Dogr / In Korean Wilds And Villages

Sonig

In Korean Wilds and Villages is the debut album by Dogr, a young New-York-based conceptual artist / instrumentalist / vocalist who explores unheard musical ideas and conducts webbed experiments, not only for the sake of discovering and exploiting a great art, but to speak in a clear and beautiful language, accurate in its contraction and original in its musical quality. Moreover, Dogr maintains his curiosity, the exotic eclecticism of his idiosyncratic musical arrangements, and his beatnik bare experimentalism. The production of Mouse on Mars's Andi Toma adds an analog thrill to this spiraling, epic record. David Michael DiGregorio is was raised in coastal New England, where he created harmonies at an early age using a a four-track mini-cassette tape recorder, his voice, and an old Roland JX-8P with programmer. He soon moved on to 16-mm experimental filmmaking and electro-acoustic composition, using a Bolex camera and a Serge modular synthesizer. During his years in Amsterdam, his head and ears swelled with voices, mostly his own, multiplied; he was inspired in part by his time in a gospel choir and by the Korean operatic form called pansori, in which one singer assumes the role of the narrator, different characters in the story, and even the sounds of animals and nature. After many experiments using delay and loops to create massive vocal textures, he began telling the stories of others through his own music.  Many of the pieces that comprise In Korean Wilds and Villages come from the series of musical / visual / theatrical storytelling performances conceived by artist Sung Hwan Kim. Their collaboration resulted in music made by a single person using multiple voices. Many of the instruments on the album are also used in the performances--the broken, wheezing harmonium on "Things Are Not More Exciting Than They Are"; the bell sound recorded in Seoul on " Fiks It Up"; the makeshift slide guitar on "Grows on Top of the Old One" and "O How This City Has Changed." In "My Must Needs Over There," Dogr remakes Kim's lyrics by recording the song using only his voice as instrument.  On In Korean Wilds and Villages, melodic phrases wind into journeys and the text pulls the listeners out to the realm of storytelling in a macroscopic sense; meanwhile, the winding melismata and grains of voice, like detailed veins under the skin, draw the listener microscopically into the music as it is in progress.

• SHARE

  •  Twitter
  •  Stumbleupon
  •  Digg
  •  del.icio.us
  •  Facebook
  •  Mixx