Jang Kiha built his first solo album from a silent film he refused to edit

Jang Kiha’s first solo album 산산조각 (Shattered Pieces) opens not from a recording session but from a poem. That poem became a 33-minute silent film, produced with video team mogeosu, and the album’s nine tracks were written only once the film was complete, with not a single frame adjusted to suit the music that would follow.

The constraint is the point. In an era when most music reaches listeners as a snippet surfaced by an algorithm, Jang Kiha built a work that resists that logic at the structural level. “I wanted to make an album that has a reason why you have to listen to it from beginning to end,” he has said. The nine tracks of 산산조각 do not function as standalone hits designed for shuffle play; they are sequences shaped by visual cuts, by silences that belong to the screen, by tempo variations that the image, not the song, demanded.

The work arrives at a significant moment in Jang Kiha’s career. He fronted 장기하와 얼굴들 (Jang Kiha and the Faces), one of Korean independent music’s most influential bands, and remained a singular voice in that scene: dry, literary, fundamentally uninterested in the categories the industry finds convenient. 산산조각 is his first full-length as a solo artist, and it reads as a statement rather than a transition.

The film underlying the album traces two character archetypes, White Kiha and Black Kiha, through cycles of anxiety, loss, and the repetitive texture of daily life. The music follows them track by track. The compositions are not a film score in the conventional sense; they function as standalone pop music despite their visual origins. Listeners coming in without the film will hear something unusual: structures governed by an external logic they cannot see, rhythms that start and stop on cues that live somewhere outside the audio file.

The project was not unveiled quietly. A version of the film premiered at the 27th Jeonju International Film Festival, where it was praised as strange and experimental. An exclusive theatrical run followed at CGV cinemas before the album’s streaming release.

산산조각 is a work built for conditions that most listeners are unlikely to sustain on first encounter: full attention, full runtime, the film running alongside. Its value depends on a listener willing to sit with something shaped entirely by decisions made before the music existed. Whether that position is principled resistance to fragmented consumption or a test that the streaming environment is designed to fail is a question the album declines to answer.

산산조각 was released on September 9, with the full video music version available that evening on Jang Kiha’s official YouTube channel. A documentary series covering the album’s production is being released in instalments, and physical editions are available through Korean retailers.

Tags: music-en1, indie, Korean indie, 산산조각, 장기하