Heejin Jang - Dream Signal

Released: February 8

In her first album of 2024, South Korean noise artist and electronic explorer Heejin Jang brings a varied yet perpetually heavy experience with Dream Signal. While the base of all the sounds present here is essentially noisy, it is the sonic accouterments that line her approach that give an extra dimension to the album. For starters, the opening track "Climate Setting" borders on being an impenetrable wall of sound for a portion of the initial time. However, it is when this wall crumbles a bit to allow the more minute and less abrasive sounds to poke through. Hollow scraping and clacking is joined by oddly mechanical sounds, as if some kind of obscure piece of factory equipment is struggling to come to life but ends suddenly. The next track follows much of the same motifs with stronger intensity on the noise aspect but afterwards there is somewhat of a shift in the album's direction. 

Taking us into "Brinvillers' Throat," dark textures and eerily processed vocals introduce us to the track and lull us into believing more harsh worlds await. But then it shifts suddenly and sequenced beeps take over the track transport us to somewhere less dark, but only because of these small specks of bright light. The rhythm of these bleeps is entirely unstable and speeds up, slows down, and even almost entirely disintegrates. This is one of the first variables in the album and later on, "Colors: I'm Here!" picks back up on this pattern in differing format. Gone are the weird beeps, now we have a heavily processed vocal snippet that glitches up and down with an equally unstable rhythm. It's such an outlandish part of the album in whole as the smallest phonemes are repeated and twisted over and over again. The final track, "Morning Call," acts as something of a reprise as it combines many of the elements heard throughout the album into one final piece, including the rhythmic bleeps, the harsh noise, and the wild oscillations of otherwise static sounds.