Artist: Kmang Kmang
Title: Drifting
Label: self release
Genre:  classical guitar music with a good dose of jazz and instrumental fusion

“The most important thing is that it’s viscerally powerful,” states Barmey Ung, the classically trained guitarist and composer behind Chicago’s avant acoustic rock collective, Kmang Kmang.“I don’t like to intellectualize things too much, and don’t like to attach meanings where there doesn’t have to be meanings. I just want the music to be aesthetically powerful.”

Let the man himself speak about his CD release!

For Ung, the power comes from a slowly distilled mix of his musical passions: the subtle force of the classical guitar tradition, the sounds of Spain and Brazil, his emerging understanding of his roots as a Cambodian-American. The results engage and scintillate on Drifting, a post-rock, jazz-inflected dismantling of indie songwriting to create emotional, complex songs without words.

Ung’s vision flows through pieces composed in dialogue with a carefully recruited group of diverse Chicago musicians, finding expression in pensive and grooving instrumentals, work with dancers, visual arts pieces—and even the occasional rock song.