소격동 (SOGYEOKDONG)

The song

‘소격동 (SOGYEOKDONG)’ is a single by IU, released on 2 October 2014. It is a one-song release, and the first new song to follow the remake album A Flower Bookmark five months earlier.

The album introduction states that the song came out of the ‘Sogyeokdong project’, written, composed and produced by Seo Taiji and sung by IU. The same text describes it as an electronic track with trap in it, and says its words carry a longing set in Sogyeokdong in the 1980s. The music video was uploaded to the 1theK (원더케이) channel on 6 October. Idology (아이돌로지) noted that Seo Taiji’s own album was due on the twentieth of that month.

Reviews

Idology’s new-release column ‘1st Listen’ took up the single on 17 October 2014. Kim Yun-ha wrote that “what to attend to in ‘Sogyeokdong’, and in IU’s version above all, is not the song’s genre or sound but its feeling”, and on the production that “it seems natural to read it as a continuation of an interest in contemporary electronica”.

The Singles Jukebox covered the song on 16 December 2014, in the column it gives to songs it missed during the year. Each writer signs a short piece with a mark out of ten, and nine wrote.

Madeleine Lee gave it ten, beginning with where Sogyeokdong is: “Sogyeokdong is a neighbourhood in the centre of the north bank of Seoul, pressed up between the wall of the rebuilt central palace and a carefully preserved traditional hanok village.” Lee read the song as one that “is not about being a child, but about the memory of childhood”, and wrote that “the fragility of both time and memory is captured in IU’s clear, pure tone: sometimes falling in layers like drifts of snow or crystals of frost on a window, and sometimes standing on its own, the only visible and enduring thing in a whiteout”.

Iain Mew gave it eight, writing that “its calm synthscapes are perfect for IU, though: spaced out so you can take in the gorgeousness at leisure, every sigh given its own jeweled setting”. Will Adams also gave it eight: “God, the synthwork is so beautiful it almost hurts.”

Patrick St. Michel gave it ten. He wrote that “this sounds like a battle to remember, synthesizers all tumbling over one another”, and pointed to the song’s reference to the Seoul of the 1980s. Cédric Le Merrer gave it ten as well, writing that “it’s love, beauty and happiness as acts of resistance in themselves”.

Afterwards

The single Heart followed on 18 May 2015, and the fourth mini album CHAT-SHIRE on 23 October that year.