Go outside — day or night, but preferably night —take a walk around the block, and listen to “yes my weeping frame.” Along with a soft cascade of piano sounding like light grey rainfalls, streetlights and the shining light of corner stores and ATMs will feel a lot like the city is making music with you. That’s the power of ambient music: sometimes, it isn’t just background music; it is music that is meant to soundtrack fragments of your life, like a film.
This is Robert OHYUNG’s specialty. They’re an accomplished film score composer who’s dropped music on the side of his day job, with sounds ranging from noise to ambient on albums like PROTECTOR to Untitled (Chinese Man with Flame). This time around, OHYUNG dedicates the entire two-album runtime to ambient compositions. They’re not just exercises because the music feels too meaningful to be tossed off as such.
OHYUNG’s album emphasizes that ambient music requires patient ears, because where most hear repetition, others will hear a dive into something aesthetically interesting. “My torn cuticles” let’s bells and empty bottles and cans add a story to .
The album wraps up in a 36-minute epic, “releases like gloves.” “Gloves” is best described as a three-chord brass brooding that rotates endlessly like a rising sun making way for the darkness and back every day till death arrives. In this case, it arrives in a loss of that shine, when all that is left is synth tones of emotional ennui.
