petak, 7. prosinca 2012.

Shin Joong Hyun - Beautiful Rivers And Mountains: The Psychedelic Rock Sound Of South Korea's Shin Joong Hyun 1958-74






Korejski kum rocka, tj. psihodeličnog rocka. Balade su mu izvrsne.
 

Streaming ulomaka











This videos is from the film Mi-in and features the song “I’ve Got Nothing To Say” performed by Shin Joong Hyun & Yupjuns. This is on our Beautiful Rivers And Mountains anthology.
This slow jam features Park In Soo singing Mr. Shin’s “Spring Rain”, also included on our anthology. Looks to be early 80′s but is SO good! He just kills it, though the song cuts off before the colossal ending

For the most part, sunsets in black and white are not the most breathtaking, however in the case of this film featuring Kim Choo Ja, her interpretation of Mr. Shin’s classic “Sunset” is down right technicolor. On Beautiful Rivers And Mountains we have the Jang Hyun version of the song but hey, a good song can stand up to a few versions.



The subtitle for this album includes the hallmark "psychedelic rock" phrase — and, while it's misleading, I don't fault Light In The Attic Records for attempting to define the music of this South Korean legend. Like many players in Seoul's late-'60s and early-'70s scene, Shin was a soul boy, and much of his music contains debris from the soul pantheon. This wasn't uncommon in the psychedelic rock idiom, of course, but a song like "Beautiful Rivers and Mountains" is about as surprising a psych jam session as I've encountered. It's a highlight of an album full of dirge-like blues-funk, sorrowful ballads, surf-rock and flower-power pop. - NPR

Shin Joong Hyun’s tale is personal, spiritual, and deep, not only reflecting the full spectrum of human emotions, but one that produced reverberating echoes of sound, some beautiful and life-giving, others restless and ungovernable. For the first time outside of Korea, Shin’s music will be readily available to music lovers the world over. Light In The Attic are thrilled to release Beautiful Rivers And Mountains: The Psychedelic Rock Sound Of South Korea’s Shin Joong Hyun, a career spanning CD, 2xLP, and Digital Download compilation of the diminutive guitarist, songwriter, producer, arranger, and talent developer.
Inspired by jazz, soul, and traditional Korean music, Shin started his career in the mid-1950’s, performing for US troops stationed locally after the Korean War armistice of 1953. While his English language skills were limited, the young player had no trouble communicating through his trusty electric guitar, but Shin was no mere 6-string slinger for hire, he was able to communicate something far beyond your average professional musician. Production work and extensive songwriting followed, not to mention a steady stream of electrifying performances. Gaining momentum by the moment, Shin developed popular success across South Korea molding protégés like singing duo the Pearl Sisters and folk-psych songbird Kim Jung Mi into top pop stars. From there it was hit after hit. The late 1960’s rock explosion and an influx of imported music from The Beatles, Jimmy Smith, and The Jefferson Airplane all informed and inspired Mr. Shin to elevate his own craft. Even experimental trips via a crew of local hippies also took the music man to new heights despite Korean law forbidding such rebellion. Drug use was illegal and punishable as a serious offence. Park Chung-hee, then President of South Korea began to closely monitor Shin’s “subversive” activities. After refusing to write a song in praise of the political leader, the musician was labeled unpatriotic and his career was instantly snuffed-out through a series of surveillance, torture, and institutional confinement.
While this was not the end of Shin’s musical story, for an all-too-brief moment in Korean cultural history, Shin Joong Hyun and his talented accomplices laid down a trove of recordings that have slowly reverberated far from their native land. Beautiful Rivers And Mountains: The Psychedelic Rock Sound Of South Korea’s Shin Joong Hyun features Korean/English lyric translations, unseen pictures, beautiful graphic design from Strath Shepard (Pacific Standard), fully restored and re-mastered audio by Timothy Stollenwerk (Stereophonic) extensive liner notes by Kevin “Sipreano” Howes (Jamaica-Toronto series, Rodriguez, Monks, Mowest comp) and Shin Joong Hyun himself. With loving attention to detail and Shin’s full blessing, we trust you’ll find this album as addictive as a bottle of your favorite Korean soju. So let’s raise a toast to Shin and his musical life! As they say in Seoul, “Gun Bae!!!”
  • First anthology of Shin Joong Hyun’s music outside of Korea
  • Comprehensive liner notes by Kevin “Sipreano” Howes with an in-depth interview and track-by-track notes by Mr. Shin
  • 2x LP housed in a deluxe jacket with liner notes and rare photos
  • Vinyl lacquers cut by John Golden at Golden Mastering and pressed at world-renowned RTI!
  • CD housed in a deluxe card-stock Digipak with 32-page liner notes with rare archive photos
  • A musical trip existing somewhere between Motown, Hendrix, and the Velvet Underground

