Park Jiha - Philos review | Ammar Kalia's global album of the month

The Guardian 80

(Tak:til/Glitterbeat)
Using no more than three instruments on each track especially the yanggeum, Jiha’s music expresses as much emotion as words could convey

Park Jiha trained in classical Korean instrumentation and has been a key figure, along with bands such as Jambinai, in firmly pushing forward the lineage of “traditional” Korean music. Where her debut, 2018’s Communion, was a group effort, interweaving traditional Korean instruments – the reed wind piri and gargantuan saenghwang – with saxophone and bass clarinet, Philos is a far more isolated affair.

Here, her vision finds its clearest expression – featuring just four instruments, or five if you also count the voice of poet Dima El Sayed reading her piece Easy on a song of the same name. As the album’s sole player, Jiha transcends the sum of her tools’ parts to create a deceptively enveloping soundscape that evolves from soft, ambient warmth and playful melody to brittle, bone-rattling tension – textures so uncannily rendered that they almost sound programmed by computer.