soo:k - Grape Chariot (Swims)

The Slow Music Movement
Jun 30
2 min read

This is the cover art for soo:k's, Grape Chariot LP on the Swims label. It shows a cartoon child and two dogs, drawn in a style of early Tin Tin on a yellow terrain under a blue sky. Red path curves across the scene. Text: ORCHADIA and S00:K. Surreal and whimsical.

Soo:k is a producer and musician from Seoul, Korea who, like so many artists from around the world, is now resident in the open minded and culturally fertile city of Berlin, the perfect home for her genre fluid approach to music making. Her debut album captures her love for the disparate worlds of electronic and acoustic, classical, folk, ambient and new age music, although their original forms are twisted out of all recongnision, then melted to better express her curious world view.

Korea's soo:k, dressed in a black, blue and white jacket stands in a colorful playground with blue and green equipment. She looks calmly at the camera.

When the album starts in pleasingly ambient fashion, the lightest of chimes and tones drifting serenely above the sounds of gentle waves as some ambiguous sonic details eventually enter the picture to flutter and drift through the warm idyllic soundscape, you know that all will be well with the album. And it is.

The baton is then passed to, "Sylvanus Never Slept" which maintains the vibe admirably, but tunes in to some alien radio transmissions to add a distant galactic dimension to this already far out LP. "The Living Mountain" then unfurls its parachute and floats back down to earth with a new age sensibility, spirit world vocals and some gently propulsive beats that are more suited to after the after party rather than dance floor deviance.

The album is determined to keep you on your toes as "Thistle Kiss" adds a bit of spiky attitude and jets the listener back to a neighbouring galaxy, albeit a pretty cosmic, chilled one. "Grape Chat" then beams in some classical strings to add a bit of grandeur to the star gazing.

And so we continue. The album flirts shamelessly with multiple ambient adjacent genres, exploring a shadow world where belief system energy ripples collide and swirl. Electronic futurism dissolves into more holistic new age frequencies, age old classicism is face painted and thrust into the hear and now, fauna looks the machines in the eye and pecks the cables, as vintage soundtracks say hello to their twenty first century grandchildren. It's an assured, adventurous and immersive debut from an artist I'm now following with interest.