DOYEON KIM
You’d be hard-pressed to find an artist with a sound and vision more apt to claiming center-stage at this moment of global dystopia, than DoYeon Kim. Armed with an unlikely traditional Korean instrument (the gayageum, pronounced GA-ya-kum), flanked by three extraordinary improvisers (drummer Tyshawn Sorey, double-bassist Henry Fraser, and Mat Maneri on viola), radiating a brash, acoustic strategy that simultaneously invokes folk universalism and a No Wave battle-stance, the Brooklyn-based virtuoso will drop a volcanic sonic statement with grand humanist goals May 1, 2026 on TAO Forms. Wellspring, Kim’s debut as a bandleader, is a call for society to come together. She mingles Korean lullabies, unrelenting interactions between drums and strings, and pure instrumental expressions of musical self. At times, she sounds like she can halt armies. Knowing where our world is headed, it may soon have to.
How the Seoul, South Korea-born 34-year-old came to be the centuries-old zither’s leading (only?) practitioner of contemporary improvised music, reflects an expansive embrace of her own culture, her place in modern society, and her ascending recognition of music’s liberatory power. Wellspring is Kim’s open-hearted declaration of those complicated feelings. “This is the first time I open my hand to the world, a first greeting,” she says. “I wish people hearing this music [receive] energy and comfort. I want to be there with them.”
An only-child of two educators, her father is a lifelong player of the traditional janggu (a hand-drum). Kim grew up immersed in dance and piano lessons, but steered away from creative-career study by her parents who knew its hardships. Two events brought her back. One was Kim’s hobbyist embrace of the gayageum, a primary instrument in traditional Korean music, the way it “comforted” her, offering greater opportunity for self-expression. “Its direct plucking with my hand connected to the string, which I can bend, made me feel attached to the instrument,” she says, “that I can represent myself through the instrument.” The other event was a teenage trip to Canada on which Kim realized how—in those days before BTS, Bong Joon Ho and Squid Game had taken over the global zeigeist—Korean culture was unknown to the West. Her reaction was a desire to become an “ambassador,” before realizing she could play that part with the gayageum. Her parents relented and Kim went on to study the instrument with Yi Ji-Young, a living gayageum legend, earning the highest student awards.
Kim’s teachers at Seoul National University recognized that her roving musical mind—listening to Ligeti and Wagner, less interested in ancient repertoire than in speaking to the modern world—needed challenges. America beckoned, with the New England Conservatory offering a non-ethnomusicological pathway via its Contemporary Improvisation department. Kim’s initial reaction to her new surroundings was culture shock. To Kim’s ears, her colleagues’ self-revealing improvisations sounded like the noisy emissions of “cement, concrete and plastic culture.” It took some time to concede that maybe she was the one hiding her true self behind a mask formed by her homeland’s traditions. It set off a process of analyzing, absorbing, digesting, and, most of all, listening, under the guidance of NEC instructor and legendary guitarist Joe Morris. In came the methodologies of Ornette, Braxton and Derek Bailey, to name a few. The turn initiated a still-evolving relationship to playing: “Music is way bigger than me,” Kim says. “After the pandemic, I was no longer interested in talking about me. I wanted to find the reason I was born in this era, and how I can contribute to society.”
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