ADG7 make party music with instruments most party bands would consider a joke: no guitars, no synthesisers, just gayageum, piri, saenghwang and daegeum, the tools of Korean court and folk music for centuries, pushed until they behave like a rhythm section. The result is Such Is Life, a nine-track record built almost entirely from that contradiction.
The band's full name is Ak Dan Gwang Chil, chosen when they formed in 2015 out of the remnants of the gugak ensemble Jeong Ga Ak Hoe. Gwang refers to national liberation, chil to the number seven; the group came together in the year of the 70th anniversary of Korea's liberation from Japanese colonial rule. Nine members now make up the lineup, three of them singers, the rest playing instruments that trained conservatory musicians spend a lifetime mastering and that ADG7 uses to write songs you can dance to.
ADG7's leader, bamboo-flute player Kim Hyunsoo, is unambiguous about the method. "Instead of trying to extract something that already fits pop music, we focus on understanding what makes pop work and then building forms and sounds that align with it," she has said. That is a more radical statement than it sounds: it means the traditional instruments aren't decoration on top of a pop song, they are the pop song.
What they are drawing on runs deeper than folk revivalism.
ADG7's sound is rooted in gut, the shamanic ritual music of Korea, and in minyo, the folk songs of Hwanghae Province, a region now on the North Korean side of the border and largely inaccessible to musicians in the South. Kim has described the pull of that ritual tradition as a kind of immersion, a sense of being drawn deeper into a spiritual world that she compares directly to what happens on a modern stage. On Such Is Life that comparison holds up: the jubilant clatter of Whatever and the more ominous churn of Hee Hee both operate less like songs to be appreciated at a distance and more like states to be pulled into.
The band earned the Sori Frontier Award at the Jeonju International Sori Festival in 2017 and was named best group at the following year's KBS Korean Traditional Music Awards, recognition from an industry built around exactly the instruments ADG7 refuses to treat as museum pieces. By 2019 they were playing WOMEX, the trade fair where the world music industry does its shopping, putting the sound that would become Such Is Life in front of programmers who had never had a reason to think of Hwanghae Province folk song as club music. On this record, released the following year, they gave them one.
