Unsound Dispatch #4: bela’s album "Noise and Cries 굉음과 울음" and Warsaw’s Ephemera Festival
Read a piece on Korean artist bela by John Twells, and news of the Unsound-produced Ephemera Festival in Warsaw
Introduction
This month’s Unsound Dispatch includes news of Ephemera Festival, taking place at the start of June in Warsaw. Fellow Artistic Director and founder Gosia Płysa gives a few words on the idea of the festival below.
This is also the place to let you know that the Unsound label recently released an album with Subtext: Noise and Cries 굉음과 울음 by South Korea’s bela. You can find the album here, on vinyl and in digital format:
By way of connections, one of the things that convinced us to get involved in the release of this album was bela’s show at last year’s Ephemera, around the summer solstice. It took place just after sunset inside Warsaw’s Królikarnia Palace. bela’s powerful show held the power of collective ritual — and floored us with its distinct sound and performative aspects.
For this month’s Unsound Dispatch, we commissioned music writer John Twells to write an extended piece on bela. John has known bela for some time in Berlin, seen those unique shows, been acquainted with the album since its early stages, and even penned its press release. Their work, created from interviews, is an attempt to give deeper context for Noise and Cries 굉음과 울음, coming as it does from a specific South Korean reality that many readers/listeners probably know little of. You’ll also find the piece below.
We hope you enjoy it, as well as bela’s album.
Mat Schulz
Warsaw’s Ephemera Festival Unveiled
Taking place between 5 - 9 June, Ephemera is a multi-arts festival that traverses Warsaw, working with local partners, initiatives, collectives and artists. The program is now fully announced — you can find it here.
The festival’s origins date back to 2019. “Things then looked very different,” says co-Director Gosia Plysa. “The Polish right wing was riding high: destroying independent culture, taking away women’s rights and actively attacking LGBTQI+ communities. Then the pandemic hit in 2020.
“We had to start humbly, finding a window between lockdowns in 2020 to present Hildur Guðnadóttir’s Chernobyl, even using the restrictions as part of the scenography. In the following years, as an act of protest, we looked for wild, queer performances, collaborating with the wonderful Kem collective and W Brzask series from the start. Supported by the city, we also connected to a number of other partners and initiatives in Warsaw that hosted and supported us, and close curation with Ukrainian friends helped create a strong 2022 edition.
“While the situation in Poland has improved, the global geopolitical situation remains grim, making it easy to submit to doomsday scenarios and defeatist thinking. But the fifth edition in, we’re still using Ephemera as a way to connect with each other, celebrating the longest days and performing rituals for a better future, with a program full of surprises and radical choices.”
Ephemera this year includes music — starting at sunset and ending at sunrise several days later — theatre, dance, performance, visual arts, ceremonies, feasting and more. Check out the full program here.
A Deep Dive Into bela’s New Album: Noise and Cries 굉음과 울음
by John Twells
The first time I saw bela perform, they were on the last leg of their first European tour. I made my way to the basement of Arkaoda in Berlin after being persuaded to attend by some British friends who had been dumbfounded by a set at London’s Cafe Oto, and was confronted with a show that shook me to my core. bela’s recorded output was already meticulous and shrewdly groundbreaking: Guidelines, released on Éditions Appærent in 2021, reconfigured Korean traditional sounds, augmenting pungmul — a rural folk form that includes frenetic drumming, dancing and singing — with clubwise electronic twists and tricks:
But the live performance was a different experience altogether. Holding a small notebook filled with Korean words and a flashlight to dazzle the audience, bela entranced an often apathetic local crowd, growling acid-tipped phrases over anodized industrial thuds and blown-out, cybernetic trills. The music genuinely surprised me; it’s fiendishly difficult to come up with something truly innovative in an age when so much sonic history can be raked over and conciliated with a just few clicks, and bela’s considered expression of queerness, contemporary anxiety, anger and confusion felt not only novel, but vital.
That 2022 tour was the genesis of bela’s dizzying Noise and Cries 굉음과 울음, recently released via Unsound and Subtext. An album that unflinchingly confronts the idea of death, it uncloaks the deceptiveness of a supposedly peaceful Korean society, considering identity, marginalisation and rebirth, and it’s bela’s powerful, versatile voice that shepherds us through this thematic labyrinth. “I had just made ‘Guidelines’ and I was thinking there’s no way to perform this live,” they recall, sipping a glass of tap water. “I wanted all the percussion to be exact, and frankly, there was no good way of doing it electronically, at least no good way of doing it with controllers.” A booking from Rewire Festival followed, and an offer to tour with South Korean cellist Okkyung Lee — the pressure was on for bela to figure something out. “I thought, why not add one more element to this equation? I was already putting pungmul and experimental club material together, so why not add the vocal element to create a show?”
