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Spiked Goggles

and

Antipsychotics

Live at Lucerne Festival 2025, by IEMA Ensemble (now Chroma Kollektiv) with Leonard David Wacker (World Premiere, Aug.24.2024)

illustration for "Spiked Goggles and Antipsychotics" by Junyoung Hyeong, 2025

Program notes

"The reminiscences of the boys with spiked goggles, the very ones who have been functioning on antipsychotics led me to the composition of this piece.

This piece is based on several sketches for popular music genres like Bebop, New-age, Pop, and Techno. They are stitched together to make them function like one collective organism, but within the confinement of pre-made timeframe.

Lots of mediocre things consist this piece. Obsessions for aural complexity, some songs from my old playlist, yearning for grooves and gratuitous nostalgia etc. But the piece also includes multiple references of my favorite composers - to point where I can't tell whether the piece is theirs or mine. How can I escape from their shadows? And how much of their music consist me? These were the questions I asked myself during the process of composing this piece. It's a retrospect of my life and work, and also my taste and preferences.

The question of how to be free - free from the boundary of conventions that were set to make things certainly work, were the starting point of the piece. Even though this piece uses all the skills I obtained throughout my life, I wish to go somewhere else - somewhere nice, hopefully.

This piece is dedicated to my friends: Popsick, Mello, and the late Juan (may he rest in peace.)"

(revised version of the program note, August, 2025)

Commentary

An attempt at liberation, but ultimately was a closure to something I've been persisting although failed in fully escaping it. This piece took the longest to write, 4 months in total. The purpose of this piece was a remembrance of a time when music just by itself could be enjoyed in whole - both the process and result, and the memories of my friends who I was collaborating for a long time.

Juan passed away in 2024, after his long-lasting suffering which prevented him from doing everything that he used to enjoy - guitar, motorbikes, and everything. This was the 3rd time where a person around me died of their own hands, and I couldn't even make it to the funeral. So I felt a need to write a memorial piece, but not in a conventional way. He would not want us to shed tears, but to carry on.

When I started working on the piece, I almost lost all the motivation to write this piece, experiencing a steady decline in myself, from all those years of neglect and lack of discipline. And the people around me were experiencing all the same. Stuck within themselves, revolving around the eternal treadmill to slowly erode away. I realized I was not that different, so I needed to look back on what I used to do until now. Pusing them to extreme to be ready to break free from them. In a way it feels strange that everything turned out well.

Hanurij once said that this is same to my "FACILEMENT ÉCOUTABLE" series in many ways, and I agree. This is the final destination of the aesthetics and techniques of "FACILEMENT ÉCOUTABLE", but with more cumulative knowledge and clearer direction of what to do.

I wanted this to negate the obsession that have been with me for years, obsession of good things. But in a way this was not "bad" (in a conventional sense anyways). The new necessity arises, for me to re-define what I consider "good" in the first place. This piece is consisted of all the things I like - violent and angry things, messy things, cheesy things, extreme contrasts and things that are naive and happy. All mediocre and superficial, but all quite meaningful to me.

Chart for sections, subsections, and tempi for the piece, with durations and events that occur in it.

Process

Like always, the form and the meters were pre-determined, and what events should occur within certain duration were set too. In this kind of writing, every sound should be enslaved within the time-frame. We have to exploit them to set a compositional intentions straight and clear, and I believe that gives a form its structure, and the structure its function. Everything works together to consist something colorful and messy, in which may seem impulsive but in reality very orderly and intentional.

Then the intuitions and impulses come through, as the writing process depends almost entirely on intuitions and inner hearing. Of course, the web or net of tones or harmonic progressions are set before taking another step, like deciding where to visit or eat next while on the trip. It's a proper fun, and it is like a negotiation process between the past me and present me.

Can the audience perceive all these forms and proportions? No. But do they make difference? I think so. When structural functions of each sections are clear, it naturally forms a narrative (though it's hardly lingual).

List of sections

Mediocre saturation
Loops 1
Premature recapitulation
Transition 1
Anticlimax 1
Interlude 1
A Good New-Age Music
Grooves 1
Obligatory Climax 1 - Codetta 1
Loops 2
Interlude 2
Transition 2
Codetta 2 - Chorale
Bebop & Disclaimer
Transition 3
Viola Concertino
Grooves 2
Obligatory Climax 2
Anticlimax 2
Chant
Fleeting nostalgia
Stairway to somewhere nice
Transition 4
Coda

There are 24 resulting sections, linked in many ways to each other. For example, the first section, "Mediocre saturation" is a direct derivative, or a prototype for the 22nd section "Stairway to somewhere nice", consisted of the same elements in a different tonal environment.

