A bowed haegeum wailing over a wall of downtuned guitar is not a sound South Korea has much use for on its charts, and Jambinai have never much minded.
The trio at the centre of the band met in 2009 as students of traditional music at the Korea National University of Arts in Seoul: Lee Il-woo on guitar, piri and taepyeongso, Kim Bo-mi on haegeum, Sim Eun-yong on geomungo. A bassist and drummer, Yu Byeong-koo and Choi Jae-hyuk, later filled the group out to five. Where a generation of Korean modernists had folded gugak into jazz or Western classical form, Jambinai pointed their instruments at metal and post-rock instead, genres built to hold a drone or a slide without smoothing it into something more polite. It puts them nearer the slow-building maximalism of Godspeed You! Black Emperor than anything on a K-pop chart, played on instruments that predate the electric guitar by several centuries.
Lee, the band's chief songwriter, has said the group refuses to call what it plays gugak at all, since what they do, in his words, is simply music, and that Jambinai are darker than the traditional bands around them. That darkness has carried across four releases: the self-titled EP of 2010, Différance in 2012, which won Best Crossover Album at that year's Korean Music Awards, and A Hermitage in 2016, the record that took them to Bella Union and, that August, to the Rudolstadt-Festival stage in Germany.
Then came the Winter Olympics.
In February 2018, members of Jambinai played in the geomungo orchestra at the closing ceremony in Pyeongchang, a strange, brief brush with a global audience that had nothing to do with the underground rooms they usually filled.
ONDA, released on Bella Union in June the following year, is the sound of a band absorbing that exposure without softening for it. The title is a small pun: 온다 means "it comes" in Korean, onda is "wave" in Spanish. Across eight tracks and fifty minutes it is grander and more patient than its predecessors, the thirteen-minute "In the Woods" the clearest sign of a band no longer in a hurry. "Square Wave", pre-released the year before, gives Kim Bo-mi's vocal its most exposed showcase yet, her voice threading through dual guitar and geomungo lines while the haegeum arcs overhead like something burning out. The record won Best Rock Album and Best Rock Song at the 2020 Korean Music Awards.
Three years on, the four-track Apparition EP made room for the saenghwang, a Korean mouth organ, widening the palette again rather than repeating ONDA's grand scale. It remains, for now, the most recent word from a band that started out being told their instruments belonged in a museum.
