EVERY GENRE PROJECT - April 30 - Fusion Gugak

Genre of the Day - Fusion Gugak 

Album of the Day - Philos by 박지하 (Park Jiha) (2018)

April 30, 2024

Yesterday, we got to talk about City Pop. City Pop is a gleaming, sentimental, major-7th-drenched amalgamation of a bunch of western music elements that peaked in late ‘70s Japan, but has become Internet-ubiquitous since. Fusion gugak exists on a very different plane of the East Asian popular music sphere. Whereas city pop never really carried much trace of what was traditionally musically relevant in Japan—besides being in Japanese—fusion gugak is a statement of cultural preservation amidst musical change and modernization. 

Fusion gugak is about as straightforward a name as city pop with the aid of a little translation. Gugak simply refers to the traditional music of Korea (remember in this column when I covered jeong-ak?), and fusion obviously indicates that there’s outside influence coming in. To get a fuller picture of what influences might be steeping musical movements in a particular place, it’s always wise to investigate the political situation at hand. The 1980s in Korea kicked off with a bang, with the brutal police backlash towards the Gwangju student uprising (sound familiar?) against the recently installed military government. Dissatisfied with multiple decades of American counter-Communist influence and militaristic dictatorships, it’s understandable that a musical return to Korean roots blossomed. 

By taking traditional Korean compositions and converting them to a pop format that still worked in an orchestral context, the group 슬기둥 (Seul Gi Doong) were the first to launch fusion gugak into the picture. However, fusion gugak has evolved to the point where a variety of genres are combined with Korean traditional music to inject some modern buoyancy and interest in these ancient instruments.

With ambient flair, today’s album is one of the most beautiful discoveries and nuanced explorations of sound I’ve found on this column. Much conventional music, as in industrial records, is made to stir: not all music is fundamentally made to elicit peace. There’s a balance, and today’s minimalist instrumentalist Park Jiha exacts it wonderfully. She can play the piri, a bamboo flute, and the saenghwang—a fascinating instrument that sounds a bit like the bagpipe and looks like metallized bamboo—but the particular focus here is on the yanggeum, a metal-stringed hammered dulcimer. In this video, which is actually a track off of today’s album, she applies her musical wizardry to the piri and the yanggeum. It shocked me how a little bamboo flute can have such a similar timbre to a saxophone. If the video is any indication, the album is a gorgeous, suspended opus throughout. From the hypnotic piri melody panning across the sonic sphere of “Arrival” and the arpeggiated yanggeum of “Thunder Shower”, her compositions are resonantly emotional. There’s a deep love for the ancient craft of these instruments combined with thoughtful ambient sense. Underscoring the potential political undercurrents of fusion gugak’s origins that I mentioned earlier, Jiha asserts that this traditionally-influenced music can be in tune with global change. “Easy” features poet Dima El Sayed, who meditates on how best to feel angry and chafes against those who try to put down rightful anger at injustice, invoking the suffering of the civilians in Iraq. Sounds familiar again. The quote “I wish for peace, but I will fight” stuck with me as I observe resistance at my school and around the world, and inspired hope in me that music is a core part of that puzzle, from fusion gugak to all across the globe.