorgeous meditation on the intersection of music and light.
Park Jiha
Park Jiha performs her new material solo, by looping and building soundscapes from an array of traditional Korean instruments, such as piri (double reed bamboo instrument), saenghwang (double-reed mouth organ of 17 bamboo pipes) and yanggeum (hammered dulcimer-like metal stringed instrument).
There’s a stark clarity to her sound but it has a searching warmth, with occasional references to the formality of traditional Korean music that is her background, but she feels the distance she has put between herself and that teaching is “really what made my music what it is now”. Her music comes together as a beautiful whole, flows with a natural rhythm and breathes.
Park Jiha has staked her place in the international music scene over the last few years as the official showcase for The World Music Expo, WOMEX and Classical:NEXT.
- “Park Jiha has a foot in jazz and drone, but her new album might be better described as “slow music”, making art illuminating our organic relationship with passing time.” -UNCUT
“Packed with moments of intense reflection, with melodies straddling the ancient and modern, The Gleam confirms Jiha as a singular talent.” -MOJO
"The eight instrumental tracks are presented as an impressionistic journey from night into day and back again, as we awake to the sparse and haunting tone signal of ‘At Dawn’, peak with the sparkling rhythms of ‘A Day In…’ and then drift into a sleep of dreams with ‘Temporary Inertia’. The result is serene, luminous and utterly gorgeous…” -Songlines
