South Korean sound artist Yeong Die claims the influence of artists as diverse as Frédéric Chopin, Aphex Twin, and Erykah Badu, but you'd really need to spend a couple of hours with a dish towel and a can of club soda to peel back enough layers of her mixes to find any recognizable hints of a homage. Instead, her latest album Threshold Value is a reflection of mood more than the artistry of others. Before the pandemic descended on her native country and streets were clearing and businesses were shuttering in forced hibernation, Die had taken steps to procure for herself a life of hermiticity. She had quit her job and bought a synthesizer on which she began to compose, every day at 9am, for three months. These compositions eventually emerged as a text of isolation, of displacement, of profound dislocation. The reality that Threshold Values rises in response to existed before the pandemic and has only intensified in its wake. Throughout the world, people are distant from each other. They feel as if no one knows them, and they are only recognized for the dominion they exert over others, or singled out for punishment by their employer, the State, or a faceless mob. The experience of the global community is one of 'unpersonhood' and concentrated anonymity. One where annihilation is sought through dopamine submersion and where culture is another mere tool of control. The album begins with the relatively fluid and upbeat house rev and the jittery, digital-sputter of "Dishes Done," feeling like a better-releaized version of Grimes in that artist's more grounded moments. It is a track which feeds into the channel blending, meditative coast of "Aside" before flowing over an emotional precipice into the deep well of empty echos that is "Not Necessarily Life." It is on "Not Necessarily Life" that Threshold Value begins its fateful pubescence. As Die states herself, the heart of her album lies in the late placed track "Anywhere is Fine," a slowly unfurling disaster, one that reveals itself, building measure by measure, through expanding ripples of circuit-flaying feedback, to be a space full of sound but defined by deafening silence. "Anywhere is Fine" slips effortlessly, like a hand in a glove, split along its seams, into the cochlear scrapping wheel of "Worstward Ho," a track that takes the themes and sounds of its predecessor and practices, and repeats its motions and moods until the quite mania of both is revealed. An exploration of silent awe and voiceless screams, Threshold Value will bury you in a grave of pusillanimity. A pit that the world prior to COVID had excavated, and a trap whose welcome mat some of us are only now realizing that we've tripped over.
Get a copy of Threshold Value from the Melbourne based clipp.art records here.
