Waking World

Description

AFTER THE SUCCESS OF 'IMMERSION', THE “MADE IN FRANCE” KOREAN SINGER PRESENTS HER ELEVENTH ALBUM, THE FIRST ON WHICH SHE SIGNS BOTH THE LYRICS AND THE MUSIC. SUBLIME! The “Made in France” Korean singer presents her eleventh album, the first on which she signs both the lyrics and the music. Just 20 years after the release of 'Light for the people', which introduced her to the French public, Korean singer Youn Sun Nah is releasing 'Waking World', the first album for which she has written all the lyrics and music: 11 songs faithful to the different worlds of her discography, drawing at times on jazz, pop, folk and world music, and revealing new cinematic and poetic dimensions. Even more than on her previous records, this one is marked by her own story. The world awakens when the light breaks through. When color returns - and: the dream shatters. On her new album "Waking World", Youn Sun Nah conceives and explores regions she has never entered before: the renowned jazz singer from Seoul is entirely responsible for songwriting for the first time. It happened this way because there was no other way: writing as an escape from darkness, as a means against stagnation. This resulted in 11 spellbinding compositions that make up her eleventh studio album: 'Waking World'."I always thought I wasn’t ready to take on the role of composer," says Youn Sun Nah, who released her first album 20 years ago. Since then, she has mainly performed other people’s melodies - most recently, for example, those of Leonard Cohen or Motown icon Marvin Gaye (on the predecessor "Immersion", 2019). So now there are exclusively original compositions: songs that oscillate between lightness and painful insight, always bearing her signature - in the broad space between pop gestures, folk intimacy, surprising jazz instrumentation, and a condensed “less is more”."Waking World" brings together vignettes of their world that are illuminated at different intensities: "It’s not just about songs, but rather fragments of a story, like consecutive sequences," she says. She deliberately avoids classic song structures, building the pieces more like poems “that draw inspiration from individual images”. “First, I work on the harmonies. Then on the melody. And only then does the text come.”