Presence of Attention: Seoul Psychedelia with John Hwang

In the late 1960s and early '70s for a few short years, Seoul was one of the most exciting places in the world to hear music — and almost no one outside Korea knew. Around the godfather of Korean rock, Shin Joong Hyun, who fused Western psych and funk with Korean folk melody into a sound that existed nowhere else on earth. Shin was its architect — he wrote and produced across the whole scene, from raw garage bands to the soul singers who scored its biggest hits.

Then it was taken away. In the mid-1970s, a government crackdown swept through the scene — arrests, blacklists, careers ended — and much of this music became rare precisely because it was suppressed.

This session brings that world back into a room, on vinyl, for an evening. We'll move from the sound's creation, through its rawest and most beautiful expressions, to the silence that followed — with the history behind each record told as we go. The records you'll hear are hard to find for a reason. Come join me for a rare chance to sit with them the way they were meant to be heard.

Presented by John Hwang a music curator and the voice of @imjohnhwang, known for pairing deep cuts with the stories that make them matter. He builds listening experiences that treat attention as the medium.

John Hwang is a New York–based music curator and the voice of @imjohnhwang, a channel devoted to the stories behind the records — soul, jazz, and the music of Korea and Japan. His live listening sessions, held under the Presence of Attention banner, treat deep listening as a practice: pairing rare and beautiful records with the histories that made them, played on vinyl, in rooms built to reveal what usually goes unheard.