Heejin Jang returns to Doom Trip with Me and the Glassbirds.
The Korean producer’s new album features the most intricate and brutal tracks of her career. Here, she presents mosaics of colorful sound that endlessly mutate and rearrange themselves in ways that are elegant and ferocious. Jang’s ability to position harsher sections against moments of unnerving calmness provokes the listener into a variety of mental states, including panic, confusion, and nervousness.
On Me and the Glassbirds, Jang imagines a laboratory in which she hatches birds from a bricolage of painted sounds. These glassbirds are constructed with parts that are fragile, transparent, and frequently malfunctioning. As some break and others are disassembled, new glassbirds emerge on their own, eventually combining and forming a mirror image of their creator. Fearing the reflection of herself that she sees in the mob of these transparent creatures, she attempts to move their nest to a secure location. But it’s too late. As the flock grows, she dons a heavy veil to protect herself and raises a slingshot against them. One by one, she shoots her creations down and crushes the fragments beneath her feet. Once they’ve all been destroyed, she removes her veil and gathers the shimmering pieces of her dead creations.
Heejin Jang is a multidisciplinary artist based in Seoul. Since she graduated from San Francisco Art Institute in New Genres in 2013, Jang has lived, exhibited, and performed around the world. In her live sound performance, Heejin presents a set of improvised computer music. She arranges and synthesizes sonic spaces that draw from the everyday and the trivial, forming them into phenomenal situations of meditation or digitally induced panic. Distorting field recordings and sound samples from the internet, Jang creates reverberating forces that the listener can lose themselves in.
Heejin has played live and exhibited her pieces at The Lab, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, mumok Vienna, Harvestworks, Rhizome DC, High Zero Experimental Music Festival, SeMA Nanji, Dotolim, Platform-L, Superdeluxe, Center for New Music, Dublab, and many more.
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