Our Town: Jazz Fusion, Funky Pop & Bossa Gayo Tracks from Dong-A Records

Light In The Attic has released a collection of forgotten East Asian pop tracks on compilation album ‘Our Town: Jazz Fusion, Funky Pop & Bossa Gayo Tracks from Dong-A Records’. After recent popular releases ‘Pacific Breeze’ and ‘Kankyo Ongaku’, each of which focused on a different genre of popular ‘80s Japanese music, ‘Our Town’ is the label’s first release to focus on the music of South Korea.

‘Our Town’ focuses on the “gayo” music that was popular in South Korea in the early ‘90s. Like its Japanese counterpart “city pop”, gayo music fuses the sounds of polyphonic synthesisers, funk jazz bass and saxophones to create a laid back but melodic pop sound. Dong-A Records, a Seoul-based, artist-led label, are one of the key tastemakers of the genre, which enjoyed a heyday between 1989 and 1993 – this record collates some of the label’s top releases from that period.

Highlights include Bitgwa Sogeum’s ‘The Fairy of Shampoo’, a dewy-eyed pop ballad, and Kona’s ‘The End of Summer’, a summery bop built around a bouncing bass line. Across eight further tracks, the record provides an exotic and nostalgic journey through a subgenre otherwise little-known to Western ears. 

‘Our Town: Jazz Fusion, Funky Pop & Bossa Gayo Tracks from Dong-A Records‘ was released in the UK on March 20th, 2020 via Light In The Attic.