Joshua Minsoo Kim

3 weeks ago | pitchfork.com | Joshua Minsoo Kim

James Krivchenia treats his solo career as a chance to let loose. “I can just do whatever I want,” he’s said of these endeavors, and it’s easy to believe him. As 1000000000s, he manipulated Taylor Swift songs into piss-taking ephemera. On 2022’s Blood Karaoke, he combined YouTube videos into mystery-bag collages. These works are a far cry from his collaborations, whether as the drummer for Big Thief or as a session musician for pop stars like Swift, Ed Sheeran, and Gracie Abrams.

1 month ago | pitchfork.com | Joshua Minsoo Kim

Every field recording is a virtual reality. Joshua Bonnetta understands that precept: The Canadian artist eschews “authentic” reproductions of any space, openly embracing subjectivity. “I abstract the sounds,” Bonnetta has said of his 2016 album Lago, “so that they would align more with my experience and the feeling of what I got from that place.” A personal perspective comes to the fore in his experimental documentaries, too.

2 months 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 months 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.

2 months 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.