Sebastian Claren: Gagokbounce: One By One

The present album “can be seen as one of the rare examples of a fusion of two musical cultures, where the respective sensibilities and creative ideas are not simply blended, but clarified by each other”, as James Water observes, seeing this album as an homage to the art of Gagok, an instrumentally accompanied song art of the upper middle class in ancient Korea. Sebastian Claren compares the form of the composition Gagokbounce: One By One to “watching a film and repeating certain sections over and over again, sometimes slower, sometimes faster, sometimes shorter, sometimes longer, to better understand what exactly is shown on the screen”. In reference to the films and performances of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha from the 1970s, the musical atmosphere of this album can be described as slow, sparse and hypnotic.