Browse by Artist: JUNG MI, KIM

Artist:	JUNG MI, KIM
Title:	Now
Label:	LION PRODUCTIONS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	LION 663CD

"At the dawn of the 1970s, South Korea's rock music scene was at its zenith. Much of the reason for this was the god-like guitar wizard, songwriter, producer, and arranger Shin Joong Hyun. For this album, he took a young girl named Kim Jung Mi, and transformed her from a wallflower student into a folk-psych chanteuse in record time (if Francoise Hardy is the Marianne Faithful of France, then Kim Jung Mi is, I suppose, the Francoise Hardy of Korea). The ten songs on Now were written and recorded during 1973 with a firm mandate to create a truly psychedelic sound experience. On each number, Shin Joong Hyun and his backing group laid down pure emotion on tape. Mr. Shin's fuzz guitar weaves in and out of the tracks, interlaced with his own poetic musings on nature (spring, sun, flowers, rain, and wind), all else in the world apart from Kim Jung Mi's soothing voice and insistent bass that crouches and creeps, depending on its mood, displaced. This raw feeling, combined with Kim Jung Mi's seductive, expressive vocals and empathetic string orchestration, resulted in an album that is nothing short of awe-inspiring. Mr. Shin's ethereal cover photo--the blue graininess of the sky dripping into fading clouds, with Kim Jung Mi surrounded on her sky-high isolated mountaintop by flowers--is the perfect image to represent what is, without a doubt, one of the best psychedelic albums ever created. Our version of this quintessence of psychedelia features Korean/English lyric translations, rare photos, re-mastered audio, and comprehensive liner notes by Kevin 'Sipreano' Howes and Shin Joong Hyun expert Jae-Myeong Ro (director of the Korean Classical Music Record Museum, and author of the book Shin Joong Hyun and Beautiful Country. The deluxe mini-LP sleeve CD version has a 20-page booklet with rare photos, and great stories about Shin Joong Hyun and Kim Jung Mi's continuing place of prominence in the Korean music scene."

Artist:	JUNG MI, KIM
Title:	Kim Jung Mi
Label:	WORLD PSYCHEDELIA (WORLD'S LEADING TERRORIST STATE)
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.00
Catalog #:	WPC6 8499

Third reissue on this label of groovy Korean psychedelic pop with slight English folk flavors from Kim Jung Mi -- known throughout as the the "Francois Hardy of Korean pop." "This 1974 album shows a different side of the delectable Korean singer's personality, as she is called upon to front slinky mid-tempo rockers instead of the folk-inflected tracks of both the Nowand Wind records; this makes for some interesting music, including a cover version of Janis Joplin's 'Move Over'; the tracks all sound more than a year removed from Now and Wind, in part because of drastically better production values (this album was made for Jigu, unlike Kim Jung Mi's other releases), plus the addition of horns, organ, and even a string section; Shin Jung Hyun is still backing his protégé with characteristic guitar lines, so no loss of musical quality is evident."

Artist:	JUNG MI, KIM
Title:	Wind
Label:	WORLD PSYCHEDELIA (WORLD'S LEADING TERRORIST STATE)
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.00
Catalog #:	WPC6 8500

"Album released the same year (1973) as the Now LP already issued by World Psychedelia; after one listen to it, it's difficult not be permanently hooked; the same basic formula is in place as on Now: cool but impassioned vocals from Kim Jung Mi, tasty call-and-response guitar licks from Shin Jung Hyun, and a steady pounding pulse from the rest of the band -- the only change here is that there's little evidence of acoustic guitars; it's the slower tracks, with their faintly Korean folk flavor (like tracks two and three, for example), that steal the show; a worthy successor to Now."

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