Neon Bunny: A New Korean Cosmos – Korea Times
National
2021-11-22 14:10
Neon Bunny: A New Korean Cosmos
| Courtesy Hillary |
By David A. Tizzard
 |
Music needs space. Claude Debussy, Miles Davis and many others knew this. It is not always what you play; It’s the gaps, the intervals, the meditations, and the silence between the sounds that really resonate. Nothing is louder than silence.
Unfortunately, this silence is often difficult to find in modern life. A constant barrage of shorts, jingles, and government warnings are ringing, tweeting, and ringing from our pockets. We sleep with podcasts. Netflix will automatically play the next episode of the drama, which we don’t really care, but everyone else is watching. And the music has to hit us within the first 10 seconds, otherwise we’ll skip and scroll down. Influential songwriter and producer Tat Tong, a man whose discography went 80x platinum, echoed that opinion in a video recently uploaded to LinkedIn. Tat explains of listening to demos: “I hear it the way a listener with a very ADHD attention span would. I start the track. Does he start me right now? me off, I’ll skip it. “
This is the environment with which the music makers are confronted: not getting bored, but getting to the chorus. Now. Fast! K-pop does this incredibly well. As soon as most of the songs begin, they’ll throw hooks and earwigs at you and slide into your brain as you get distracted by the airbrushes of circling teenagers. But what does the opposite mean?
Neon Bunnys (Ya-gwang Tokki) 2021 Track Bloom definitely does. A volume booster coated with white noise pans across the left and right speakers for the first 20 seconds, creating a feeling of tension and disruption. But this threat to avant-garde atonal experimentalism is soon replaced by a deep single-note string pattern that resembles a whale’s vocalization. What was once just white noise suddenly means that we are now apparently underwater, accompanied by a distant, haunted female voice saying in ethereal Korean that something is blooming and ready to become a star. A sporadic set of house-style piano chords finally gives way to arpeggios and after a minute of atmosphere, 60 seconds of space, the drums finally arrive. Tension released.
The rhythms transport the song into intelligent mid-90s drum and bass territory, albeit a little slower, and they are danced to an indecipherable chant that is glitteringly filtered. The word “heart” is one of the few expressions that penetrate to us. It sounds like it was in the womb sometimes. Knowing that Neon Bunny was born a few months after this track was released may support this interpretation. But after just 20 seconds of comfort, knowing where we are and being anchored by a drum, that feeling is broken again as the BPMs drop and we dive into a lo-fi section with wah and organ tunes. It’s familiar territory for those with undecided YouTube beliefs and / or graduates, but certainly unexpected here. Lo-fi is often background music for busy people. It’s elevator music for the TikTok generation.
But Neon Bunny doesn’t rest there. A key change is accentuated by stacked vocals that create harmony, a brass section steps in, trumpets sting and strings send us to a crescendo that ELO or Neil Diamond would be proud of. This is the real highlight of the song: a stark and bold contrast to everything that came before. Then we return to the upbeat jungle patterns, but this time with violins and cellos – a distraction because we are about to fall into a dark glitch techno passage that sounds schizophrenic and nasty. The bass is deep and abrasive. The sounds scratch the sides of the speakers and your ears. It hurts. And then we’re back to the crescendos. The strings. The horns. Sixties-inspired singing. We made it. We have blossomed.
Neon Bunny does all of this in 4 minutes on their track. It shouldn’t work. Sometimes I’m not sure if that’s actually the case. But if modern music is afraid of gaps and is afraid of doing something unpredictable that people may not immediately like, then Neon Bunny is not. It’s premodern or postmodern or something completely different. Neon Bunny’s music suggests cynicism towards modern life, but creates a new cosmos in which we can exist. You can listen to them here. And please listen to it.
Dr. David A. Tizzard (datizzard@swu.ac.kr) has a Ph.D. in Korean Studies. He is a social / cultural commentator and musician who has lived in Korea for nearly two decades. He also hosts the Korea Deconstructed podcast, which can be found online. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own views and do not reflect the editorial direction of the Korea Times.
Register for eNewsletter
Comments are closed.