No diamond without flaws. The light shines right through Floating Ones.
[Release page] Witness the beginning of what is sure to be an exciting career. Yong Min Moon works in Seoul and Paris. In 2011, he scored the Chinese film Here, There beautifully and the year before published a book combining long-time collaborator Miju Kim’s playful green and purple watercolours with a disc tucked in the back and featuring a foreword (in French and Korean) by recently-deceased art critic Pierre Descargues. It was called Le Denevir—”The Becoming”—and Mimyo’s round, plummy notes perfectly echoed the decorative bulbs dominating in Kim’s paintings. Like the visuals, each track plays with the sound of roundness—hollow and resonant, chubby and fleshy, pinging like pachinko arcades. Five very different variations are followed by four remixes—variations on variations (the first by a guest identified as Bong Train)—twitchier, glitchier, even a little Philip Glassian. Le Denevir is a small pink delight for both the eyes and ears.
A penumbra of blue circles the pink of Floatiing Ones, officially Mimyo’s first solo album. Six tracks over a mere thirty-six minutes, painstakingly structured, combining the best of his pop and art sensibilities. They have been pieced together like micromosaics, tiny, shiny tessarae of sound exquisitely laid in place, idiosyncratic yet immediately accessible. His overriding theme is missed chances, the opportunities left hanging mid-air, expressed most explicitly in a sweet song sung by Big Baby Driver, “Left Words,” about the impact of what we leave unsaid.
The album also provides brief glimpses into a friendly Korean underground. Stylish accompaniment by guitarist Mookou on the opening track, “The Way I Like to Picture You,” gives an amorphous character study body and personality and more electric guitar stretches and arches catlike on “Snapshots,” while “Idealized Memories” takes the same repetitive pattern and makes it twinkle and soar with optimism. Actress Kkobbi Kim appears in dialogue with a robot on “Synth Pop,” a little playlet of a number that is more whimsical than bewitching. Better actually is the teeny-tronics dance remix by Eunchurn that closes the album, after another guest, Byul.org, has done a less stellar job remixing the other vocal on the album, “Left Words,” into a drag of a dirge.
No diamond without flaws. The light shines right through Floating Ones. [Release page]
Floating Ones is available on Curly Sol.
