LEENALCHI

Seating is limited. Reserve your seat in advance to pick where you sit ($6 fee per seat). Join the standby line for remaining seats on the day of the concert, free of charge.

Leenalchi is a seven-piece band from Seoul that draws on the folk storytelling tradition of pansori and will remind you of Talking Heads. After releasing their most recent album, Here Comes That Crow, and supporting Japanese Breakfast, the band will perform in the Meyer Auditorium as part of their first-ever North American tour.

About Pansori
The music of Leenalchi is taken from pansori, a traditional Korean style of musical storytelling often compared to opera. Rooted in shamanism and developed in the seventeenth century during the Joseon dynasty, pansori tells epic tales of love, virtue, sorrow, and dragon kings.

As part of their training, pansori singers are required to spend time singing next to a waterfall, tasked to carefully observe and mimic the sonic nuances of water. The Korean language is full of onomatopoeias. The repetition in these words create their own rhythmic unit, each word functioning like a tiny song: kwal-kwal (콸콸) is the sound of a running stream; gaegul-gaegul (개굴개굴) goes the frog; and for mimetic words, mikkeul-maekkeul (미끌매끌) is a slippery floor and sol-sol (솔솔) is a kind of gentle and subtle slowness.

About Leenalchi
As if reverberating in our ears from a spiritual plane, the sounds emitting from Leenalchi’s singers are transcendent. Their lineup, as singular as their sound, features two bassists, drums, keys, no guitar, and four singers.

The psychedelic riffs found in Leenalchi’s songs are courtesy of Jang, the band’s enigmatic leader, who looms large in the country’s small but dedicated indie music scene. The band’s creator and visionary, bassist Young Gyu Jang, is also behind several beloved horror soundtracks and the now-disbanded iconic art band SsingSsing, which Tiny Desk’s Bob Boilen described as “one of my most memorable Tiny Desk Concerts of all time.“ Jang’s work with pansori began in 2007, after composing for choreographer Ahn Eun-Me’s piece “Bari.“ With musicians from that project, Jang went on to form groups such as BIBING, SsingSsing, and eventually Leenalchi.

On “Here Comes That Crow,” as on most Leenalchi songs, Jang wordlessly directs his vision of cross-cultural funk with a collaborative spirit. First comes the rhythm section, developed with drummer Oh Hyung Suk, which sets the foundation for a song, then singers Park Soo Bum, Ahn Yi Ho, Ra Seo Jin, and Choi Su In draw from the repertoire of pansori songs to discover the most distinctive and fitting sounds.
The Bill and Mary Meyer Concert Series is generously made possible by the Bill and Mary Meyer Concert Series Endowment. Suntory is the Lead Corporate Sponsor of the 2026–2027 concert series.
Image credit to Swan Studio.