The list were color-coded for categorizing the functions, characters, and their relationship to the other sections.

Even though the music was divided in 10 larger sections, the capricious nature of the music let to it being divided more finely.

Functions of the sections are solidified with their titles, like Interludes, Transitions, Codettas, and the final Coda. Interludes and transitions denote to their unimportant or liminal nature, leading music to somewhere, and codetta can be considered like a small wrap-up for a larger section. Purple-marked sections like Bebop & Disclaimer, Viola Concertino or Coda are unrelated to the other sections, breaking them off from the flows of the music. All these characteristics make them seem menial, but they are very important in bonding the music together in place.

Degrees of appropriations

Appropriation takes a big role in my music in general, and those can be categorized with Quotation (75~90% sim.) - Citation (50~74%) - Reference (25~40%) - Implication (10~24%) as benchmarks. The contents of them can be intra-musical or extra-musical at the same time, pointing at a music or a cultural phenomenon.

The piece takes a lot from various musical and extramusical sources around me in current times. These all capture things that I like, some of them to the point I cannot tell if they are good for me or not.

Section 14, Bebop & Disclaimer uses three pieces from Beat Furrer (Presto, Still, and Ira-Arca) and the first SACHER chord from Dérive 1 by Pierre Boulez in form of quotations (or references). Furrer's music affected me to the point I cannot tell whether my music is totally mine or his. This is kind of poking fun at that situation, quoting and juxtaposing his music directly on the announcement, accompanied with a reference of Negligible-Music 1 by Hyunmin Kim, adding a tv-show-like atmosphere to it.

Another earlier section, Section 7, A Good New-Age Music (following the line "Here comes a good new-age music!" from a contrabass player) refers to a fragment of an easy-listening piece composed (for a joke) by Hyunmin Kim. This kind of easy-listening music is mis-labeled as a new-age music or a classical music (just because they mainly use piano), and a certain kind of craze or snobbism around this kind of music made me start FACILEMENT ÉCOUTABLE series in the first place. This puts this melodic-harmonic materials in a Webern-like pointilistic (textural) environment, undermining their function to be mindlessly comfortable. Section 21, Fleeting Nostalgia is in direct link with A Good New-Age Music, but with different harmonies.

Section 5 and 19, Anticlimax 1 and 2 refers to a certain types of Japanese anime-music, in which they use a lot of added notes and tensions on their harmony - probably originated from their traditional-ritualistic chords meant to be played on shō. Hisaishi Joe or Takashi Yoshimatsu has been an archetype of this kind of music for me, but academically they are almost always frowned upon. This kind of denial makes me think: why are this kind of music considered to be bad, when they obviously require a lot of experiences and intuition for the culture. I put them in a place for a climactic moments, where conventionally, has to be an ecstatic and satisfying explosion. It perfectly negates the function of a "drop" or "chorus" in electric dance music, where the explosion should satisfy the people who were being elated to the rising nature of the transition before.

Section 22, Stairway to somewhere nice is an implication to my earlier electronic piece, Stairway to nowhere, which was released alongside with the tracks made with my friend POPXICK in his 1st album No Boundaries. I wanted an ecstatic, exuberant end to the piece with an unadulterated joy, where we can celebrate for all we've done and our loved ones' lives. It was the first-ever section to be actually written after setting all the plans for the piece and it takes inspirations from all the D&B and Breakcore I've been listening to.

In conclusion and hindsight

This was by far the piece that took the most effort in my lifetime. It's probably the hardest one to play but it's already played twice by now, and it will be played more in the future (as of September 2025).

About the texts in the piece, everyone was uncertain about the uses of spoken words and I had to argue about some of them during the rehearsals. Some were meant to stick out, some were meant to stay in the shadows. I wanted to use them just as another layer of sound like a sauce in a sandwich, but the implicative nature of the language blocks that. Hanurij suggested that there would be a better way of using them, but I do not have a single clue how to make that work.

In the end I am quite happy that I brought closure to FACILEMENT ÉCOUTABLE series with this one, but I am now unsure where I should head next. I am scared, and I wish there are no perils ahead of me. But as this came out, it would take a lot of effort to surpass it.

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