Park Jiha – All Living Things (tak:til, 2025)
Gifted Korean composer and multi-instrumentalist Park Jiha returns with All Living Things (tak:til, 2025), a meditative, conceptually unified album that explores the life cycle through an exquisite fusion of traditional instrumentation and contemporary sound design.
Her fourth solo release, All Living Things, builds on the musical vocabulary of earlier works (Philos, The Gleam), while expanding her use of electronic music elements. Jiha plays every instrument on the record, layering Korean instruments such as the piri, yanggeum, and saenghwang with flute, glockenspiel, bells, voice, and subtle electronics to shape immersive, slow-unfolding, deeply mesmerizing soundscapes.
The album follows a clear narrative arc, beginning with birth and progressing through growth, maturity, decline, and death. Each track reflects this structure. Opener “First Buds” sets a tone of delicate emergence, while “Grounding” offers looping patterns that echo minimalist influences.
“Growth Ring” places the saenghwang and piri in counterpoint, conveying a sense of ripening form. Meanwhile, lead single “Blown Leaves” introduces layered electronic swells to mirror natural entropy.
Closer “Water Moon” returns to simplicity, evoking a lullaby-like sense of renewal.
Rather than confining her work to ambient or post-classical tags, Jiha positions this album as a personal and philosophical statement. According to her, the project stems from “a singular connection to the earth” and aims to process uncertainty through an awareness of natural continuity. Her compositional approach emphasizes restraint, attention to detail, and reverence for sound, qualities that allow the music to resonate across cultural and stylistic boundaries.
“Life, as a beautiful voyage, is what always brings me to compose at some point,” says Park Jiha
All Living Things is both grounded and ethereal, built from tradition yet unmistakably modern. By mapping an emotional and physical journey onto the cycle of life, Park Jiha offers a beautiful musical meditation on existence that invites personal reflection without prescribing a fixed interpretation.
Buy All Living Things.