Review of Youn Sun Nah’s “Waking World”

Allen Michie
3 min readJul 24, 2023

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Thankfully, not all popular music coming out of South Korea is from boy bands. Youn Sun Nah began as a young prodigy when her first album Reflet came out in 2001, and she is now a seasoned professional with a long list of awards and honors, including the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from the French Ministry of Culture and the Sejong Culture Prize awarded from the Korean government. Her latest, Waking World (Warner), delivers on her early promise with a mature musical statement from an artist in full control of a truly magnificent voice.

Her style is difficult to summarize. Part jazz chanteuse, part indie rocker, part arthouse iconoclast, and part cabaret stage singer, she exists comfortably in her own category. She’s not quite like Kate Bush, Björk, Laurie Anderson, or Annie Lennox, but you can hear elements of their music passing through Waking World like breezes through different windows all opening into the same room. Of these four, I’d say Bush is the closest parallel. Nah has something of Bush in her five-octave range, poetic sensibility, and dreamy musical vision — and, when she chooses to use it, you can hear some of Bush’s vibrato and phrasing (you can hear it on “Don’t Get Me Wrong”).

This is a heavily processed record with effective and liberal use of reverb, synthesized colors, and overdubbed harmonies (all of which sound great on headphones, by the way, in the widened sound stage of Dolby Atmos on Apple Music). For example, “Heart of a Woman” uses the breathy, echoey preface to transition into a slow, meandering melody that winds its way around a faster background led by a trumpet popping octaves. There’s a shift into a rhythmic North African section, then the two sections weave together in counterpoint. The result is hypnotic and seductive.

Nah, who wrote all the compositions, likes abrupt transitions, some of them less successful than the integrated one in “Heart of a Woman.” “Don’t Get Me Wrong” shifts from an angry ballad to a jaunty section with trumpets that adds little, and “Lost Vegas” breaks its ominous minor-key feel with a jazzy interlude with prepared piano and cello. More successful are the moments of sublime beauty when textures flow organically into one another, like complementary colors in a Rothko painting. “My Mother” has patient pastel melodies that grow slowly like tendrils over a sharper and busier background, with a kaleidoscope of musical scenes constructed from a limited palette of instruments (electric keyboards, bass, and trumpet). “I’m Yours” has a floating, sleepy sound; but we also hear Thomas Naïm’s twangy Twin Peaks-ish guitar, and the vocals and cello are woven beautifully together in the mix that sounds like they’re merging high up in the flying buttresses of a cathedral.

Then there are simpler tracks, such as “It’s OK,” which is content to luxuriate in the richness of Nah’s voice. “Waking World” is a dream vision with just a hint of an Asian mode supporting the harmonies, and there’s an intimate black-and-white video that captures the sophisticated simplicity of the music and the layered emotions behind it.

Nah’s previous album, 2019’s Immersion, featured some covers, including Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)” and George Harrison’s “Isn’t It a Pity.” It was perhaps more ambitious with a wider variety of styles, international grooves, and approaches to the material. Waking World takes a more focused and coherent approach, and it’s therefore the better opportunity to hear the full expressive power of Nah’s remarkable instrument and the clarity of her artistic vision.

(Originally published on the Arts Fuse, April 2, 2022)
https://artsfuse.org/252975/april-short-fuses-materia-critica-2/

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Allen Michie
Allen Michie

Written by Allen Michie

I live in Austin, Texas, and I work in higher education. See the lists for an archive of my reviews and articles. Let me know your opinions!

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