Pump up the volumes
The bookish catalogue of a Korean band of brothers.
KOREAN STUDENT Kim Chang-wan was 17 and on his way to college in Seoul when he made an impulsive, lifechanging decision. Near his bus stop, a music shop had a classical guitar in the window that caught his eye. He walked in and bought it for the equivalent of a month’s wages from his part-time job. He didn’t know how to hold it, tune it or anything, so he also purchased a pitch pipe and a guitar tutor. Back home, he sat str umming D for hours, transfixed by the sound. He started practising every day.
Older brother Chang-hoon also bought a guitar. Younger brother Chang-ik joined in, playing rudimentary drums with spoons on a book. The brothers formed a band called Mul, doing well enough in a local contest to attract a manager, who suggested the name change to Sanullim (Mountain Echo). It was a period when the ruling military regime was cracking down. Famous musicians were being imprisoned on drug charges or having their work banned. Korean rock was moribund.
When Chang-wan graduated he decided to record some of the songs they’d amassed, perhaps for a private press album, but a record company heard their demos and commissioned an album. Without really knowing what they were doing, the brothers went into a studio and, with cousin Kim Nan-sook on keyboards, recorded the nine tracks for their first LP, Vol. 1: Already Now ★★★★ (Guerssen). Chang-wan supplied a childish pastel-crayon portrait of the band to ser ve as the cover image.
Released in December 1977, it took South Korea by storm, selling a reported 400,000 copies, having a vivifying effect not unlike punk’s in the UK, sounding like nothing Korea had heard before, neither ’77 nor ’67, but some dream-world meld of the two. Over time, the ingenuous enthusiasm of Sanullim’s first three records, all released within a year, filtered through to fans of psych and garage in the West, occasional tracks appearing on crate-digging compilations.
Reissued often at home, those records haven’t made much impact outside Korea beyond a devoted cult following listening to bootlegged or passed-around copies. Guerssen’s Antoni Gorgues, an obsessive fan, wanted to change that. He says these new versions, the first reissues outside Korea (with very limited coloured editions too), remastered from the original tapes, sound even better than initial Korean pressings.
Already Now’s title track is a pop song with springy bass, Farfisa organ, plishy cymbals and acid fuzz guitar that’s more trapped wasp than metal beast (the fuzz pedal seems to be malfunctioning), Chang-wan’s vocals wash over it in a metallic reverb. Likely Late Summer is a delicious slice of folk rock. The feel of this first record will be familiar if you’ve ever enjoyed any of the Cambodian bar-band pop recreated by acts like Dengue Fever.
Things fatten up for Vol. 2: Spread Silk On
My Heart ★★★, which opens with three minutes of distant fuzzy soloing. The songs are hooky, the bass is tougher, though the drums still sometimes sound like spoons on a book. Vol. 3: My Heart (My Soul Is A Wasteland)
★★★★ ventures further out, closing with the side-long You Are Already Me, a freaky, fuzzy 18-minute excursion that reminded this column of Nektar. The series is rounded out by Evening Breeze ★★★★, an engaging double compilation of highlights from Vols. 4-9.
The vocals are more urgent, the guitar more expansive, the drums finally sound decent.
There were 13 volumes in all, the last appearing in 1997, by which time only Chang-wan was still involved, his brothers having left music in the ’80s. Revived for a 30th anniversary show in 2007, Sanullim was finally pronounced over when Chang-ik was killed in an accident in Canada in 2008. Chang-wan started a solo career and subsequently branched into TV, theatre and film as both actor and writer. But, fundamentally, that impulsive teenage buy kept him gainfully employed for over 40 years.
“Sanullim’s debut LP had a vivifying effect not unlike punk’s in the UK.”
★★★★★ Orbital
LONDON. CD/DL/LP
Game-changing ‘Green LP’ from 1991, with bells, whistles, VapoRub. THREE YEARS on from the Second Summer of Love, the explosion of electronica around acid house was still widely regarded as kid’s stuff, lacking in substance, when the Hartnoll
brothers dropped this landmark debut LP. Even though Chime had dented the Top 20 in 1990, few foresaw the Kent-born siblings, or anyone else, making this dancefloor phenomenon workable at home. Quite literally, Orbital was the one that cracked it, paving the way for The Orb, Under world and Warp’s ‘Electronic Listening’ series. At 33 years’ distance, it presents an irresistible blend of Detroit techno’s sophistication (High Rise) and fullblooded acid pulsation (Fahrenheit 303), of Belfast’s sublime elegy and Speed Freak’s hilarious nosebleed rave. Diligently expanded here, the vinyl box cherry-picks bonuses, but the CD variant has it all – the Chime, Omen and Satan 12-inches, the better Mutations remixes and a noholds-barred live disc, including the Butthole Surfers-sampling Satan and a mind-warping Son Of Chime.