lightintheattic.net/

Shin Joong Hyun



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Shin Joong Hyun & Yup Juns

Spring of 1974 witnessed the birth of psychedelic power trio Shin Joong Hyun & Yup Juns. “In Korean, yupjun literally means a brass coin,” Shin explains. “However, during that time it was used as slang to describe a sense of unpleasantness and dislike. Since I was so unpleasant and dissatisfied [in my career], I told myself, ‘Ok, fine, I am just a yupjun,’ and named my band with a rebellious attitude.” He began by renting a room at Seoul’s Tower Hotel to serve as a creative base for the group. After six months of preparation, the group cut ten powerful songs filled with monster grooves, fuzz guitar, emotive singing, and top-notch songwriting. The album was pressed up as a broadcast-only promotional vinyl to test radio response; the response wasn’t what anyone expected, and the record label refused to release the album. The band re-recorded the album, but it is this, the original ten track version, that has become legendary—with good reason. An astounding record, and one that we are privileged to bring to the rest of the world for the first time.


Shin Joong Hyun: South Korea's psychedelic mimic turned master


He learned American pop via a hand-built radio, became a psychedelic pop star in his own right, then was tortured by South Korea's dictatorship. Meet the remarkable Shin Joong Hyun
 
Shin Joong Hyun writes a song in his bedroom while holding his swirly-patterned guitar
Shin Joong Hyun: 'It was the most beautiful time of my life.'
 
It was in 1957, at the spring variety show at the Eighth US Army base in Seoul, that Shin Joong Hyun gave his first public performance. The 19-year-old had lived through Japanese rule, the subsequent division of Korea into two warring states, and the US "police action" that followed. The Harmony guitar he strummed had been paid for by many hours' toil at a relative's pharmaceutical factory. At the variety show, as girl dancers gyrated for the entertainment of American GIs, Shin played standards and showtunes: tame material for a boy who worshiped Elvis and Charlie Parker.
He'd developed his passion for western music via American Forces Korea Network. "I ended up building my own radio to listen to American music," he says. "It had poor reception and terrible static, but I was just happy that I was able to listen to music. I thought jazz was simply amazing. But, honestly, I enjoyed any music that was played on AFKN.
"During my first performance, the GIs were shouting, 'Hey shorty! Play guitar solo!'" remembers Shin, who duly asked his bandleader for permission. "He gave me this sheet music book and told me to practise … I played my first guitar solo during my next performance: the crowd went wild, and the bandleader raised my wage by 50%."
The following year, Shin cut his first records, covers of Korean pop. His own tastes remained attuned to the west, however. "I remember the first time I heard the Beatles. I was mesmerised by their sound: it was blissful. I tried to mimic them with my four-piece, ADD4."
Shin's pseudo-Merseybeat quartet failed to find success in the Korean market. His embrace of psychedelia would prove a turning point a couple of years later, however, when his new group, Club Date, performed Jefferson Airplane's Somebody to Love live on Korean television, to instant acclaim.
AFKN had clued Shin into the psychedelic sounds then emanating from the US. "I mimicked their music, visuals and sounds without fully understanding what it was," he admits. "Later, I was playing a 'psychedelic' song and some American hippies – antiwar protesters – came to listen. I became friends with them, and they taught me what psychedelic music really was. They also gave me LSD."
After hearing Somebody to Love, local singing duo the Pearl Sisters approached him for creative guidance. Their single Nimah subsequently topped the charts in Korea, and Shin recast himself as a successful performer, producer, songwriter and svengali.
This career is essayed by an excellent new compilation, Beautiful Rivers and Mountains: The Psychedelic Rock Sound of Shin Joong Hyun 1958-1974. It collects choice nuggets of Motown-styled pop (I Don't Like), deep soul (Spring Rain), melancholic folk-pop (The Sun) and Hendrixian acid-rock (J Blues 72).
"It was the most beautiful time of my life," says Shin. But it wasn't to last. In 1972, at the height of his career, the South Korean government requested Shin pen an ode to President Park Chung-Hee and his ruling Republican Party. Shin refused the dictatorship's request; soon, he was blacklisted within South Korea's music industry and his songs banned. Arrested for possession of marijuana in 1975, he was tortured in prison and incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital. "I was miserable. I had no motivation for anything," he says now, of those years of silence.
With Park's assassination in 1979, Shin's gloom began to lift. His music enjoyed a renaissance in South Korea in the 1990s, and in 2008, five decades after Shin first switched on to American pop via his home-built wireless, he finally performed in the US, at the Korean Music festival at the Hollywood Bowl.
"Words can't describe how I feel," he says with a smile, of the acclaim the new compilation has already enjoyed. "I still can't believe people listen to my music across the world."

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