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| Courtesy of Hillary |
By David A. Tizzard
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Unfortunately, that silence is often hard to find in modern life. A constant barrage of shorts, jingles, and government alerts beep, tweet and ring from our pockets. We sleep with podcasts on. Netflix automatically plays the next episode of the drama we're not really interested in but everyone else is watching. And music has to hit us within the first 10 seconds, otherwise we skip and scroll down. Influential songwriter and producer Tat Tong, a man whose discography has gone 80x platinum, echoed this sentiment in a recent video upload to LinkedIn. Explaining how he listens to demos, Tat says, "I listen to it the way a listener with a very ADHD attention span would. I start the track. Does it grab me instantly? Is there something cool about it? If there's something that throws me off, I skip it."
This is the environment those making music are faced with: don't bore us, get to the chorus. Now. Quick! K-pop does this incredibly well. As soon as most songs start, they throw hooks and ear worms at you, sliding their way into your brain while you're distracted by the airbrushed features of gyrating teens. But what does the opposite?
Neon Bunny's (Ya-gwang Tokki) 2021 track Bloom certainly does. A white-noise coated volume swell pans across the left and right speakers for the first 20 seconds, creating a sense of tension and disturbance. But this threat of avant-garde atonal experimentalism is soon replaced by a deep single note string pattern that resembles a whale's vocalization. All of a sudden, what was once mere white noise now means we're apparently under water, joined by a distant haunting female vocal stating in ethereal Korean that something is blooming, ready to become a star. A sporadically arriving set of house-styled piano chords eventually give way to arpeggios and after a minute of atmosphere, 60 whole seconds of space, the drums finally arrive. Tension solved.
The rhythms put the song in mid-90s intelligent drum and bass territory, if a little slower, and they are danced upon by an indecipherable vocal that is filtered in a way that glistens. The word "heart" is one of the few utterances that breaks through to us. It sounds at times like the womb. Knowing that Neon Bunny gave birth a few months after this track was released perhaps supports this interpretation. But after only 20 seconds of comfort, knowing where we are and anchored by a drum, that sense is once again broken as the BPMs drop and we're plunged into a lo-fi section with wah and organ melodies. It is familiar territory for those of an indecisive YouTube persuasion and/or grad students, but certainly unexpected here. Lo-fi is often background music for people with work to do. It's elevator music for the TikTok generation.
But Neon Bunny doesn't rest there. A key change is emphasized by stacked vocals creating harmony, a horn section enters, trumpets stab and strings send us soaring towards a crescendo that ELO or Neil Diamond would be proud of. This is the real highlight of the song: a stark and bold contrast to everything that has come before. We then return to the upbeat jungle patterns but this time with violins and cellos ― a distraction because we are about to fall into a dark glitch techno passage that sounds schizophrenic and nasty. The bass is deep and abrasive. The sounds scratch at the side of the speakers and your ears. It hurts. And then we're back at the crescendos. The strings. The horns. Sixties-infused vocals. We've made it. We have bloomed.
Neon Bunny does this all in 4 minutes on her track. It shouldn't work. At times, I'm not sure it actually does. But if modern music is scared of gaps and scared of making something unpredictable that people might not immediately like, then Neon Bunny is not that. It's pre-modern or post-modern, or something else entirely. Neon Bunny's music suggests a cynicism towards modern life but creates a new cosmos for us to exist in. You can listen to it here. And please, listen to it.
Dr. David A. Tizzard (datizzard@swu.ac.kr) has a Ph.D. in Korean Studies. He is a social/cultural commentator and musician who has lived in Korea for nearly two decades. He is also the host of the Korea Deconstructed podcast, which can be found online. The views expressed in the article are the author's own and do not reflect the editorial direction of The Korea Times.
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