Tangent, JIN SANG TAE, CHOI JOON YONG

Antler Juice

POSTMODERNCORE CD

BY CLIVE BELL

Seoul, Korea, is currently home to Alfred 23 Harth, formerly of Cassiber but now gainfully employed in Otomo Yoshihide’s New Jazz Ensemble. Another improviser based there is young New Zealander Sam Stephens, who runs the Postmoderncore label and performs under a flurry of aliases. As Tangent, here he engages in a live free electronica trio with local boys Choi Joon Yong and Jin Sang Tae. Harth contributes the cover photo of the Antler Juice trio gearing up to play at the Iri Café – it’s here that a bimonthly series of concerts goes by the name of Relay. Visual work is strongly featured alongside sound experiment. Along the lines of Derek Bailey’s Company Week, organiser Ryu Hankil grouped the three youngsters together at a few minutes notice during last September’s “Relay 03” event, and the album contains their 26 minute set.

This is a gritty, ill at ease music, where conflicted signals seem to be struggling to get through, a kind of audio dogfight in the ether. The clear intensity of purpose, however, means that it’s an engaging listen. Voices start to layer up in a radio collage, people cheerfully discussing pain and limits of endurance. The ominous mood dissolves into a slurry of looped fragments, snipped from Korean traditional vocal recordings. There’s a sprinkling of chopped-up rapper. Eventually a fast, flapping rhythm drives us into a climax of distorted live vocals, ending with a sort of peace, sounds flickering across drones.

Antler Juice has a satisfying arc of development, and the musicality of its structure contrasts nicely with the dirt and rough edges of the sound itself. All the more impressive for a first meeting, and it’s clear why Postmoderncore, till now a web based label, felt this set was worth releasing as their first proper CD.

Antler Juice - LIVE AT RELAY 03 (CD by Postmoderncore)

The three players who recorded as Antler Juice are Jin Sangtae (radio, sampling, electronics), Choi Joonyong (CDs) and Tangent (aka Sam Stevens on laptop, microphone, flute, okarina, toy guitar, throat). They met up for the first time on september 16th of this year when they played together at Relay 03 in Seoul, Korea. Of course of twenty-five minutes they play together a set of improvised electronics, scratchy electronics, in a pretty raw and direct way. Not that this falls in the category of noise or some such, but it's a in your face recording of more forceful sound material. Not every moment is great here, but throughout it was most enjoyable.

New Zealand label Postmoderncore takes the plunge into the 500-copy world with its first ‘proper CD’, "Antler Juice."

Postmoderncore, run by Sam Stephens aka Tangent Precipitate aka The Unknown Rockstar, has been around a few years now, releasing CDRs and making material available free on its website www.postmoderncore.com. The roster has included the acoustic folk stylings of Richard Whyte, the autodidactic free jazz of Rick Jensen Trio, the Last Exit-ish punk of The Shambolics, a spoken word album, and more. Wellington alto & baritone saxophonist Jeff Henderson, who looms large on the New Zealand improvised music scene, released his first solo albums via the label.

"Antler Juice" consists of a single 25-minute improvisation recorded at the Relay 03 event in South Korea in late 2005. Sam, who spent a year there teaching English as a second language, is teamed up with Korean electronic musicians Jin Sangtae and Choi Joonyong. The trio have between them laptops, CD players, and an ocarina. The photo inside the Korean hanji paper sleeve shows three young men seated, Sam the westerner with cheekbones and close-cropped hair.

The piece begins with the quiet setting of mood as the sounds begin to coalesce. The piece gets more agitated as it progresses, and shows plenty of variety, making good use of textured noise and samples from local media. There’s a strong sense of place, presenting Korea as a media-saturated landscape with an industrial sense. And we’re hearing Koreans and a New Zealander meet.

The strength of the album is in the definite structure of the 25-minute piece, and the sense of restraint inherent in keeping it short as an album. Possibly reflecting an Asian spacious aesthetic? Repeated listens show good dynamics and evolution, and there’s a great moment 2/3 of the way through where someone lets out a yell. The piece finishes without any recording of crowd reaction, so we’re free to speculate how it was received.

Sam describes the Relay series thus:

‘The series takes place in Iri Cafe in the Hongik area of Seoul. It is organised by Ryu Hankil aka Daytripper. It is currently the main event for fringe and improvised music in Korea.

‘For Relay performances, video artists often work together with musicians. It also often involves groups of musicians collaborating without any prior knowledge of who they would be playing with. Performers at Relay include Korean nationals, foreigners living in Korea, and occasional overseas guests.’

He describes the Korean music mainstream as

‘Pretty crap. Full of K-Pop, which is even worse than J-Pop ! Apart from that there is the traditional music scene, which is amazing. There was some kind of classical avant-garde scene, which I heard intriguing little snippets of on the radio on the Korean Concert station. Then there was some fringe folks doing punk, and other different music (maybe metal and things, I dunno really), in Seoul and probably a couple of the other big centers.’

Here’s Sam’s manifesto:

'The goal of postmoderncore is sharing musical creativity with other people. postmoderncore is a protest against the idea of music as a commodity, and the use of copyright to control and curtail creativity – it’s pro-sampling and pro-creative commons. postmoderncore has no ties to particular genres of music, simply releasing artists and albums that deserve to be available to the public.

‘At the time of writing, postmoderncore has 52 releases. All except for Antler Juice are under Creative Commons licenses, available for free download, and on CD-R. Antler Juice is under copyright because of the need to attempt to recover costs!’

This seems to me a plausible strategy, and certainly something aiming towards some kind of greater good. And as well as supporting Postmoderncore’s efforts, "Antler Juice" is a great little snapshot album that is well worth hearing and buying on its own merits.