‘slight turbulence’ was a work completed in March 2022 reflective of the ongoing dialectical conflict between propaganda and working class realities, thinking through US colonization of the Korean peninsula.
It shares in the assertion that Korea has historically and politically developed its relationship with cultural traditions in a way that makes them radical often - talchum dramas as radical folk performance, ongoing usage of protest pungmul, and DPRK cultural revitalization work as radical self preservation. It agrees folk culture for Koreans is a banner of anti-imperial sentiment that benefits from the work of indigenous cultural laborers in Jeju, a home for radical Korean politics that suffered the effects of American anticommunism most severely, culminating in the Jeju Massacre of all Koreans outside 50km of the mainland, with continuing charges on survivors only lifted in 2019 following protests involving traditional dances, drums, music, and costumes–large parts of radical organizing and culture in Korea to this day. It is also my feeling that traditional culture is powerful in the Korean situation in referencing a common history of a contemporarily divided people allowing the foregrounding of absurdity of division that actively traumatizes the Korean people.
I utilized airplane cabin sounds, background conversations, heavy white noise, and rain to create embodied degrees of physical separation from the conflict played out between the tracks on the left and right ears, implicating the listener as a literal passerby, which one can aliken to the insulation of being subjects within the imperial core.
The right ear’s track utilizes a heavily designed form of Truman’s voice during the speech he made citing the validity of the Korean War to extinguish communism, and is placed slightly closer to the listener than the track in the left ear, a folk song named “Lovers”, about a Korean folk tale surrounding a pair of birds that each only have one wing and can fly only together like the two Koreas. The distortion of “Lovers” upon a rendition featuring solo haegeum, an instrument famous for sounding like a sorrowful human voice, serves to augment the struggle of the “voice” to reach the listener resulting in anguish. 
The equal application of distortion to both “Lovers” and Truman was important as a sound design choice in its ability to cause nouveau feedback between the two tracks utilizing sound design software as a modality for digitally generating sonic conflict through disagreement between the two as now their own technological bodies and sonic bodies. It was interesting to utilize feedback as an accessible way to auto-generate sonic conflict as something that is normally sparked to momentary wincing and pain in the audience, to use it rather as a central tool to the piece.
In concluding, whispered conversations between other passengers on the airplane are just barely audible, provoking the listener to consider where they are and where the sounds they just listened to were coming from as they “exit the storm” with the sounds of rain ending last before the track comes to an end, leaving the listener with the empty white noise of the plane continuing past the sonic events that had just occurred.

slight turbulence

'판소리 funeral' was a work I completed in May 2022 taking seriously the historical pedagogies of oral traditions in order to reinforce formative messages. I utilized the sonic themes associated with these traditions in Korea, the cover for this piece utilizing notation from this background, and utilizing materials from ancestral family records under a calligraphic interpretation of the phrase “memorize this” outlined in negative space. Indistinct but measured reading vocals from self and family were featured to incorporate voices of actual family history and members.
I was particularly interested in extreme layering of white noise from varying isolated spaces, found sounds, and subsonics for ambience, in order to forefront liminality within storytelling and surrounding it, abstracting the augmentation of a story’s importance to a child. Ambience was also important to think about oral traditions as a form of connection and original creation & reflection upon shared experience with ancestors spanning death, time, oceans, and spaces. 
Ambience also played a role in making vocals indistinguishable, replicating tension between needing to know something and being unable to make out what is being said, somewhat made fun of in the cover’s text “memorize this”. To further incorporate the role of the inadequate student, this piece was performed live with myself utilizing the traditional drums I’d been trained with for eight years and my laptop screen playing back this recording and displaying the cover created for it, visually replicating the pansori duo of singer and drummer, my body as simply reinforcement of learning’s necessity for entry of the disembodied narrator.

WOO SEOBO

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