Helmut Lang As Seen By Jeremy Deller

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For the majority of her modeling career, Park has been captured as platinum blonde. Now, Park who was previous based in New York, has been spending time in Los Angeles, utilizing free time between jobs to work on her forthcoming album. Her voice has the free, yet looming, quality of Julee Cruise, a muse she cites enthusiastically. Park’s hair is now black, and she’s diverting the course of her creative life in a true Lynchian act of self-possession. Here, she speaks with friend and artist Rachel Rose about discovering and uncovering sounds in unlikely places, chasing cinematic thrills, and the rare opportunity of merging different personas. The two met nearly a decade ago through Rose’s now-husband and artist Ian Cheng, around the time Ian was working on early demos with Park. Catching up from her LA home, Park sits in the afternoon light, Zooming into Rose’s New York evening.

Rachel Rose – How’s your day been?

Soo Joo Park – I woke up really early because I'm a little jet-lagged and I had a flurry of emails — fires to put out. I played around on the keyboard for a little bit – I'm teaching myself how to play the piano again, without any guidance. I learned classical piano when I was young. I find it really fun to just tinker around with sounds, and I just record stuff on Voice Notes. I drank way too much coffee, walked my friend's dog around the reservoir, went to lunch, unpacked all my stuff, and now I'm talking to you.

Are you an autodidact?

I taught myself how to use Photoshop, and I guess I'm a self-taught vocalist. I've had a few vocal lessons recently, like right before the December Chanel performance. I like learning things on my own. It can be really frustrating, and it's a little bit hard to get started, but I like doing things at my own pace, and I like discovering my own methods.

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What were you thinking about before you began making music?

I grew up singing in choir and going to church on Sundays with my family. My mom was in the church choir, and she would come home humming, so I would harmonize with her while she was doing the dishes. Very domestic. My parents had some CDs of music from the 60s and 70s. One of them was a compilation of The Mamas & The Papas, and I remember listening to certain tracks — “Dream a Little Dream of Me” and “Midnight Voyage” on repeat. In my teen years I started developing interest in the arts and wanting to be a participant in it, I started becoming extremely hungry for knowledge, regardless of genres or styles. After I graduated college, I had a full-time job in San Francisco doing graphic design, and then I started modeling. At first, modeling was quite slow, so I filled my whole day with watching movies and listening to music. I got really into shoegaze and witch house, which I think encapsulates the soft yet sinister, raw feelings I had at that moment. Then I watched Mulholland Drive. I was clutching seeing Rebekah Del Rio's performance of Roy Orbison's “Crying,” in Spanish. It was so entrancing. It was around then I thought, maybe I want to try to pout some of my emotions into making tracks and singing.

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I found when I was listening to some of the tracks on your album, that your voice feels like it is gliding on water. It's floating right above, and sometimes will duck down and submerge into sound and then come back up. It feels like the water is the electronics. I was thinking about how much that movement feels like you, or how much that movement feels like you're channeling something else. Is it a part of yourself that you don't otherwise get to touch or see? 

I reference water a lot, actually. Getting my start in the choir, I’ve always wanted to use my voice as an element of an ensemble. Obviously, I metaphorize nature in my lyrics as well, and a lot of things I write about are purely personal. But at the end of the day, what really carries me is melodic harmony and how things make you feel.

There are these moments where it feels like it shifts into banger energy, and then feels totally calm. Are you interested in dance music at all? How does this ethereal, natural, choral aspect of what you're doing also push up against pop or dance? 

I've always loved the idea of opposites cooling each other off. So, just because something glides or sounds very airy, it doesn't mean it can’t have that intensity. I love the push and pull. I like to surprise people, fuck up, and find happy accidents. I find those moments a lot more exciting than when things are what you expect.

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I've always journaled, so I had a lot of materials that I'd written down before I was able to really get started with studio time. You never know what you're going to get when you walk into a studio, which is the excitement. I usually work with a producer, and we sit down for the first 30 minutes, just bantering and talking shit. Once we start building things, we're looking for something exciting to happen. It becomes about sifting through a lot of things that are floating in the air, and going with that flow to see how we can play it out. We usually start arranging a chord or some kind of melodic thing, and then I go and start humming some melodies. Sometimes if I'm humming, it's almost like rambles of pronunciation or sounds, and then those become part of the lyric. The lyrics don't have to have meaning, but I do like having some kind of depth. It's like a secret message for myself, if anything.

