The New Sound

“Black Out”  IU IU (real name Lee Ji-eun) has been making music for about ten years, during which she has taken more and more artistic control of her output. Her most recent album, Palette , was almost entirely written by IU herself. It seems her hard work paid off, as the album was awarded Album of the Year at the MelOn Music Awards (an annual South Korean music awards show). The album also received international attention: Billboard named it the best K-Pop album of 2017 and Fuse TV ranked it 12th on their “Best Albums of 2017" list (the only Korean album on the list). For me, the best track from Palette is the darkly intoxicating, and surprisingly refreshing, “Black Out.” The song was written and produced by IU, with music and arrangement by Lee Jong-hoon. (Source: Wikipedia ) K-Pop is known for it’s brilliantly polished and shiny production, nary a breath or note out of it’s predetermined place. “Black Out” is gleefully not that. The rhythm section is clanky an...

“1/1”  Brian Eno My musical preferences often cycle with the seasons. The cold, dry, wintry weather often puts me in an ambient state of mind. If I were to suggest one piece of ambient music, it would have to be Brian Eno’s brilliant “1/1” from the album Ambient 1: Music For Airports. The philosopher Alan Watts has said “In music, one doesn’t make the end of the composition the point of the composition. If that were so… there would be composers who wrote only finales. People would go to concerts just to hear one crashing chord…” Eno it seems, has done just that with “1/1” though. He has taken one brilliant sonic moment, a seemingly simple chord played on piano, and impossibly expanded it into a meditative and crystalline seventeen minutes. The song slowly forms like an icicle, each harmonic repetition on the piano a drop of water slowly rolling down the frozen column; simultaneously creating the overall structure of the song and adding to its length. Nuanced s...