Goneway

We call the trace left by a moving point a line. The trace left by a moving line we call a plane, and the trace left by a moving plane, space. We can turn that dull explanation we heard at school into something a little more interesting. Could we also give a name to the trace left by moving space?

There may be various words to express the trace left by moving space, but the one most familiar to us is “world.” According to the definitions of line, plane and space we just looked at, we can also picture a three-dimensional space being pushed along the axis called time.

The trace left by passing time creates the past, and with the knowledge humanity has studied so far, the past can be neither changed nor reached. As the saying goes that there are no ifs in history, we hold only a single past.

A human cannot step directly outside the dimension they live in. But they can picture it in their head. The fact that the past is a single line does not constrain the imagination. The regret of “what if it had gone this way” grows in the gap between the imagined past and the real one, and crawls toward the present along the one and only timeline.

Turn the gaze the other way, and countless futures unfold before the point called the present. No one knows what will happen in the space fixed by a choice. And what is chosen once cannot be undone. Anxiety flies in from the future drawn that way, through imagination.

녹음’s [Goneway] is the story of a human who chooses their own path upon the world and, bearing regret, writes a personal history in the face of anxiety.

The lyrics revealed within the album focus on describing, in as much detail as possible, the emotions felt at one point in the time spent in America. If the world is the trace of space moving along time, then leaving a place can also be thought of as leaving the time you spent there right where it was.

If so, the farther the place you must leave and the longer the time you spent there, the more tender your gaze toward the past becomes. Because it becomes a part of you that you don’t know when you’ll meet again.

Because each track is segmented by point of view, they give the impression that a different speaker is talking each time; but in the end all those points lie on the single line of a personal history. So [Goneway] is a work that expresses affection for the time left behind in America and the emotions taxidermied within it.

At the same time, it is a clue that lets us glimpse what the author held most precious at the moment they looked back on their life in America. What was precious enough for 녹음 to preserve in sound can be gleaned through the elements embedded like Easter eggs throughout the lyrics and the wittily phrased track names. It is the everyday, the people who made the everyday bearable, and the love felt for them.

This aspect can be felt in more detail when you closely examine the sounds used in [Goneway]. If each track focused on closely depicting the emotion itself rather than the progress or change of events, the album as a whole organically wove clear sounds and smeared sounds together, along with a gentle warmth.

It sounds as if one of the incoming futures, at the point called the present, meets the past — transposed into sound. Thanks to this, the whole of [Goneway] evokes the strange sensation of listening to a photo album that gathers extreme long-exposure photographs.

Also, the photographs 녹음 shot with sound are utterly ordinary scenes. In “호수 앞에서 새벽 다섯시에 매일” (Every day at five a.m. in front of the lake), the loop breaks off and resumes as if chewing over the same worry; and in “들어올땐마음대로지만나갈때는” (You come in as you please, but on the way out), a piece that begins with guitar sounds scattered all over — as if scattering a head full of thoughts and returning to reality — abruptly finds its shape.

Each and every one is a thought or event people have probably experienced at least once. Through this, it is a pleasure to have quite detailed emotions summoned into the head.

We live forever on the line segment called the past. Since time cannot be turned back, a space that has become the past will remain the past forever. If you are happy now, our moment that has become the past will be fixed forever in a state of feeling joy. If you are sad now, our moment that has become the past will remain forever in sadness.

We must decide what to fill our time with. If you are someone pondering what kind of past to leave upon the world, 녹음’s [Goneway] might become an answer to that.