The latest release from Korean musician Hunjiya, Start Over emerges like a hazy filtered memory. Guitars, spoken snippets, and wisp-like vocal harmonies float against a textural percussion line.
The sense of nostalgia and reflection at play here feels apt, given Start Over’s position as part of Hunjiya’s forthcoming six song project, Memory Box. Loose guitars create a playfulness in the song, even as you sense frustration build. Start Over is concerned with the repeated act of beginning again — a new place, new connections, moving for different reasons searching for something that feels like a fit, like home.
Start Over moves through two cycles of itself starting over. The song’s structure vibe-shifts between a playful sense of contentment before sounding frustrated and lost, and back again. After moving through these movements a couple of times, however, there is a starry eyed and spellbound moment where everything feels like it hangs in space, free of gravity for a moment, before kicking into a cacophonous heavy grunge bridge. The impact of all that weightlessness from moving around is a sudden crash of gravity.
Hunjiya is the musical project of Seoul-born, New York-raised Alice Kim. With Memory Box, she looks to root through old snapshots and recollections to pull out moments from her past that have stayed with her. In Korean, attaching ‘ya’ to the end of someone’s name generally conveys a sense of closeness — whether via friendship or for old friends, familiar faces, or siblings. That sense of familiarity and closeness is something Kim looks to channel through her music and lyricism. Describing the inspiration for both Start Over and Memory Box, Hunjiya says:
“Over the past four years, I've lived through moments that shook my sense of self such as moving between homes, rebuilding communities from scratch, losing myself in one person, feeling trapped in a controlling environment. Each of these was its own specific time and place, and each one felt like ‘home’ to me, if only for a while.”
Check out Start Over below, and look for Memory Box from late November.
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