Four Lines Sung Five Times, and 4 Minutes 48 Inside 1.5dB

There is a song whose lyrics run to four lines.

Today, which will vanish in the end / Us, who will vanish in the end / Everything, which will vanish in the end / And so it is beautiful

That's RAINBOW99's 'Everything That Will Vanish'. Those four lines repeat five times across 5 minutes 30. After the third pass, a two-line variant keeping only the first and third lines slips in once. That's all of it.

The album 'Neunggok Blues' has eleven tracks, and this is the only one with lyrics. The other ten are instrumentals.

A Neighbourhood of Thirteen Years, Half Gone

In RAINBOW99's own words: "This album is a story about Neunggok, the neighbourhood I've spent thirteen years in." And: "Redevelopment is well underway, so half the neighbourhood is already gone, and the bus routes are gone too except the village bus."

Every title is a place there. Jido Park, Neunggok Market, 80 Jido-ro, Streets Not on the Map, Empty Houses, The Way Home, Patrol. RAINBOW99 explains each one — Jido Park is the park right next to home that the artist always walked past, 80 Jido-ro is the alley outside the front door, Empty Houses are the ones redevelopment emptied. 'Neunggol Jijimi' isn't a food; it's the name of an indoor bar that survived the redevelopment. And 'Patrol' is the redevelopment association's patrol, which won't even let you photograph the neighbourhood that's going to disappear.

In August RAINBOW99 released 'Jido Park' first, and how that was done tells you the album's attitude. The song was taken to Jido Park and recorded there. The credit reads 'recorded & mixed by RAINBOW99 at Jido Park'. Seven minutes 36 of live audio. The album's first track is a different, 7:20 recording — so there are two versions of the same song.

Made It Alone

The credits are short. Production, composition, arrangement, performance, recording, mixing and mastering are all RAINBOW99. The performance credit reads 'programing, guitar, piano, trumpet, vocal, sound design'. The video is self-shot too — the end credit is 'Music & Video RAINBOW99'. Only the artwork and motion graphics are by G99.

That's the biggest difference from the earlier work. 'Redevelopment Blues' — two singles in September and November 2022, then an album in January 2023 — was a project built by visiting four places in Seoul, and it was a team effort with a photographer and a visual artist. RAINBOW99 wrote a song at each location and filmed it live there.

This time it's one place, not four; RAINBOW99's own neighbourhood of thirteen years, not someone else's; and the artist alone, not a team.

RAINBOW99 calls this album the 'twentieth full-length'. 'Redevelopment Blues' was called the 'eleventh' in 2023 — nine more in three years and eight months.

RAINBOW99 Called the Method 'Taryeong'

"I worked and played with the feeling of, ah, I'd like this to be something like a taryeong. The mixed feeling of looking at a neighbourhood about to vanish was hard to express any other way, but once I thought 'this is a taryeong', it came together as naturally as actually singing one."

And measure it, and that sentence is right there in the sound.

4 Minutes 48 Inside 1.5dB

I measured the title track. Five minutes 30, 120.2BPM.

From 0:16 to 5:04 — four minutes and forty-eight seconds — the one-second average level never leaves the range −7.2 to −8.7dB. That's a spread of 1.5dB. The low-end share holds between 16 and 21% throughout.

There's no contrast between verse and chorus. No break, no drop, no build-up, not once. I searched exhaustively for any stretch of 1.2 seconds or longer below −38dB, and inside the song there are zero — only the three seconds at the end.

The shape of the sound is exactly the shape of four lines repeated five times. 'Taryeong' wasn't a metaphor; it was the design.

The opening is the one exception. The first 15.5 seconds have only 3.9–5.3% low end while the mids take 45–55%. Then at 0:15.50 the highs break first (5.5% → 17.3%), and 0.65 seconds later, at 0:16.15, the low end arrives (6.8% → 26.2%). The level jumps 6dB and the low-end share goes up fivefold.

The sound folds at the same point. Side/mid drops from +0.7dB at the intro — wide open across the stereo field — to −4.6dB. As the band comes in, everything gathers to the centre.

It Closes With the Sound It Opened With

At 5:04.20 the low end falls from 17.3% to 2.2%, in a tenth of a second. The band leaves.

Then a sixteen-second outro, with the same band distribution as the opening fifteen seconds — 3–6% low, 45–52% mid. The stereo returns to intro values as well, −0.2dB and −0.8dB.

Only at the beginning and the end does the centre empty and the sound spread outward. The four minutes 48 between them stay gathered in the middle at one size. The place where the neighbourhood stood and the place where it is gone, wrapped in the same sound.

The Picture Is That Neighbourhood

The video mostly follows a figure with a guitar from behind. Alleys, an empty house covered in ivy, a lot where the grass has grown waist-high, a yellow construction barricade, '출입금지' — keep out — sprayed in red on a wall, night streets. Over them, white handwritten lyrics are drawn stroke by stroke and then vanish.

The album cover is "a photo taken at some unknown time at Yeongmi's bar, which is gone now." Onto it, G99 placed a 3D version of a character RAINBOW99 built out of Oxford blocks. "I made it thinking of a figure walking steadily onward in any direction."

When to Listen

While walking. It's an hour and one minute long, and ten of the eleven tracks are instrumental, so there's only one place where you need to follow words. Let the rest run underneath.

And if you only take the title track, go in knowing the volume barely changes across 5 minutes 30. Wait for it to grow and nothing will happen. What you hear instead is what a sound does when it stays in one place for a long time.

Everything That Will Vanish.