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When I'm going to write a review, I usually put the music on my Mp3 player so I can listen to it on my way to and from work. The first day I picked up this album – Western Pansori, by Cyril Morin – I was sitting on the train at 6 AM. I put in my earbuds, and a small voice whispered “Don’t be worried…you will succeed…you will be famous”. 

This little ghostly pep talk certainly freaked me out. At that or any hour of the morning, having little voices inside my head is a fairly upsetting thing. But then the track relaxed into a mildly cloying beat with a really beautiful flute quotation from Debussy’s Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune. And my morning commute went from an everyday event to a complete sensory experience. 

The album is extremely diverse – moving from tracks like “Don’t be Worried” to much melancholy pieces like “Stranger Days” which pulls in howling winds and sliding strings to create a darker ambience. The classical influences are clear, both in the quotations like the Debussy and the sense of complete orchestration that flows throughout the album, but are solidly supported by the electronic beats.  

There are also a few vocal tracks, most of which feature crooning Indian melodies, and one unfortunate ballad, “Lean on Me”, that sticks out like a sore thumb among the nebulous and open sound that the rest of the album creates.

Morin is best known as a film composer, and this album has the same basic effect. Western Pansori is an eclectic and beautiful album, filled with poignant and disturbing moments, but it does seem to work better when placed in a context. It is a film score with no film – so the listener has to create their own. Even one as mundane as a morning metro ride.

In this age of the iPod, it seems like everyone is plugged in – looking around on the metro, half of the ears are filled with those innocuous white buttons. Everyone is walking through life with their own personal soundtrack. I wonder what their little voices were telling them?

Four out of five Pansori's (a type korean song that tells a story)