- A colourful collection of drum & bass, dub and hip-hop from a key Toronto artist.
- In the music video for "Bounce," the lead single from Korea Town Acid, AKA Jess Cho's, debut album, we follow Korean rapper Pianwooo through the back streets of Seoul and a series of slightly tacky CGI renderings of The Matrix. Although full of jump cuts and tough-guy posturing, the video also feels campy, like a lo-fi snapshot of the future as envisaged by angsty teenagers. We start late night, in medias res, with hits of acidic bass and an off-kilter beat careening under vicious bars. Cho and Pianwooo quickly start winking at us—Cho with some light harp chords, Pianwoo with a chorus that gleefully takes cliché to its breaking point, asking us, "Red pill, blue pill. Which one would you take?"
The song captures the interplay of Cho's debut album, Metamorphosis, which positions itself where beauty, menace, theatricality and violence meet. Cho has never sat still in terms of her musical references. The Toronto-based producer burst on the scene with a 2018 mini-LP that was spacious and airy, touching on jazz, broken beat, and deep house. But as someone who has also spent a fair amount of time playing warehouses across and Canada, Cho also knows how to turn out a banger.
Cho provides us with this full spectrum as the album restlessly flits from one genre to the next. She starts with boom-bap swagger and off-the-cuff freestyles courtesy of Los Angeles rapper Imani, and ends with the pummeling drum & bass of "There’s No Turning Back." My two favorite tracks on the record fall somewhere between drum & bass and dub. "Thiis World Is Sick" and "Law Of Attraction" both feature skittering drums that fight for air with the skanking low-end of dub. On “Thiis World Is Sick," the reference is dub techno, but on "Law Of Attraction," Cho's spoken word vocals slip into the slowed slink of dub reggae proper.
"Curtain Call" also incorporates dub techno chords, though Cho sets this against a skeletal hip-hop beat and the occasional caulk of a gun. The effect is equal parts sinister and serene, a balance Cho also strikes on "Eclipse," where vocalist PNSB grows increasingly frantic over some minor key synth noodling and delicate piano. This sense of humour keeps the record light throughout—clock the wafting saxophone paired with Odd Future-esque rap on "Dazed."
Cho is primarily a live performer, and Metamorphosis channels the improvisatory and fleeting feel of a live set. No track clocks in at over four minutes, which means that these songs, especially the instrumental ones, feel like sketches, as if Cho were just starting to map out an idea before the wind blew her in another direction. When listening to the record for the first time, I wrote down "vintage KTA" when "Into The Future" came on. But this record, and Cho's discography more broadly, seems like a rebuttal to that idea. If anything, Cho proves that there is no Korea Town Acid style. Wherever the wind blows, she seems to land on her feet, and in front of her gear.
Tracklist01. (Intro) Dreamdave - Korea Town Acid Shout Out
02. Curtain Call (쇼)
03. Bloom (꽃) feat. Desiire
04. Dazed (멍) feat. LJ The Alien
05. Eclipse (일) feat. PNSB
06. Bounce (흥) feat. PIanwooo
07. Thiis World Is Sick (병)
08. Law Of Attraction (삶)
09. Into the Future (후)
10. There's No Turning Back (끝)