At the time, bela was living in their family home in Paju, a city on the outskirts of South Korea’s capital, Seoul. Trapped in a suburban vacuum “without any culture", they had to travel an hour and a half to interact with any meaningful art and music. So when Park Minhee, the vocalist of cult Korean duo HAEPAARY, offered bela the use of her Paju studio, it was a lifeline. Surrounded by design studios and publishing houses, the quiet office provided bela with the space to develop their voice and, more importantly, experiment with ear-splitting sounds. They’d grown up fascinated by visceral, extreme music — from local punk bands to Western industrial outfits — and tapped Jang Seong-Geon, aka Sunggun, the gravel-voiced lead singer of sludge metal band Gawthrop, to teach them Sunggun’s growling technique. The final ingredient was a TC-Helicon VoiceLive 3 Extreme effects pedal. “I’m not comfortable being in a public space with this voice,” they say softly. “I wanted it to sound more feminine. I tried [the VoiceLive 3], and it sounded like I became a female news anchor — I was so amazed. It makes this wonderful pitched-up growl where it picks up the tonal parts and boosts one octave. I always wanted to produce a female scream and it does that for me, so I use that a lot in my performance, where I have to embody the rage that I started the album with.”
The rage bela mentions is the album’s most critical component. They were struggling to keep their head above water in South Korea when they were devising the live set, working multiple part-time jobs just to survive. “I wanted to cry, I wanted to die,” they told me when we were putting together the press release for Noise and Cries 굉음과 울음. bela grew up in a lower-middle-class household with their mom, and it wasn’t long before they realised that their financial status, as well as their non-binary identity, put them at odds with the South Korean mainstream’s expectations. They were all but guaranteed to fall out of society: “I was wondering what age I would be homeless, I was basically counting the clock”. Music was bela’s escape from this terrifying prospect; after learning English as a teenager, they unlocked the gate to an anglophone world that was almost too vast to comprehend. “All the culture comes to you at once,” they say. “It’s like the surface of a black hole. Somebody chewed it up and spat on top of me.” But they persevered, combing through the sprawling mass of information to unearth forward-thinking work from artists like Mica Levi (“‘’Under the Skin’ boosted me into electronic music!”), Arca and SOPHIE.
Spurred on by this confident, expressive, queer eccentricity, bela began to experiment with their own productions, infusing these ideas with their own distinct South Korean narrative. Guidelines challenged Korean conservatism by harnessing folk traditions that have recently been hijacked by the country’s right wing, boldly using the language of contemporary queer electronic music to question the logic of a half-forgotten past. Noise and Cries 굉음과 울음 takes the philosophy a step further, stitching personal anecdotes into myths and arias, and braiding contemporary political observations with ancestral rituals. And although the words are hard to decipher, even for native Korean speakers, the new material resonated when bela debuted it in Seoul. They played the live set two or three times before going on tour, and it was an overwhelmingly positive experience: “People were dancing to it, even through it’s difficult rhythms. Mostly because they’re Korean and they know what they’re getting.” In Europe, the shows were just as powerfully received, but some of the references were lost in translation. At one performance, a Korean observer assured a European friend that the performance was a shamanic ritual, and bela had to set them straight. “I told him that it’s a social ritual, and he was trying to understand,” they say. “He told me, ‘So then it’s made up.’ And I would say — not exactly. It’s just a way of life, rather than there being a god I need to serve.”
Across Korea, mudang, or shamans, conduct rituals for various life events, singing and dancing and providing offerings. And although the traditions are ancient and have been variously disrupted by war and colonisation, they’ve persevered, tangling with modern culture and melting into more formal religions. bela’s costume and routine are a nod to this, but they’d never claim to be in conversation with that practice. “My birth name is from a shaman, so my family are superstitious, but they were also in denial the whole time,” they explain. “They have to be modern, they only believe partly about these shamanic beliefs and folk beliefs. But the influence, when that kind of denial happens in a household; in a child’s mind you pick up everything, and nothing is clear. What is shamanism and what is not?” To make matters more knotty, bela’s birth father is a Buddhist monk, and ‘The Sage’, the opening track on Noise and Cries 굉음과 울음 and a live staple, addresses this directly. Taking words from Jungtaryeong (“monk’s song”), a piece that appears in two pansori arias and “questions the ruling class and their decisions”, bela uses the iconic opening line verbatim, before twisting it into a barbed criticism of the patriarchy.
“It’s not a canon,” they explain. “But if you looked into pansori, if you learned it, you would know it. It’s two pansori references, from different perspectives, and I’m playing with that.” The track’s alloy of old and new elements mimics and challenges the muddle of religion, history and culture that still guides the Korean mainstream. In 2016, Korea’s then president, Park Geun-hye, was investigated and revealed to have been consulting family friend Choi Soon-sil on confidential state matters. She’s the daughter of Choi Tae-min, the founder of The Church of Eternal life, an influential cult that meshes elements of Buddhism, Christianity and Korean shamanism, and Park was later impeached. The current president, Yoon Suk-yeol, has also been embroiled in a similar scandal, charged with repeatedly taking advice from a self-styled prophet called Cheongong. “I wouldn’t say this guy is shamanic, but an influencer — a lecturer and spiritual leader,” says bela. “They’re consulting this person. And a lot of right wing nationalist people are following him.”
