Combine music and the word sway, and immediately I start to hum along to the beat: ‘When marimba rhythm starts to play, dance with me, sway with me…’ At least, that was until last month, when I experienced ‘the Sway’ at an Isaac Hong concert in Seoul. The concert itself was titled ‘Sway’. The Sway wasn’t merely about the singer, the songs and the splendour. At this concert, the Sway was a deeply meaningful state of being. Through his soulful singing and carefully crafted performance, singer-songwriter Isaac Hong, led his audience through a microcosm of the journey of life – one we face every single day.

I walked into the concert hall with one goal in mind; immerse in unmediated pleasure. It was the second part of my experiment in unmediated pleasures. The first was a morning in Gwanghwamun, which had left me enamoured by the life of Admiral Yi Sun-sin. For the concert, in addition to not taking any photos or videos, it was pertinent to avoid the algorithmic consumption of concert content on social media from the first two days of the concert.

I was one of the first to be seated at the concert hall. I hoped my carefully chosen aisle seat, would pacify my crowd jitters. Crowds were pouring in, finding seats, but also scurrying about posing for pre-concert clicks. Organisers moved about repeatedly announcing to refrain from using cameras once the concert began. My own device stayed powered down in my bag to avoid the notification incursion on my train of thought. Arriving very early to the concert venue and the resulting long wait built up a quiet anticipation. A single spotlight illuminated the otherwise darkened stage, bringing the heart to a focus. A single display of white on black drew my attention to the suspense of the ‘Sway’.

A gentle beating of the drums, a gentle voice and a gentle tremble. The music captivated the heart, controlling its rhythm and drawing to me to the edge of my seat. The first chapter of the concert began, ‘A Gentle Tremble’ – an invitation to embark on a journey of discovering the Sway. But first, our hearts had to be laid bare, opened up and tuned to the rawness of the moment. Hong singing, “God I only have a bird, I know what your worth, But this is all I have…” [A Bird by Isaac Hong] brought the deepest, hidden longing of the heart to the surface. In this wake of emotion, a prayer arose from my own heart with an earnestness I hadn’t seen for a while in myself. A prayer for unfulfilled longing.

Our unfulfilled longings make us doubt our dreams. We wait, and wait more for our dreams to realise. The longer we wait, dreams become doubts, and doubts become losses. Dreams, to borrow Hong’s latest album title, are like a ‘Castle in the Air’. As Hong’s voice echoed in the air singing;

Life doesn’t Sway from despair to hope and stay in that hope. Life like a pendulum Sways back to despair and again to hope.

Despite the unpleasantness of the Sway, the next chapter, “Still we stay” was an invitation to stay in the despair prone Sway. Perhaps this is what Hong intended to convey through Scarecrow. In the song the scarecrow stands in an abandoned field, weathering the elements, holding onto the hope of the sunrise nudging flowers into bloom.

Hong’s concert was telling a deeply meaningful story. What became apparent to me was that, I wasn’t merely experiencing the concert with my five senses, but also with the sixth sense of emotional perception and deep empathy. Christine Rosen in her famous work The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World, posits that unmediated environments, unlock a sixth sense, with which I must agree.

The sensory experience was overflowing as well. Hong’s dulcet tones, the band’s incredible musical dialogue, and the colourful play of the lights brought out the ‘oohs and ahs and falalas’ (Wordplay by Jason Mraz) from the audience, transforming the audience from listeners to partakers.  Who knew that a man singing about an abandoned scarecrow could cause my brain to glitch, my heart to skip a beat and visibly gasp at the sudden ill-tempoed clapping of my hands? Hong certainly dialed up his charm in that one.

While in this sensory captivation, before the next chapter, ‘Grounded in the Sway’ Hong exited the stage and the audience in a seemingly routine manner chanted ‘encore’. Hong returned, and performed an unreleased song. But at this point, nearly every member of the audience pointed their phone cameras at the stage and in a kind of notification incursion, and in much larger scale, my concentration zapped instantly. Between my eyes and the stage was a sea of rectangular glass emanating light, with Isaac Hong trapped in them. It took some effort to zone out this visual white noise. It took some time, and by the time I was back in the zone, the unreleased song neared its end. There is much of the concert that I remember, because my memory wasn’t outsourced to the phone. I remember nearly all songs in the set in order. The one song I cannot remember, the one song that I know that even if I saw a video of that performance online it wouldn’t evoke the emotions I felt at the concert, is the unreleased song. This moment serves as an unpleasant realisation that even if we were to adopt a less mediated lifestyle, in a society submerged in advanced technology we are required to make deliberate efforts to immerse and remain in the sixth sense.

Eventually I was once again captivated by the immersive journey of the Sway and Hong performed an emotional rendition of Puzzle now entrenching in me a wholesome feel and an understanding that I am just a piece of a greater puzzle. I am not the puzzle itself, but the puzzle isn’t complete without me either.

In my long walk back from the concert, I felt like a child skipping with glee. My efforts to sleep that night were to no avail because my heart was full. Even now despair overwhelms me frequently, but hope takes over, and again I Sway to despair. The cycle goes on. But just the other day I found myself unconsciously acknowledging that ‘it was the Sway’ and with it I broke out in a smile. Despair is convenient, it needs no encouragement, almost like a default mode. In contrast hope is difficult, hope needs additional fuel. That fuel is faith, which to me is the faith in God. Because as recorded in Hebrews 11:1; ‘Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things yet unseen.’ The Sway is a reminder to fight for that hope.

*The Sway described above, is my own interpretation based on my experience at the concert ‘Sway’ by Isaac Hong, and may or may not reflect the meaning intended by the singer.