Vol 1: Already Now/vol 2: Spread Silk On My Heart/vol 3: My Heart (My Soul Is A Wasteland) (reissues, 1977, ’78, ’78) + Evening Breeze
GUERSSEN
THE story of Korean pop group Sanullim is a curious one. Formed in 1976 by the Kim brothers – Chang-wan, Chang-hoon and Chang-ik – they seemed to stumble upon both their sound, and their fame, as if by accident. With no plan to become professional musicians, the early Sanullim story – documented by these reissues of their rst three albums, and Evening Breeze, a judiciously selected compilation from their next ve albums – is one of teenage energy turning, slowly but surely, into a long-standing career: the group would last until 2008, when brother Changik passed away, and release 17 albums, including several children’s albums.
They’ve long been held in high esteem within the underground outside of Korea: Tori Kudo of Maher Shalal Hash Baz covered a song of theirs on his recent The Last Song Of My Life album; Khruangbin included a Sanullim song on their Late Night Tales mix disc. But these three reissues are the rst time their music’s been available on vinyl in the West, and it’s a welcome development, particularly given the sometimes lopsided focus on particular parts of East Asia when it comes to music and reissue culture.
There’s admittedly something periodpiece about aspects of all four Sanullim albums, though in some ways, they’re disconnected from their immediate moment. Recorded in the late 1970s, the
rst three Sanullim albums have more in common with late-’60s and early-’70s pop and psychedelia, the di¥racting lens of
8/10, 9/10, 9/10, 8/10 Sublime Korean psych-pop reissued on vinyl
time and the abstractions of cross-cultural adaptation making this music feel both slightly dislocated and somehow distilled, as though the brothers have boiled down everything great about psychedelic pop and extracted its essence.
There are hints on Already Now of an expansiveness that stretches beyond the simplicity of these garage-pop songs – fuzz guitars burbling away in the background, chintzy organs that hum and purr through the songs. But things really take o¥ on 1978’s Spread Silk On My Heart: “Let’s Sing” is submerged by an oil slick of swirling, distorted buzzsaw guitar; “A Flower Blooming In The Haze” is quietly epic, its
ligree guitar gures making way, in the midst of the song, for a guitar solo that sounds as though it’s being squeezed, dirty and slicked with sweat, out of the ampli er.
Things intensify further on the same year’s My Heart (My Soul Is A Wasteland), where the voices get gru¥er, the songs get more expansive, and the side-long “You Are Already Me” is a mammoth psych-rock construction that feels like it fell o¥ the back of a Kissing Spell reissue. But this intensive focus on the more psychedelic aspects of Sanullim also subtly betrays the reality of their Korean fanbase, who tend to embrace their more melancholic, ballad-like side, of which there are also plenty of lovely examples here; Sanullim knew how to pull four chords together, let them glimmer in fragile light, and dose their songs with just the right amount of sadness. Either way, the music is sublime. Extras 7/10: Liner notes from Hugh Dellar.