With populist nationalism booming, conservative values prioritised and social customs jumbled, homophobia is rife. “Korea used to have Pride parade in the biggest main plaza in Seoul, but for two years in a row they couldn’t do it there because the Christians are filing another event in the same plaza on the same day that the Pride people book it. So they’re out-booked, basically.” This cacophony reinforces the political backdrop of Noise and Cries 굉음과 울음, and it’s exactly the reason bela knew it was crucial to sing in Korean; they are indeed conducting rituals, but new customs designed for a more open-minded audience. “I want to use lyrics as noise also, by trying to embody my queerness in my voice. I am creating noise with my voice, and my language,” they say. “Only when I speak in Korean can I reconnect with the feelings and emotions that these rituals bring. It’s quite difficult to do it with a translated version.”
The connection to Korean culture is even more important now that bela lives in Berlin. They relocated shortly after that fateful first tour; they’d wanted to leave home for some time, so had made sure to complete their military service, a mandatory requirement for anyone who emigrates. But Germany wasn’t initially at the front of their mind — they were impressed by Berlin’s U-Bahn and, most curiously, the temperature. “I wasn’t sure about the music scene here,” they laugh. “I didn’t actually go to a lot of club events when I first visited, but I thought the weather in June was super nice. It was not killing me. It didn’t feel like I was dying when I was walking outside, because in Korea it does in summer, sometimes.” Once they were settled, they could think about turning their ideas into a proper album. And just as friends and acquaintances had helped them realise their vision back in South Korea, a new community of like minds saw potential in bela’s art. Subtext boss and mixing engineer James Ginzburg offered to assist them with the complicated recording process, and the dream turned into a reality.
At first, the music had been based around ‘Guidelines’, but the more bela workshopped the material and refined it, the more they realised it needed to be different. Not only did the tracks need more space for vocals, but bela wanted them to function as dance music. “Playing live is different from an album,” they say. “That’s basic knowledge to me now, but not back then. I wanted to condense the album into tracks that can still resonate with the club music community that I come from in the first place, and also experiment a bit more. So it is a result of trying to hit the balance right.” Tracks like ‘Deathwill’ and ‘Confluence Loop’ still use the triplets typical of many Korean rhythms, but bela mapped them to a 4/4 template: “I moulded them towards the soundsystem, and the culture that I face here, on this side of the earth.” Ambient pieces like ‘풀이’ and the title track break up the flow a little, allowing bela to show a little more of their vocal range, and on the towering ‘나락’, they look back home, splaying urgent, acerbic words over pneumatic beats. “My lyrics here are more about class than queerness,” they explain. “‘나락’ has desperate lyrics of the dying of working class people, the worksites where I should have been. And stories about how my mom’s friends died.”"
If the album is fixated on death, it’s also about the hope bela has in rebirth. They describe it as “community-supported R&D”, and moving away from South Korea has only emboldened them to find ways to assist the community back home as much as they can. “A lot of Korean friends are afraid of speaking out about class, and they feel like it will keep them starving,” they sigh. “My mission right now is trying to remember that pressure, and trying to help my friends. Releasing this album with Unsound and Subtext, with this much support, means something. I want to showcase a little of the innovation that’s going on in the Seoul underground scene and how I was a part of it and how I want to give them a bit more light.” Their latest mix, published on Swine Daily, contextualises the album with tracks primarily sourced from the South Korean underground. There’s a track from Jiyoung Wi, whose outfit bela wears during their performances, and one from Kirara, who taught bela how to use Ableton Live. It’s a porthole into a scene that’s not widely understood outside of South Korea, and also a love letter from bela to the people that lifted and inspired them in the first place.
And they’re already thinking about the future. bela is about to embark on a series of residencies in France, Czechia, Latvia and Romania supported by the SHAPE+ platform. “I’ve been trying to figure out this joy of performance, and I don’t think it comes from turning knobs,” they explain. “I want to figure out how making sound physically can still have a political agenda, can still have an expression that can cover what I want to convey to the world. Not through Ableton Live this time, but through stand-alone devices that I can make from Arduino chips and little pieces.” After experimenting with maximalism, bela is motivated to try a different approach. “Where I already appear to the public in my live shows as a shamanic figure, or a person transcending from human existence, I want to use that presence in quieter ventures also,” they say. “Rather than raising myself to put fear in people, I want to lower myself this time, to make people come to me and surround me and listen to what I’m doing.” They’re enthusiastic about what might emerge from further collaboration — with choreographers, technicians, costume designers and performers — and how Europe will inspire this next chapter. “I see a lot of possibility in this new venture,” they say. “Although I will keep making music with Korean traditional knowledge as the basis, I am trying to mend the gap between my sense of displacement and trying to find my roots, my new roots here.”