Okkyung Lee’s Winter Solstice Mix Is a Funeral Song to 2020

Marking the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere, the winter solstice is a day that calls for a moment of calm and contemplation. For Okkyung Lee this is certainly the case. “My immediate response was to make some kind aural ritual to send off this year by fully embracing all the pain and heartbreak before we can start next year anew,” she says.

The South Korean cellist, respected by experimentalists and electronic music heads alike, is known for her singular musical language, built on contemporary cello and improvisational techniques. Her ecstatic compositions are the starting point for a holistic deconstruction of her instrument, peeling every imaginable note out of it and exposing its physicality and expressivity. Through such methods, Lee’s raw sounds range from disturbing to claustrophobic, appearing on labels like John Zorn’s Tzadik imprint and Stephen O’Malley of Sunn O)))’s Ideologic Organ.

Lee’s 2020 has been marked by personal upheavals and hardships, having lost her father at the beginning of the year and subsequently being marooned in South Korea after the funeral without her cello for the next six months during the country’s lockdown. This separation marked the longest period of time she has spent away from the instrument since 1993.  “It was kind of embarrassing trying to record after not touching it for so long. I got so depressed when I finally went back to New York in September that I didn’t touch the cello for another two months,“ she admits over email. Lee has since viewed the interruption as a reset, saying, “but I’m curious where this new connection will take me.”

Despite these obstacles, she reappeared in May with Yeo-Neun, a quietly radical record (featured in our Top 20 Records of 2020 list) that surprised her listeners once again with a melodic serenity she hasn’t explored since the release of her debut album Nihm. Yeo-Neun marks a sonic return to her classical training in film scoring and composition at the Berklee College of Music, but in her personal life, Lee has experienced a return as well, relocating from New York, where she spent the last 20 years, back to South Korea.

Her Winter Solstice Mix, a blend of traditional shamanic funeral music from Korea and placid yet quietly devastating piano melodies performed by Ella Fitzgerald, Bill Evans, and Nina Simone, is a testament to sitting with discomfort and pain in order to find something more hopeful and true on the other side.

Additional graphic design by Ekaterina Kachavina.

Published December 21, 2020. Words by Caroline Whiteley.