Jiyeon Kim is Seoul-based musician and sound artist. Over the past decade she has devoted her time to developing a vocabulary based on field recordings and format-specific sound making, with close-listening deeply embedded in her practice.

“This cassette is a document of a performance and its rehearsal, in Seoul, December 2019. The piece performed was a “decomposition” of a previous cassette release of mine, “piano mixtape”.
"For this live show I employed two distinct techniques. Firstly, I took piano decay resonances, broken melodies, mechanical noises and magnetic hiss from “piano mixtape” on the fly and recorded them on separate buffers of an 8-track digital sampler. By modulating time and pitch of those samples, I mixed and played them without a master clock. Through overlapping various looped samples, micro patterns would arise organically.

Secondly, I overdubbed the original piano pieces repeatedly to deform and fade their sounds. Cassette tapes and tape players are not just a data storage medium, but also an analogue musical instrument in themselves. They have their own sound characteristics and unique means of manipulation. My digital sampler provided me with further compositional possibilities.

I do not consider these processes to be “destructive”, but instead something more organic – decaying sound sources seeding and propagating new landscapes.” – Jiyeon Kim