Park Jiha and Roy Claire Potter Bring Saenghwangs and Spoken Word to Cafe OTO

For the second show of her two-night residency at Cafe OTO, Korean multi-instrumentalist Park Jiha joined forces with experimental poet Roy Claire Potter. Where the previous evening had seen Jiha playing songs from her most recent album, The Gleam, the music on night two came from the duo’s first collaborative record, To Call Out into the Night. The set itself has been doing the rounds since early 2020, when Jiha and Potter recorded these songs as a live session for BBC Radio Three’s Late Junction with Verity Sharp. Two years and a whole pandemic later, they teamed up with OTO’s OTOROKU label to give the project a full release.

Onstage, Potter knelt before a table of their poems, while Jiha sat across from them at her yanggeum (hammered dulcimer), sporting a physio boot on account of a broken foot. Jiha took up her saenghwang (mouth organ), breathing from it a keening melody, over which Potter began to speak. Across the next 40 minutes the gentle beat of Potter’s words twisted into the trills and undulations of Jiha’s music, the poetry blending moments of narrative with more esoteric imagery. Jiha herself moved between instruments, turning her attentions to piri (double reed bamboo flute), yanggeum and again to the saenghwang, building an enthralling conversation of speech and sound. A raptured audience stood wide-eyed and immobile, with barely a between-song cough to break the spell that Potter and Jiha cast.