Experimental music is the opposite of pop music. This statement is of course utter nonsense: ask Brian Eno, ask The Beatles, ask Holger Czukay. Well, some of those people aren’t available for comment, so I will answer on their behalf. Pop music is by its very nature experimental.
But not K-pop, right? Right?
Last year, TripleS put out a twenty-four(24!)-member iteration of their shifting girl group for “Girls Never Die”. It’s the closest we’ll get to Thomas Tallis‘s “Spem In Alium” as K-pop. Meanwhile the rapper RM, leader of the insanely successful BTS, released a solo album that in its eclectic stride took in cutting edge jazz (Domi and JD Beck) and Fela Kuti-inspired afrobeat as unflinching parts and parcels of its constantly shifting chimaera.
In their last three years, NMIXX have been operating as an experimental K-pop act since their inception. Their structure is entire conventional for the form: six girls who came up through the training system with exceptional abilities in both vocal and dance. They are managed by Park Jin-young’s JYP Entertainment. A thoroughly glass-fronted company as one might expect from an older generation South Korean singer-songwriter who made it huge.
Last year, with the two EPs, Fe3O4: Break and Fe3O4: Stick Out, they really hit their stride. The previous EP, Expérgo, had simplified the approach with total bangers like “Love Me Like This” and “Young, Dumb, Stupid”, which effortlessly incorporated melodic motifs from “Frère Jacques” (yes, the nursery rhyme!), into the mix, to more lucidly communicate their “mix-pop” approach to the audience.
However, by the time that the early 2024 EP Break hit the ground it became apparent that “Run For Roses” was pushing them into barndance prog rock territory, and the next EP would only get more audacious: “See That?”, with lyrics written by Mudd The Student and Omega Sapiens of “multi-national alternative K-pop group” Balming Tiger, is as close as we will get to Amon Düül II‘s “Archangel’s Thunderbird” in this century.So perhaps we might hope for great things in their first EP of 2025?
“Know About Me” that follows is comparatively audience-friendly. This is not to say that the arrangement and production are anything short of breath-taking, but “Slingshot (<★)” does nothing short of throwing us into the sea to see whether we drown. Reference points in rave house and ratchet miss the point. Harmonically this thing is fucking out to lunch, and the line distribution is something that you would not want to give to anyone who isn’t accustomed to performing György Ligeti on a professional level.
Unlike the experimental music that we customarily stroke our chins to, most of this EP barely peeks over the three-minute mark. We get six tracks totalling seventeen minutes, but so many details, feints and false alleys that open into exploratory vistas. How do they expect an audience of teenage girls to follow the album closer “Ocean” that ostensibly plays out in waltz time, throwing out unexpected melodic turns that wouldn’t be out of place in one of those albums where The Beatles were being “difficult”? Well, because teenage girls who have grown up with demanding material, and who demand material that challenges them, might just be able to take this in their stride.Taking their audience seriously is the business of whoever is behind this operation. And increasingly that audience isn’t just the rhetorically clumsy set of teenage girls imagined in the previous paragraph.
Do yourself a favour and take a leaf out of George Michael‘s book and listen without prejudice. NMIXX are pushing the boundaries, and you don’t want to be the last person to realise that.– iotar-
