The voice doesn't arrive until 0:36: LIMA's 'Gypsy Song'

We picked 'Gypsy Song' from 'The Moments', the first full-length album that jazz vocalist LIMA released on October 1. In the four-minute music video of six people playing in one room, you can clearly hear and see the instruments taking over the lead one after another. The album introduction presents LIMA as 'a vocalist who has breathed with audiences on jazz club stages for 15 years' and notes that LIMA started singing late, at 32. LIMA composed all eight songs and wrote this song's English lyrics with Hodge. The introduction calls the song 'gypsy jazz style'. Gypsy jazz is a genre started in the 1930s by the guitarist Django Reinhardt, who mixed traditional Romani music with swing jazz (the jazz loved as dance music in America at the time). The sound in the video is a different recording from the released track (3 minutes 50 seconds), so times follow the music video.

0:02 · The guitar opens, the drums count

The song opens with guitar alone. Split the sound by instrument and measure it, and for 20 seconds from 0:02 there's only guitar, with no voice and no drums. Once its last note fades out by 0:24, only the drums mark the beat for 4 seconds, every 0.53 seconds, or about 113 times a minute. At 0:28 the band comes in all at once, and the camera shows the piano and the double bass. The double bass is the biggest and lowest-sounding of the string instruments that are plucked or bowed, and standing upright it's as tall as a person. LIMA's voice only arrives at 0:36.

0:36 · A drifter, a dreamer

The first four lines begin with 'I, I'm just a drifter'. The lines that follow readily admit to fading in the midst of pain, and that calling it helpless might be right. At 0:54 the first line comes back with just one word changed: 'I, I'm just a dreamer'. Becoming a dreamer doesn't end the drifting, so the next line is 'I drift through every loss and gain'. And it closes on 'Yet something's burning bright'. The introduction says the song 'expresses my twenties, when I was a wanderer who never let go of dreams and passion even amid anxiety and wandering'.

1:09 · 37 seconds not in the lyric sheet

Singing all eight lines of the lyric sheet once takes you to 1:09. But LIMA keeps singing for 37 more seconds, until 1:46. This passage isn't in the lyrics on Bugs. When we measured the pattern of the voice's pitch, it differed both from the eight lines before it and from a similar passage at 2:52. In other words, this isn't a spot where set lyrics are repeated. The camera holds a single wide shot of all six players for 39 seconds from 1:10, and LIMA sings with hand gestures woven in.

1:46 · 33 seconds with the voice stepping aside

The voice drops out at 1:46 and returns at 2:19. Those 33 seconds are the guitar's turn. The camera, too, stays close on the guitarist without a cut for 26 seconds from 1:49. The reason the introduction calls this a song whose 'charming guitar playing stays in your head all day' is packed into these 33 seconds. From 2:19 the eight lines are sung once more, and the 35 seconds from 2:52 are again a passage that isn't in the lyric sheet. This time a trombone, a brass instrument, sounds alongside.

3:27 · After the song ends

The credits say trombone, but the instrument on screen has no long tube that slides in and out (the slide). It's a valve trombone, with three valves pressed with the fingers like a trumpet's. When the voice ends at 3:27, the camera focuses on this trombone player. The lead photo is the shot right after. The drums drop out at 3:42, and at 3:45 comes the loudest sound in the whole video. At 3:48 the sound almost cuts out for a little over a second, 36 decibels quieter than just before. Decibels are the unit for measuring how loud a sound is, and every 10 down sounds roughly half as loud to the ear. At 3:49 the band rings out its final chord. The released track is a different recording from this performance, so it's worth listening to the two side by side. Apple Music

The players listed in the credits are Moon Kyeong Whan on piano (and arrangement), Ahn Won Seok on bass, Kim Young Joon on drums, Lee Hyun Jong on guitar and Lee Chang Min on trombone.