IT FEELS LIKE | I CARE IF YOU LISTEN
Spoken Word and Piano Soar on Eunbi Kim’s “It Feels Like”
on September 7, 2022
As listeners, we’re familiar with the combination of spoken word and music in popular genres such as R&B and hip hop, but this creative medium is also finding its way into classical music. For instrumental works, spoken word has the power to advance a more literal narrative by embedding context into the music itself. Historically, contemporary piano compositions that have included spoken word (like Frederic Rzewski’s De Profundis) relegate the music to an accompaniment role. But on pianist Eunbi Kim’s second album, It Feels Like, she achieves an egalitarian balance of speech, acoustic instruments, and electronics while probing existential questions of family and identity.
Released August 12, 2022, on Bright Shiny Things, It Feels Like is greater than the sum of its parts. Kim’s sensitive creative approach and thoughtful collaboration with her commissioned composers Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR), Sophia Jani, Pauchi Sasaki, and Angélica Negrón results in a narrative arc of her own introspective journey through her Saturn years: the time in which Saturn returns to the same position it occupied at one’s birth.
It Feels Like a Mountain, Chasing Me by DBR is a triumph of performance, composition, and audio engineering. Fragments of an interview with Kim unfold over the 17-minute work, recounting her memories of her parents. The composition begins with the music serving as an emotional response to Kim’s spoken words; the bleak dissonance of two piano ostinato lines colors the speech, yet the music is actually foregrounded by audio engineers Judith Sherman and Charles Mueller.