Korean traditional music is taken to the club on K-Core, the new album from Seoul-born, Berlin-based artist HWXXNG, released on Chinabot. Across seven tracks, 800-year-old ceremonial frag- ments are torn apart and reforged as uncompromising techno, asking what place traditional forms hold in modern-day Korea.

The opening track, “Neo K-Core,” serves as a manifesto. It sam- ples Samdo Nongak Garak (the three-province farmers’ percus- sion suite), janggu drum patterns and ceremonial chanting, and chops them into micro-fragments, pitch-shifts and reassembles them. The result is propulsive leftfield techno that declares the birth of “Korean-Core”, a sound where ancestral energy collides with contemporary club music.

On “Neo Ritual,” shamanic melodies are granulated and rebuilt as hardstyle and industrial bass. The track imagines how ancient spiritual practices mutate in a post-digital era where identity and connection strain under the pressure of tech-dominated life.

Elsewhere, heavily processed ritual jing gongs, kkwaenggwari strikes and geomungo tones reflect how shamanism persists in hyper-technological Korea amid anxiety and societal pressure. As organic memory and synthetic systems blur at a rapid clip, K-Core refuses neat answers as it explores where we can go from here.