CHI-DA | project philosophy
We find ourselves crashing into the world. We break out of mom’s body to be born, push feet hard against the ground to run, or bump into an old friend on the way home. We observe an international conflict over a piece of land whether it sees a peaceful resolution or only one winner over the land, hear note C and note G collide and as vibrating together create beats, or give rapturous applause with clapping hands. To become expressed outwardly in any tangible, visual, audible and detectible forms that can be located in the time-space of the world that we humans live in, the points of contact are inevitable.
Two objects that meet must have a certain direction of movement and a speed, which carries kinetic energy. When the meeting is carried out with high speed, it becomes ‘crash’. Gentle meeting of those two objects would be simply a ‘touch’. In the realm of chemistry, a chemical reaction shows an intense activity of atoms. Heat is the result of those atoms “fighting against” each other, or crashing into each other to re-organize its order, thus to create a new atomic structure.
Chi-da, a verb in Korean that translates into “hit”, creates multitude of layers in its play in music makings. And Chi-Da project intentionally sets music crashing into a particular time-space, which is, in nature, not repeatable. Vibratory resonance occurs within a certain space-time, with particular agents, or performers in relation with their own instruments or voice, that produce sonic phenomena, which travel and resonate with and in the space of performance and the bodies and souls of the audience who are present in it. Whether an episode of Chi-da is conducted successfully or not would depend on the level of commitment of everyone in the presence of the concert and would be determined by the level of communication created among all.
Is Chi-Da an improvisatory music project? In the most broadened sense, an intentional process of composition starts with planning such as finding a venue, setting a date and time and determining the performer, etc. Thus, it is determined by the degrees of improvisational and compositional components. So, the elements of improvisation and composition, if posed in the polarity, are only variable in different degrees in Chi-Da project. The bottom line is that Chi-Da is notably not a re-hearing of conventionally written out composition in live concert. But whether the project is widely different from that type of musical practice is open for discussion and further investigation.