Philos

On her 2018 debut Communion, Park Jiha played an array of ancient Korean instruments including the piri, a double-reed bamboo flute that sounds like an oboe; the yanggeum, a hammered dulcimer and the saenghwang, a bamboo mouth organ. She wove those into an ensemble sound that also included saxophone, clarinet, vibraphone and percussion. On the follow-up, the extra instruments have been stripped away, leaving her to overlay her core instruments to hypnotic and resonant effect. All but one of the eight tracks are purely instrumental, creating eerie layers of ambient sound that fuse an Oriental vibe with the minimalist Western compositional style of the likes of Steve Reich, Jon Hassell and Michael Nyman.

The opening track ‘Arrival’ operates as an overture, introducing her panoply of different sounds. ‘Thunder Shower’ evokes the steamy heat of midsummer rain, and ‘Walker: In Seoul’ is an impressionistic evocation of the city in which she lives. ‘Easy’, the only composition to feature the human voice, finds the Lebanese artist Dima el Sayed reciting a poem about Middle Eastern conflict and oppression. Although the militant sentiments are laudable, there's a disconnect between the anger of the words and the otherworldly drones of the piri, which makes it the least successful track on an otherwise impressive album.