just like any other day (어느날) : background music for your mundane activities

Okkyung Lee returns to Shelter Press with Just Like Any Other Day (어느날): Background Music For Your Mundane Activities, a deeply intimate body of recordings at the juncture of ambient music, minimalism, and the baroque. This album stands as a radical intervention with what experimental music can be, and the place that organisations of sound occupy in our lives.

Just Like Any Other Day (어느날) belongs to a broadening shift in Lee’s approach to composing that aligns with her return to her native South Korea. Infused with a deep reengagement with her own culture and relationship to memory, it is equally a response to critical challenges provoked by significant life changes.

Worked on in isolation over the course of four years, the album’s nine pieces challenge the traditional notions of experimental music. Lee's inquiry into the utility of music itself led her to create music that is intended to provoke a relationship to experimental music beyond its normative expectations.

For the first time, the music of Just Like Any Other Day (어느날) sees Lee leaving the cello entirely behind. Created at home on keyboard, computer, and an inexpensive cassette recorder, this album presents a remarkable form of ambient music that becomes its own environment to be occupied.

Just Like Any Other Day (어느날) represents a radical reconfiguration of experiential music, stripped to its bare essence in defiance of widely presumed aesthetic signifiers. This immersive body of intimate recordings not only reveals new dimensions of Lee’s range as an artist but also offers a new perspective on how we might regard and occupy music itself: an ambience to be lived and felt like a second skin.