If you’ve recently listened to Okkyung Lee’s just like any other day (어느날), take a minute to collect yourself and reset expectations before diving into the South Korean cellist’s new record. While Lee’s 2025 collection of charming and bright-eyed, keyboard-focused ambient miniatures wouldn’t feel out of place in pastoral passages of a JRPG soundtrack, Signals, a commission by London’s Explore Ensemble, is stark, grave, and sharply abstract from first note to last.
The first sounds we hear, in fact, on the opener ‘Siwan’ (named for pianist Siwan Rhys) are the echoes of a resounding yet dangerously unstable piano stab. The sonic shape feels at once awfully close and impossibly distant, as if we were peering into the instrument’s guts simultaneously with a telescope and a microscope. Deep thumps throb and resonate into a walking line, while an uncomfortable murmur and skitterish chimes swarm around it. The question of which parts of the soundscape are electronically generated and which are acoustic remains unanswered. A 50 Hz mains drone that haunts the straining strings here, for instance, feels intentionally placed, even if its mundane nature intimates a chance encounter.
A native of South Korea, Lee has come a long way since she first rose to prominence as an improviser in the early 2000s. Having moved to New York City after studying at Berklee College Of Music and the New England Conservatory Of Music in the 1990s, she became part of the city’s lively free jazz and improv music community, which, at the time, orbited around John Zorn and his Tzadik label. By the early 2010s, she had already become one of the scene’s most exciting collaborators – working with everyone from Butch Morris and Taylor Ho Bynum to Christian Marclay and Peter Evans – and a successful leader in her own right.
Even in those days, Lee nurtured ambitions beyond idiomatic forms. Her earliest solo albums, Nihm (2005) and I Saw The Ghost Of An Unknown Soul And It Said… (2008), saw her flirt with noise, hinting at how future works would erase the borders between set roles. Signals arrives as a case in point and a demonstration of Lee at her most adventurous as she synthesises improvisation, composition and noise into a fascinating whole.
While the material for Signals was recorded over the span of a year in situ during performances at the Transit Festival in Leuven, Luxembourg’s Rainy Days, and Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Lee borrows from the Ina-GRM tradition of using the studio as an instrument, splicing together, remixing and electronically augmenting the recorded sounds. Live, the performers sit and walk in the middle of the auditorium, while Lee conducts them with hand signals, similar to her work with the BIT20 Ensemble. On record, the narrative is rendered oblique, mysterious even, as sounds emerge from sources that can be recognised well enough, only to then morph into impossible architectures. At times, the qualities of the sounds themselves become so mesmerising as to drown out any sense of structure.
On ‘Taylor’ (for flautist Taylor MacLennan), woodwinds whistle and join in a collective wail, while breathier flute lines occasionally move to the front as if trying to placate the uninhibited exhalation. Beneath it all, that pesky piano stab still trembles, sustaining a physically impossible long tone. Then, ‘David’ (for violinist David López Ibáñez) sees a single string tightened and bowed and stretched to the point of breaking, while tremolos bounce around, impatient and unnerving.
For all the music’s hermeticism, there is intent, and even understated beauty in it. The music often speaks without using a single word. ‘Deni’ (for cellist Deni Teo), ‘Christine’ (for violist Christine Anderson), and ‘Alex’ (for bass clarinettist Alex Roberts) move from proper dark ambient atmospheres, replete with enormous abyssal sounds, to more distinctly composed chamber passages, alternately evoking carnivalesque revelry and diving into polyphonies and hockets shared between woodwinds and strings.
Lee’s most vivid storytelling arrives with ‘Wings / First Love’ and ‘Wings / First Love (Farewell)’. Both cuts embrace harmonies, only to then quickly deconstruct them, with the latter piece filling the album’s tail with haute tension: a bustling, busy soundscape whose pressure rises like a bomb ticking to its end under martial rhythms. Here, the applause arrives and ends while the music is still going, accompanied by an ominous hum. Strong yet gentle piano keys can be heard underneath it all, and a shy stringed melody lifts its head for a moment. It’s the sort of goodbye that makes sure you don’t forget about the experience that came before it. This is Okkyung Lee at her most articulate, pushing the boundaries of sound and the forms of its organisation.
