Komunguitar by Jin Hi Kim

In addition to two solo pieces by Jin Hi Kim, this album presents her collaborations with Derek Bailey, Hans Reichel, Eugene Chadbourne, Henry Kaiser, David First, and Elliott Sharp.

Original notes by Alex Varty:
I first heard KomunGuitar while driving Highway 5A. a rugged stretch of road that connects the small towns of Kamloops and Merritt in the British Colubia Interior. Formerly one of the main trade routes from the Pacific Ocean to the dry Okanagan, this stretch of two-lane blacktop has been made redundant by a recently completed super-highway, and now offers the traveler with time to kill a welcome respite from the logging trucks and tractor-trailers that make up the bulk of this resource-rich area's road traffic. The road rises from the valley of the Thompson River through an undistinguished stretch of tract homes, until it breaks out onto an expansive plateau of rolling hills, postcard lakes, and sudden canyons. Every time I've driven, winter or summer, these things have been constant: sun, and gales, and scudding clouds that disintegrate and reform a few metres above the ground, giving the vistas an unsettlingly Tibetan top-of-the-world feel. Grazing cattle have left the parallel ridges of their slow passing on the hillsides, adding to the slightly eerie magic of the landscape. Agriculture has been here for 100 years at most, and human artifacts are few, but the ground looks simultaneously raw and worked, like the terraced fields of the Andes. Jin Hi Kim's muse seems oddly at home in this terrain. All improvisors develop a kind of affective landscape within which they build their music, an accretion of emotional experience expressed by the tricks and subtleties of instrumental dexterity, contoured and defined by the possibilities and Imitations of the instruments they choose to play. Their compositions may be spontaneous and heterogeneous, but they can always be placed somewhere within this sense framework. One only has to look at the lengthy recording histories of Komunguitar participants Derek Bailey, Eugene Chadbourne, and Henry Kaiser to see how much of a piece a 20- or 30-year body of work can be. Kim's internal landscapes are much different from those of her collaborators on this project howeverv - and not simply because she is female and Asian while they are male and Western The sound of the guitar in improvisation is often a high nervous one, full of busywork and jitter. The komungo, even amplified, is not capable of projecting such a clatter and rush, its notes push at the chest like an open hand held against the heart. They have an innate force, but they demand time in their apprehension, to our Western cart they perhaps inevitably come laden with a bag-gage of Zen depth. In fact, it would be easy to pitch KomunGuitar's six duets as a series of meetings of opposites male/female. Oriental/Occidental, temporal/spiritual, fire/earth. Those elements are certainly part of what's going on here but not the totality of the experience. It's best, perhaps, to hear KomunGuitar as a meeting of landscapes. Some crash and collide, others slide into each other with slow tectonic force. At times, as in Kim's duet with Hans Reichel, an instrument builder of genius, the instruments and sonic environments find a rare unity. Perhaps inspired by Asian harp-zithers, Reichel has designed his guitars so as to allow for a wealth of tonal variations and ghostly resonances. In Gut Morgen, he and Kim go hand-in-hand through a woozy exploration of bent string acrobatics that is not without its humour: catch the allusions to Hawaiian guitar that emerge towards the piece' end. With Elliott Sharp however. Kim turns to her amplified komungo, and the two concoct parallel planes of intensity that rip at each other in passing, churning up flash-fires in the midst of sparking urban rubble The ironically titled Company is both a nattering set of simultaneous solo monologues and an exploration of an arid Cubist wasteland. Derek Bailey's flinty acerbic tone seems the polar opposite of Kim's woody pitch-bending. The interest is not so much in how they interact as in the apparent impossibility of their connecting. When they do, stretches of spare twanging build to peaks of splintery razor-sharp harmonics. Henry Kaiser's dark, digitally-transformed textures provide a supportive (if ominous-sounding) ground for Kim's melodic lines on Yongary Meets Big Foot. Roles are reversed in Howdy Partner where Eugene Chadbourne's ragtime camping mocks the rapid-fire conventions of bluegrass banjo virtuosity over a bed of churning komungo rhythms. And on Slow View Picnic, relative newcomer David First brings rubbery lines that allude to the blues-rock vernacular without making explicit use of its cliches. But delightful and daunting as these duets may be, the essence of Jin Hi Kim's musical spirit emerges on the two solo outings. Like the land between Kamloops and Merritt, worked yet still raw, Kim's komungo solos Naby and Yellow Seed find a sophisticated and assured musicality in the service of a bluesy emotional bedrock. Any listener, even if previously untutored in Korean music or free improvisation, will surely respond to their depth.

Alex Varty. Vancouver, B.C July 1993

Composer and komungo soloist Jin Hi Kim is a Guggenheim Fellow and United States Artists Fellow and
has performed her compositions at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, SmithsonianMuseum, Metropolitan Museum of Art and improvised with leading masters including Henry Kaiser, Derek Bailey, Elliott Sharp, William Parker, Oliver Lake, Hans Reichel, Rüdiger Carl, and Gerry Hemingway.