Minhwi Lee - Hometown to Come (2023)

South Korea’s preeminent contemporary folk artist and film composer Minhwi Lee made a long-awaited return this year with 미​래​의 고향 Hometown to Come, seven years to the day after her award-winning debut 빌린 입 Borrowed Tongue. In those years Lee has kept busy, scoring films, starting a jazz trio, and occasionally playing bass for sludge metal group Gawthrop, but it’s her prolific soundtracking work that comes to the fore in this record. Hometown to Come is as cinematic as folk gets, with swelling string arrangements and imagistic lyrics that explore how the notion of “hometown” changes for the peripatetic: “If we were able to stay/ Would we be able to call ourselves ‘we’?” (간혹 머물 수 있다면/ 우리는 우릴 우리라고 부를 수도 있을까) she sings in the title track. It’s this sense of disjuncture that has characterized her work, from her exploration of empathy as ventriloquism on Borrowed Tongue all the way back to her iconoclastic approach to Korean tradition with Mukimukimanmansu. But this record is Lee at her most refined, one whose meditations on longing and belonging are influenced by films like Sicilia! (1998) as well as her own experiences studying in New York and Paris.

Tracklist:
1.01 - Minhwi Lee - Blue Flower (2:58)
1.02 - Minhwi Lee - The Station (3:58)
1.03 - Minhwi Lee - Returning (4:35)
1.04 - Minhwi Lee - Mirror Therapy for Phantom Pain (2:58)
1.05 - Minhwi Lee - Lost Land (5:23)
1.06 - Minhwi Lee - Penitentiary (3:32)
1.07 - Minhwi Lee - Mother's Mother (3:05)
1.08 - Minhwi Lee - Hometown to Come (5:59)