In A Minute's 'Midnight' and a midnight held within 1.43 dB

There are nights when you turn off the light around midnight and lie down, but sleep won't come, and after switching your phone screen on and off a few times you end up putting in your earphones. In A Minute's 'Midnight' sounds as if it were made for exactly that hour.

From sundown to the deepest night

Lee Jaejun, Kim Juntae and Hyunyeop released their first full-length album, 'When the sun goes down : Midnight,' on September 9. Ten songs, 28 minutes 24 seconds. According to the album introduction, if 'Honjanmal (혼잣말)' on their previous album held the pain right after a breakup, this album tells of the time after that, the process of accepting the breakup and rebuilding a collapsed daily life, as a single flow from the moment the sun sets through the deepest night to looking toward tomorrow. Lee Jaejun wrote the lyrics for the songs at the front of the album, including the title track, and composed them with Lyle. Toward the end there's a solo song from each of the three, and the album closes with '1AM,' for their fandom INNING, and 'In_Complete (관람차).'

The mastering is by Kwon Nam-woo of 821 SOUND. The songs by Kim Yong Bin, SOOSOJIN and LUCY that we covered this week went through the same hands, so over one week we heard sound shaped by the same ears four times.

A sound that runs almost in a single line

As the album introduction says, 'Midnight' is built on electronica, and when you measure it, the loudness runs remarkably evenly. The flattest 10 seconds start at 1:34, and within them the loudness moves only 1.43 dB. dB (decibels) is the unit of loudness, and a 1 dB difference is barely noticeable, so it's a sound drawn almost in a single line. Across the whole song, too, the range is narrow: not waves that swell and fall quiet, but something closer to a river flowing at the same height.

Three times, the floor drops out of that river. At 52 seconds, 2:02 and 2:37, the low end goes empty for about two seconds each; low end here means below 150 Hz, the rumble you feel in your body like a bass, and Hz (hertz) is how many times the air vibrates per second. With only the floor vanishing briefly from an evenly flowing sound, in each of those short gaps the voices seem to take a step forward.

Tonight, if you can't sleep

So tonight, if after switching your phone on and off a few times you end up putting in your earphones, start it around 1:30. Through the ten seconds held within 1.43 dB, past the two more places where the floor goes empty, slowly crossing over toward dawn, 'Midnight'.