Ten years in the past, Minhwi Lee carried out on South Korean public tv with the freak-folk band Mukimukimanmansu, straining her voice as her bandmate Muki destroyed a standard janggu drum with a hatchet and supplied its items to a shocked studio viewers. Since then, the songwriter and composer has channeled her artistic hearth into movie scores, a jazz trio, and the sludge metallic band Gawthrop, for which she often performs bass. Her 2016 solo debut, Borrowed Tongue, mixed chamber folks orchestration with a unfastened narrative across the limits of communication, profitable the Korean Music Award for Finest People Album. Impressed by the poet Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in “Dicteé,” she sang in Korean, “Father, I misplaced my tongue final evening/I can’t even say these phrases as a result of my mouth is empty.”

Recorded after transferring again to Seoul in 2019, Hometown to Come, meditates on a distinct sort of absence. Accompanied by fingerpicked guitar and orchestral sweeps, Lee’s lyrics resemble the poetry of Kim Hyesoon, refiguring feelings into impressionistic parables. Each artists ruminate on the theme of phantom ache: The hometown that Lee remembers looks like an amputated limb that retains sensation, without delay a “place that disappeared way back” and a spot the place she’s already arrived.

Usually the emotional payoff rests on lyrical ruptures which invert unhappiness to disclose heat. Her language works within the house between opposites: “I discover myself pondering of your smile, as you requested about grief/I discover myself pondering of your grief, as you looked for a smile,” she sings in Korean, mendacity in her room alone at evening. Resolving the stress—between keys and guitar, consolation and unease—she sends us off with a “goodbye” (“annyeong”). However each “goodbye” may also be a greeting: Lee makes use of the Korean language to complicate the binaries between escape and pursuit, assembly and separation, unhappiness and pleasure that situation our concepts of residence.

Lee’s preparations listed here are a few of her most formidable. On some tracks, there’s a 19-person orchestra that brings her songwriting into the realm of French singers like Françoise Hardy; on others, her classical guitar arpeggios purchase a medieval high quality amid Jeseok Jedol Kang’s flute melodies. On “Returning,” she’s accompanied by saxophonist Kim Oki, a prolific collaborator in Seoul’s music scene, who brings out the jazz sensibilities in her songwriting. Lee maintains the melancholy of her early strummy, campfire fare, however she makes use of the fuller instrumentation to tease out an emotional ambivalence. Hearken to how the timbral and melodic claustrophobia of flute and guitar in “Blue Flower” unfolds to disclose a swell of strings on the bass’ mild steerage, like a projector switching to a large 16:9 firstly of a movie screening. And the bass solo that ushers in “The Station” is pure noir, with rhythmic white noise that hardly obscures the sound of a rushing prepare.