Joshua Minsoo Kim

2 weeks ago | letterboxd.com | Joshua Minsoo Kim

top 20 all time as of this exact moment, listed chronologically, made for this random zoomer discord. been increasingly invested in appreciating film as a “living” artform; all these works have stayed with me for various reasons and the way they linger in my brain is more valuable than anything else. i relate to marathon more than any other film i’ve ever seen. our body is increasingly the most important film of the decade.

2 weeks ago | pitchfork.com | Joshua Minsoo Kim

It starts with a bang. Then a barrage of DJ tags, sampled vocals, and drum rolls carry us into a sea of ambience. This is the Los Thuthanaka experience in summary: ceremonial but swaggy, cataclysmic but healing, unrefined but magnificent. And these are the paradoxes you are confronted with immediately upon hitting play: A dizzying reorientation to the possibility of what music can or should sound like.

1 month ago | pitchfork.com | Joshua Minsoo Kim

Success changed BLACKPINK forever, for better and worse. At the height of their popularity, the Korean girl group shifted their focus towards Western audiences, making diluted songs that felt ready-made for Kidz Bop. It was an honest mistake. For 30 years, K-pop acts rarely contended with the rubric of American pop music, whose stylistic conservatism thwarts K-pop’s compelling genre agnosticism.

1 month ago | pitchfork.com | Joshua Minsoo Kim

LISA wants you to believe she’s multifaceted. The Thai singer and rapper’s debut solo album is called Alter Ego, and if one takes her at her word, these 13 songs are meant to live up to that title. She presents different versions of herself, among them Vixi, a villain who drinks your tears; Roxi, a rock star who loves energy drinks; and Sunni, a girl who’s afraid of the dark.

2 months ago | pitchfork.com | Joshua Minsoo Kim

Eddie Chacon was in the studio when his life began anew. He was there at the request of Capitol Records to assist his labelmate, the late Charles Pettigrew, recording vocal takes that the latter would sing over. But when playing back the track, the engineer forgot to pull out Chacon’s voice and the two were heard together. “It gave you chills,” Chacon recently told Monocle, but his feelings were complicated.