Time of the Gypsies

It was as though the room was being created in real-time, lucidly, presently, as my eyes discovered each corner, my fantasy of perfection projected. Dark wooden tables and dark beers. Ceiling and walls covered in dark acoustic foam to absorb echo from the bar's centerpiece: a sound system so scientific in its art that it could have been designed by da Vinci. The golden calf, however, was the owner, Jang Yoo-te, and his lunatic obsession with mthfkn-rare, obscure and persistently piquant psych-rock, folk and "world" vinyl recordings. Walls of it.

The moment I finished taking it all in I knew I must cultivate a relationship with this place. Sandr was nervous, however. This basement bar tucked away in our neighbourhood called Time of the Gypsies had only two patrons - a couple of men, sitting and smoking with the owner at the bar. A Satanic music cult, she thought, explaining the lack of customers. Besides the prospect of a secret Satanic music cult existing over dark beers in our neighbourhood sounding, to me, like the best possible news, I reminded her that everyone was out of town. Tonight was Chusok.

Chusok (or Chuseok) is an ancient Korean day of ancestor-worship, a family day on the theme of thanks. It dates back to about 55 BCE, and besides the Lunar New Year, it is Korea's most important holiday. Families flee the cities in droves, and travel to their hometowns where their grandparents are buried - their spiritual center.

A steady polling of my students here in Seoul City has painted a picture of today's Chusok traditions. They go like this: Everyone piles in the car/bus and heads to the family's hometown. This is a large percentage of the city, the result being a sort of congested exhaust-choked traffic-jam-torture only rivaled by that special circle of Hell reserved for Hummer drivers. The eldest brother's house is the destination. He is to pay for the feast, but everyone brings gifts, usually cash and/or elaborately packaged fruit, which puts him well into the black. The day before, the day of, and often the day after, the motherlyest woman available will spend every waking hour preparing and serving the traditional foods. The men, as they do in many cultures, sit around and drink. Sometimes they gamble. Sometimes they don't. When they do they play a game called gostop. Yes, that's 'go' and 'stop', I've italicized it because gostop is Korean, an example of the ubiquitous "Konglish" that exists here. The morning of Chusok-day families go to the graves of their ancestors, which are usually tumuli, or grassy burial mounds, and pay their respects. (This burial practice has become less common recently due to a surging of both the population and property costs. Increasingly the deceased are cremated, and their urns are placed on a shelf in a kind of post-apocalyptic mother-brain cemetery-warehouse.) Then the families return to the feast.

Most of my students, especially the women and for obvious reasons, expressed a pointed loathing for the festivities.

Chusok is a binding thing for Koreans. This made the two men sitting at the bar seem dangerous - had they murdered their whole families just so they could be there, in that bar, with that music? As Yoo-te sat us down with the two men at the bar, answered the question, what is this music?, with En El Marravilloso Mundo de Ingesan by 1960's Colombian psych-rock band The Speakers, and then handed me a Leffe, murder quickly seemed worthwhile.

The men sitting with us introduced themselves by way of a slurred cheers. Yoo-te asked if we had any requests. Even the most vinyl-stocked and music-nerdly of bars in Seoul usually only has bands like Journey among their prized stock, so I thought it would be a good way to burst this too-good-to-be-true bubble to ask for some Os Mutantes. Yoo-te smiled and pulled out both the Mutantes album, as well as Divina Comedia Ou Ando Meio Desligado on vinyl. Reissues, yes, but it didn't matter. Yoo-te was my new best friend.

The men sitting next to us bobbed their heads and smoked. We made a sort of wordless toast to the music, and the three of them, Yoo-te and the men, asked us if we were familiar with the Korean concept of service-ah. "Service," Konglish again, and yes we were. Free stuff (sweet!). Yoo-te took down a fresh bottle of Hennessy V.S.O.P, and cracked the plastic. Woaaahhh, thought we, hold on a sec. Free?, at over $160 on the menu, we had to confirm. The men poured shots, and together, to a fuzzy-bliss soundtrack, we shouted "gambay!" and took in the smoky pleasure that is good cognac.

As we made quick work of our Chusok gift, and became drunk, Yoo-te continued his mammothly enlightening DJ schooling. He introduced us to some seminal psych-rock gems (each revealing, by virtue of my ignorance, the degree of delusion involved in my previously-cool self image), like the anarchicly wild Deviants of the UK, to Austrian Miles Davis-associated keyboard luminary and composer Joe Zawinul, Kaleidoscope, otherwise known as Jimmy Page's favorite band, and an elusive singer named Ron Davis, whose voice sounded like the voice of Led Zeppelin's Swan Song figure - you know, that androgynous angel - if s/he were a humble Canadian folk singer. This was only the tip of the gold-burg.

"You strong man?"

I confessed that I wasn't, in a begging manner, when one of the men tried to pour me a seventh shot in (perhaps) as many minutes. He looked adequately and kindly incredulous and poured me my damn shot that I was damn well drinking. I tried convincing the men that Sandr should drink more (thus spreading out the alcohol that would soon have my eyes crossing). She smirked a taunting look at me as the men let her off the hook with their old-school conceptions of women - namely that they don't, and shouldn't, drink or smoke as much as men. In a slur the other man made a request: Kim Jung Mi.

It was with some dread that I watched the needle drop. In my 13-month quest to find some enjoyable Korean music I have found only a few teen-punk bands, buried deep beneath a pile of K-pop, wallpaper balladeering and that annoying functional music of the older generations, trot. So then a shock, a surprise, joy and thankfulness when the veil was lifted on something great, Korean music's Pièce de Résistance: the album Now by Kim Jung Mi.

Her voice was the first thing that killed me: whispery yet soaring, limitlessly expressive, in that special deep female register that destroys the listener in a good way. Next was the bass. Fuzzy deep warmth, with a sense of rolling funk I had previously thought had yet to touch Korean shores. The style was a delicious mixture of American west-coast folk with a dash of French Chancon stirred with thick smoky Funk. We sat with the men, smiling, listening gratefully. We listened to the whole album, toasting our fortunes, relishing the camaraderie of our unlikely Chusok.


***




Post script:

As it turns out, Kim Jung Mi was one of a string of successful proteges guided and produced by one man: Shin Jung Hyeon. Shin was the impetus for a huge folk/rock scene throughout the 1960s and 70s in Korea. The theory is that he was exposed to foreign sounds during the final years of the Korean war, during the occupation by American forces, and then evolved his own genus of rock music right here in Korea. This work has arguably spawned everything rock or folk that has happened since on the peninsula.

You can read more about him and the whole scene on this great site.

Listen to track six from Kim Jung Mi's second album, called Wind here.

And this, track seven from her third LP, self titled.

[mp3s from emptyfree.com]

All three Kim Jung Mi albums have been recently reissued via the World Psychedelia label. There are rumors of a heavy vinyl reissue of Now in the near future.