- Delicate, devastating, yet lighthearted ruminations on apocalypse from a central figure in a growing Korean experimental music scene.
- In the short essay that accompanies Weather Z, the latest album from Seoul producer Yeong Die, the writer Yeasul Shin describes how the record is based on images of natural landscapes "which should be peaceful at a glance, [but] deserve to be the introduction to a catastrophe." This gets to the heart of a paradox in the Anthropocene epoch that ecological theorists Ian Baucom and Mathew Omelsky summarize as the "simultaneous aesthetic beauty and imminent devastation" of climate crisis. (Look no further than the ending of Don't Look Up, where the crashing meteor bordered on the sublime.) Weather Z takes this contradiction to heart as Yeong Die gifts us with six tracks that evoke apocalypse by shifting between serene and disturbing with a giddy excitement.
Yeong Die is a central figure in a growing ecosystem of experimental Korean producers who are poking fun at the sometimes sterile world of dense and theoretical experimental music (I'd recommend the Intimate Ghosting compilation as an intro to this sound.) You can hear this in her work as part of Computer Music Club with Yetsuby and Uman Therma (two other key players in this scene) as well as her last two albums, the uplifting, Tomorrow? and her curious, nimble-footed debut Threshold Music. Given her previous work, it makes total sense that Yeong Die approaches something as complex as the climate crisis with both veneration and biting, sardonic wit.
Weather Z starts with Yeong at her most solemn and fragile. "Dig Up Dawn" is full of gently undulating textures, before a bleep that sounds like a heart monitor interrupts the calm, dramatizing the precarity of the planet's life-support system. On "Keeling Curve," the howling chords increase in force, like watching a river overflow its banks. But after these mood pieces, Yeong Die moves away from the doom-and-gloom tropes. Severe Cases" has some hip-hop funk with a tinny pipe melody and groovy hand drum swagger, and "Global Monitoring" falls somewhere between deconstructed club and Anticon-style hip-hop. The overcast pads and chopped vocals are morose and melancholy, but the neon synth whips and boom-bap beat keep it light on its feet.
Yeong brings together all of these disparate moods and sounds in the album's closing track, "Lowers," which comes across as celebratory and mournful at the same time—not an easy line to walk. It's a fitting way to end an album that navigates the seemingly intractable problems posed by climate change. It can often feel like problems as complex and multi-scaled as climate crisis elude artistic representations. But this is what makes an album like Weather Z so refreshing. Yeong Die doesn't try to capture all of the ways that the world around us is collapsing or even present us with specific solutions. Instead, she offers us conflicted and impressionistic soundscapes that provide emotional glimpses of a world that remains beautiful for now, but is closer and closer to the brink of apocalypse.
Tracklist01. Keeling Curve
02. Dig Up Dawn
03. Coin Through
04. Severe Cases
05. Global Monitoring
06. Lowers