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CD
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CVSD 082CD
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Okkyung Lee's is perhaps the most harrowing of the Black Cross Solo Sessions stories. At the onset of COVID, the cellist was called to travel to Korea to be with her dying father. The trip was sudden and didn't allow her to bring her instrument, but once there she was unable to return to New York because of the stringent lockdown. For months she was stranded without her cello, unable to practice or make any music. This intense alienation took a long time to lift. Indeed, even after she made it back to the States, Lee found it impossible to reconnect with the music for a period. The invitation to make a new solo CD for BCSS inspired her to jump-start her playing and in the process, she has made one of the most profound and beautiful CDs in recent memory, an almost impossible to describe amalgam of string and wood and voice and magic. Lee does not release many records, so each one is a major event. A stunning studio production, Na-Reul is that and more, its nine tracks, as Lee puts it, a "raw and direct" response to the traumatic events of 2020 and the turbulent emotions that accompanied it. With liner notes by the artist and artwork and design by Christopher Wool.
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LP
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SHELTER 115LP
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2022 restock. Springing from body of work spanning decades, defined by a rigorously singular and adventurous approach to sound, cellist, composer, and improvisor, Okkyung Lee, returns with Yeo-Neun. Her first outing with Shelter Press, and arguably her most ground-breaking and unexpected album to date. A vital force in the contemporary global landscape of experimental music, Okkyung Lee is widely regarded for her solo and collaborative improvisations and compositions, weaving a continuously evolving network of sonority and event, notable for its profound depth of instrumental sensitivity, exacting intellect, and visceral emotiveness. Yeo-Neun, recorded by Yeo-Neun Quartet -- an experimental chamber music ensemble founded in 2106 and led by Lee on cello, featuring harpist Maeve Gilchrist, pianist Jacob Sacks, and bassist Eivynd Opsvik -- represents the culmination of one of longest and most intimate arcs in her remarkable career. A radical departure from much of the experimental language for which she has become widely known, it is equally a fearless return. Yeo-Neun loosely translates to the gesture of an opening in Korean, presenting a window into the poetic multiplicity that rests at the album's core. Balanced at the outer reaches of Lee's radically forward-thinking creative process, its ten discrete works are born of the ambient displacement of musician's life; intimate melodic constructions and deconstructions that traces their roots across the last 30 years, from her early days spent away from home studying the cello in Seoul and Boston, to her subsequent move to New York and the nomadism of a near endless routine of tours. At its foundation, lay glimpses of a once melancholic teen, traces of the sentimentality and sensitivity (감성 / Gahmsung) that underpins the Korean popular music of Lee's youth, and an artist for whom the notions of time, place, and home have become increasingly complex. Elegantly binding modern classical composition and freely improvised music with the emotive drama of Korean traditional music and popular ballads, the expanse of Yeo-Neun pushes toward the palpably unknown, as radical for what it is and does, as it for its approachability. Meandering melodies, from the deceptively simple to the tonally and structurally complex, slowly evolve and fall from view, the harp, piano, and bass forming an airy, liminal non-place, through which Lee's cello and unplaceable memories freely drift. Printed inner and outer sleeve with artwork by American photographer Ron Jude. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker.
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