SUNNY KIM <<Liminal Silence>> Earshift Music
The music of this Australian album hovers between delicate manifestations of mundane song formats and spiritual spaciness of eternal ghosts’ spheres. Together with New York guitarist Ben Monder and Los Angeles pianist Vardan Ovsepian, Melbourne vocalist Sunny Kim created the exceptional cosmic music of her album <<Liminal Silence>> by means and around a voice that is challenging the air and thereby enters i n t o as well as emerging f r o m a deeper space on the vibrations of light and sound. It never gets lost in suggestively rustle and sough, it always reaches down to the very ground of the matter, to the essence with great intensity. Or, as Peter Knight, the former Artistic Director of the Australian Art Orchestra put it: „it is ethereal and yet always utterly visceral.“ Kim herself is a quite active member of AAO meanwhile.
In almost an hour containing 10 pieces, the music draws listeners into liminal sound experiences from different angles, groundworks and breaths of life. For Sunny Kim silence is the origin of the living and houses the inner truth of ourselves. As a human being of sharp and clear mind in congruence with her body and soul, she formulates and speaks out: “Liminal Silence is a communal meditation on the nature of silence, the cycles of birth and death, and our innermost aspiration for change within.”
The album comprises a diversity of pieces from the blissful “Living Within the Ocean” to the transcendental “Liminal”, the balladesque “Fall” or the dramatic “Poland, 1948”. None of the album’s pieces resolves harmonically in conventional way. The pieces are kept open, are stretching, wandering/wondering with and along the underlying current of heartbeat, blood circulation, imagination and consciousness, sensing expansions, thresholds and the glow of light, concentrating on these and illuminating them through the shades and intensities of their connecting voices. They masterfully cover a range from deep dark to brilliantly bright with the manifold fractures and transitions of light and sonic color in between and have trance-inducing potential (but is no ambient/mood music). The triangle of Kim, Osvepian and Monder is a heavenly match. Armenia born Osvepian from Los Angeles might be less known in Europe. Being part of the Peter Erskine Trio and having recorded with Berlin violinist Biliana Voutchkova indicate his range, that’s worthwhile to explore.
There are joint and individual compositions as well as a lovely interpretation of Brian Shankar Adler’s composition “Living Within The Ocean”. Lyrics are taken from William Blake, Rumi and Sun Do Kim.
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