The sound of breath, the echo of water, the whisper of time itself - Park Jiha doesn’t just compose music, she orchestrates existence.
With "All Living Things", her fourth album, the Seoul-based composer and multi-instrumentalist continues her pursuit of the intangible, sculpting sound into something both profoundly delicate and quietly monumental. Like an unseen current moving beneath the surface of daily life, her music invites deep listening, a form of sonic meditation that unfolds in subtle waves, shifting with the natural cycles of being.

As always, Jiha’s sonic palette is uniquely her own - grounded in traditional Korean instruments (the piri, a reed instrument akin to an oboe; the yanggeum, a hammered dulcimer; the saenghwang, a hauntingly beautiful mouth organ) yet infused with a distinctly modern sensibility. Electronic elements and shimmering layers of overdubbed textures transform these ancient voices into something both timeless and futuristic.

This is not folk music. Nor is it quite classical, nor ambient, nor jazz - but it flirts with all of these forms, offering glimpses of each without ever settling into one. If Brian Eno met Midori Takada on a mist-covered Seoul morning, perhaps they’d arrive at something like this - an album where every note breathes, where silence is just as important as sound.

Jiha describes "All Living Things" as an album structured around the arc of life itself - from birth to maturity to death, and the renewal that follows. The journey begins with "First Buds", where a single motif emerges like the first green shoots of spring. It’s a track so gentle it could evaporate if you weren’t paying attention.

Then comes "Grounding", an earthy, resonant meditation where plucked yanggeum notes ripple like water droplets, slowly expanding outward. "Bloom" is all motion, a blossoming of interwoven melodies that dance like light through leaves.

"A Story of Little Birds" is Jiha at her most playful, an almost folkloric tune that evokes wind currents and whispered conversations between unseen creatures. Later, "Blown Leaves" and "Breathe Again" evoke the passage of time with melancholic, drifting motifs, while "Eternal Path" and "Water Moon" guide us into the unknown - a final transcendence, as if dissolving into the universe itself.

If her previous albums ("Philos", "The Gleam") sought to distill the essence of space and time into sound, "All Living Things" takes that a step further - this is music that breathes, that moves like the wind through an open window, that leaves imprints in the air long after the final note fades.

And this is precisely what makes Jiha’s music so extraordinary: it doesn’t just describe life - it becomes life itself.

This is an album for those who find poetry in raindrops, who appreciate the spaces between words, who listen as much to the world as they do to music.

It is, quite simply, one of the most beautifully contemplative works of the year.