Location
Seoul Korea
Equipment
Edirol R09

A quick three day trip to Korea before Xmas was mainly to have a look around, but as always I have a recorder on me. The R09 goes with me everywhere. There is a great hill in the middle of Seoul that of course I decided to climb. The top has the remains of an old fortress. I think the Koreans had signal posts on the top of peaks all over the country to use in case of emergencies or invasion.

There were a group of locals in period costumes to represent the guardmen of the time and they did a presentation with some traditional music. I understand no Korean at all, but it was very interesting to watch and listen to. It was also facinating to compare the traditional music of Korea with that of its nearby neighbores China and Japan. It was quite different in style.

The sound highlight of the trip was on my way out at Seoul airport. One of the travelators was malfunctioning badly, it sounded like it had something jammed in it but it was still operating and scraping something horribly; it sounded great. It took a fair bit of patience to get a good sample, between people walking past, airport announcements in four languages and general background noise I waited about 15 minutes to capture a 30 second clean sample. I got a few strange looks, but then as a foreigner people proably just thought I was a little crazy anyway. It's still one of my favourite recordings.