Contemporary traditional music is currently referred to by various names such as Alternative Pop, Post Rock, Korean Shamanic, and Fusion Gugak, and is not clearly named. However, it is rooted in New Minyo, which refers to a new form of folk music, and shares the characteristics of mixing various traditional music forms such as Pansori and Muak with new technologies to create contemporary traditional music. Since it is an ongoing musical form, it is difficult to explain its concept and history clearly, so we will introduce five representative musical groups instead.
LEENALCHI is the group that first popularized contemporary traditional music in Korea and around the world. LEENALCHI is a group that composes traditional pansori and mixes it with pop music, and they introduced this genre of music in a video titled Feel the Rythm of Korea : SEOUL on the Imagine Your Korea YouTube channel run by the Korea Tourism Organization. The song “Tiger is coming” with choreography by Ambiguous Dance Company became a sensation and gained a lot of popularity, but there are many other fun songs on the album “Sugungga” that include that song. Sugungga is one of the five pansori stories, Chunhyangga, Simcheongga, Sugungga, Jeokbyukga, and Heungbuga, and LEENALCHI is looking forward to covering the other four.
Jang Young-gyu, who formed LEENALCHI and is in charge of composing and lyrics, was originally a film music director and created music for many box office movies from Tazza to Train to Busan. Among them, a good example of Jang’s contemporary traditional music can be found in the movie, Jeon Woo-Chi, where the song “Court Musicians” showed a new form of traditional music that had never been seen before, and the audience often remembers this music even if they don’t remember the movie Jeon Woo-Chi. It’s a great example of the possibilities of creating music that is interesting to the public, even if it only uses traditional instruments.
Jang Young-gyu had one other gugak band, SSINGSSING, before forming LEENALCHI. He was joined by Lee Chul-hee, who plays drums in LEENALCHI, and Chu Dahye, who later formed a group called Chudahye Chagis. After releasing an album in 2017 called SSINGSSING, they disbanded in 2018, and although the reason for this is unknown, it is believed to have been due to differences in their musical views. SSINGSSING was based on shamanistic music, unlike LEENALCHI, which was based on pansori, and this is believed to have had a significant influence on Chu Dahye, who later formed Chudahye Chagis.
Chudahye Chagis is a band that plays a genre that Chu Dahye herself describes as psychedelic shamanic punk, and as the name suggests, they compose and perform punk band music based on shamanic music. In fact, shamanic music is a minor genre of traditional Korean music, and funk and reggae music are also minor genres of Korean band music, but strangely enough, these two genres have met and created a tremendous synergy. This is the complete opposite of LEENALCHI, which harmonizes pansori, the most popular Korean traditional music, with rock music, the most popular band music in Korea.
Chu Dahye said that she traveled around the country to learn shamanic music and visited actual shamans to learn it, and in the case of shamanic music passed down from North Korea, she had to learn it through a secondary source because she couldn’t go directly to the shamans. Also, to use the Muryeong, a bell used by shamans, as one of thier instruments, it was made by asking the shamans themselves.
Like Chudahye Chagis, there is another group based on shamanic music, and their name is Ak Dan Gwang Chil. They were founded in 2015, which was the 70th anniversary of South Korea’s liberation from Japanese occupation, so they named themselves after the 70th anniversary of the liberation. Their music is mainly based on North Korean shamanic music, and they often learn and use folk songs from the Western Province, the area where Pyongyang is located today.
Ak Dan Gwang Chil is characterized by the fact that they don’t use modern electronic instruments. Despite this, they write many interesting and new forms of songs and prefer to perform in a way that interacts with the audience. Currently, the group is the most active of the contemporary traditional music groups, along with Huabol Jambinai, and has been releasing albums steadily.
The remaining two bands are groups that tend to focus more on the instruments themselves, as opposed to the bands above that utilize voice as the main melody. One of them is Jambinai, mentioned above. Jambinai is a group formed by students who studied traditional music at the same school and classify themselves as post-rock. The name Jambinai was chosen without any meaning, and just before their first concert, they needed a name, so they just picked any name that came to mind and chose Jambinai because it fit their identity.
Their songs are often experimental, using a lot of sound effects, and they tend to focus more on texture than on the melody of the song itself. They are also active alongside Ak Dan Gwang Chil, but their style of contemporary gugak is completely different from Ak Dan Gwang Chil’s, which makes it interesting to listen to.
Another group that creates instrumental songs like this is Black String. While Jambinai combines rock and gugak, Black String combines jazz and gugak for a different feel. It’s interesting to note that they are more popular in foreign countries than in Korea, and if you look for articles or resources, you will find more foreign resources than Korean ones. They are a fairly unknown fusion group in Korea, and even I was introduced to them by a British friend in my class. Nevertheless, when you listen to their music, you can hear an interesting mix of jazz and Korean music, and the songs are very well produced, so I think they deserve to be more known in Korea.
By looking at these trot and contemporary traditional music bands, I was able to see how Korean traditional music is being developed in the modern era and what kind of form it takes. In the following post, I will summarize my thoughts on the direction of traditional music development and the problems that may arise as a result of studying traditional music from Korea to modern times.