I love the idea that the words emerge from sounds, rather than the inverse. Returning back to something else you were saying in the beginning about your history with music, I was wondering if you could speak further into your cinematic experience with sound. Is that still influencing you? Are you still finding music through films?

I've always been obsessed with the color palettes in film stills and soundtracks. The cinematic experience, for me, is the whole thing. A good film absorbs into your skin. I used to love watching French New Wave films, and the song that I'm constantly playing in my head is “Theme de Camille” from Jean Luc Godard’s Contempt. Do you know it?

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I can't believe we’ve never talked about this. I used it as the opening of a whole film I made. 

I think about that song pretty much every day. As I'm doing stuff around the house, sometimes I live it out like I’m in a movie, playing certain soundtracks in my head — does this sound delusional? [Laughs] Have you ever watched Thumbsucker?

No. 

It's a really beautiful coming-of-age story. It's a Mike Mills film, and there's a song called “Thirteen” in it. Do you know this song?

No, but I want to know now. 

It's a 70s song by the band Big Star. Any time I’m feeling love, especially at night time, I think of that song. I'm really drawn to the warm crackle feeling of the 70s, it evokes nostalgia for a time I don’t personally know but like to imagine. But I also love futuristic and abstract electronic sounds. I'm always trying to merge those things. But recently, I watched Meet Joe Black while I was in Europe last week because it was one of those films that was available on Netflix. The track at the climax of the movie, called “Someone Else” is really ... It's fucking strange. The progression of the chords are very unexpected and etherial. I think about that sound a lot as well. Thomas Newman did the soundtrack.

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Okay, I'm going to watch it tonight. Do you keep specific music archive journals – especially when you're on the road – dedicated to jotting down musical inspiration and ideas?

No. I wish I was more organized, but I'm a little bit of a chaotic organizer. I like things to be orderly, but I'm not too precious about anything. And I can’t seem to have too many categorizations and compartments either, so it’s better to have it all listed in one place. It’s just in my Notes app. Everything is in my notes, like my daily to-dos and reminders, and then songs that I want to listen to again, or songs that I want to blend when I'm DJing. It's like my brain.

When you performed with Oneohtrix Point Never for Chanel, it was this really crazy moment to see, because it was like two identities becoming one. It feels rare for anyone to have that moment. Walking out one way and leaving the stage another way. What did it feel like to move between those states?

The persona I take on as a model can be transmutable to my persona on stage. I rehearsed and monitored my performance for two weeks, every day, for hours. I enjoyed it, and I hadn't worked so intently or dedicated so much of my time into work in a while. Modeling, by now, has just become like breathing. I've just done it for a long time, and I've spent hours doing it, so now, it's like second nature. I have to get to that stage with singing and performing. The most tense moment was timing, because they really timed it so tight, because during the rehearsal, there was more time left in between my runway walk and performance.

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It felt like this moment in which these two parts of you were really beaming together. 

The last time I performed on stage was when I was in high school. When I first signed up for it, I was very nonchalant about it. And then once it registered in my head that I had to perform live in front of an entire audience that knew me as “Soo Joo the model,” I started having a little bit of a panic attack. But I had time to prepare, and I did have a really amazing crew to back me up. Oneohtrix Point Never, Michel Gaubert, Ryan Aguilar, and my friend Megan, who's in the band Desire.

When I came to visit you in LA and heard your demos, it felt so you, and I couldn't believe it. I remember just being in awe of how much you had made in such a quick amount of time. It felt like this thing that had just been holed up inside of you. All of a sudden, it was just pouring out, and with such expansive production, at such a quick pace. I couldn't believe it. Yeah. I felt totally inspired by that, by your energy, and sort of, like, a calm force into this new direction. 

Thank you. That was the phase when I was super, super green, and I was so excited about everything. And then as time has passed, I'm realizing now that music is a wonderful process, but the reality is that there's politics involved. It's just like any other crossbreed of art and commerce, I think. But I'm being patient, and I think things are still going to work out. I’m going to release some EPs soon. I haven't been so happy in a long time, I think.

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