Park Jiha: All Living Things review – effortlessly straddles ambient and modern classical

First Buds, Growth Ring, Blown Leaves… the track titles of Korean multi-instrumentalist Park Jiha’s fourth album flesh out the promise of a work that takes as its subject the juicy business of being organic. Repetitive musical elements echo the concentric cycles of rising and falling that occur over a lifetime; gradual evolutions mimic the adaptive nature of living beings. Played on traditional Korean instruments with electronic bells and whistles overdubbed, All Living Things effortlessly straddles ambient and modern classical, ancient and new. Park’s fertile themes here recall those of Björk’s Biophilia (2011), but with a big nod to the systems music of the American minimalists.

Over the course of her four solo works on the Glitterbeat label, Park’s music has tended towards the thoughtfully austere. Take Growth Ring, which stars the saenghwang (a mouth organ) and the piri (a double reed flute) conducting a kind of call and response, like whalesong exchanges. But All Living Things is an altogether less stern listen than her last outing, The Gleam (2022) – sometimes to the good, and sometimes less so. Grounding is both elegant and moving, but A Story of Little Birds feels almost too conventionally pretty.