BOSTON, MA (June 1, 2026) — Ray Seol, Associate Professor of Professional Music at Berklee College of Music, is pleased to announced The Prison of Language, an eight-track music drama conceived as a new artistic platform for grief, suicide prevention, and the recovery of silenced lives. Developed through a Fulbright Scholarship in South Korea, the Soundtrack album is available worldwide on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, and all major streaming platforms beginning today, June 1, 2026.
At the center of the work is the story of Seol's mother, a woman who could not read or write, whose life was shaped by the rigid social and cultural conditions of mid-century Korea, and who died by suicide while Seol was studying music in New York City. Over twenty years, Seol's grief became his artistic practice. The Prison of Language is the result: a concert-theater hybrid in which a live jazz performance functions as ritual, memory, and an act of radical mourning.
Seol describes the work not as a jazz album but as a sound memoir, one rooted in 150 keywords gathered through interviews with fourteen survivors of suicide loss, and shaped by Korean shamanism ritual. The album's eight tracks map a two-act structure: Act One traces Seol's grief and memory from his mother's death to his life in New York; Act Two moves through ritual and what Seol calls an aesthetics of departure, the possibility that absence is not emptiness, but a form of presence that can be heard.
"Perhaps my mother, who could not read or write, chose death as a way to escape that prison of language," Seol has written. "This musical play is my artistic reflection on that very question."
The Prison of Language had its world premiere through a series of invitation-only showcases in South Korea in 2025, presented at CJ Azit in Seoul (August 23), Boogie Woogie in Seoul (December 18), and Peak Music Hall in Gwangju (December 19) — each performance sold out. Audience members included the Executive Director of Fulbright Korea, staff from the CJ Cultural Foundation (the organization behind the Academy Award-winning film Parasite), and leaders of federal mental health and suicide prevention organizations. Both major performances received standing ovations.
The album is not a traditional jazz release, nor is it a conventional musical theater score. In performance, a live jazz concert occupies center stage while actors, drawn from the audience, among the audience, portray memories across three time zones: past, present, and a future (or unknown) shaped by the aesthetics of absence.
The project has also been published as a bilingual book (English/Korean) documenting its conceptual and artistic development. The Prison of Language as a musical, also marks the first collaboration between Seol and Ins Choi, the Korean-Canadian playwright and co-creator of the acclaimed CBC/Netflix series Kim's Convenience. The two have known each other for more than two decades, meeting in Toronto where Choi's father led the church where they played in a band together. Now, Choi is serving as dramaturg on the project, working alongside Seol to shape the theatrical architecture of the script while preserving the music's central role in the storytelling. The collaboration brings together two artists whose work has long lived at the intersection of Korean immigrant experience and the wider cultural landscape, and whose friendship, after years apart, quietly found its way back to the stage.
South Korea holds the highest suicide rate among OECD nations, 24.1 deaths per 100,000 people (2020). The United States ranks among the highest as well, at 22.1 per 100,000. For young people, artists, and immigrant communities in both countries, the mental health crisis is acute and, in Seol's view, chronically under-addressed through art.
Seol has lost students to suicide. He speaks about to convey the personal stakes of the work and his ongoing commitment, in the classroom and on stage, to telling young artists: Do not die. Life is worth living.
"I do not want this campaign to be about making me famous," Seol says. "It is really me as an educator. I should do this. And I should not be shy about it."
RAY SEOL (Haeng Soo Seol) is Associate Professor of Professional Music at Berklee College of Music, where he has taught for over a decade. Born in Seoul, South Korea, he has lived in the United States for 22 years. He holds degrees from The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, New York University (Music Technology), and Columbia University (Arts Administration), and earned a Doctor of Education from Northeastern University. His dissertation focused on the career development of East Asian international music students in the U.S.
A double bassist who studied under legendary musicians Reggie Workman and Buster Williams, Seol is also one of the leading academic voices on K-pop in the United States. He hosts an annual K-pop conference at Berklee and has been quoted as an expert commentator in The New York Times, CNN, BBC, NPR/On Point, The Economist, ABC Boston, CBC, and publications across Europe and Asia. His 2026 media appearances alone span The New York Times (March 20), BBC (March 16), NPR/WBUR On Point (March 6), The Economist (February 26), and CNN (January 13).
The Prison of Language is Seol's most personal and ambitious work — the culmination of twenty years of grief, teaching, and artistic practice.
INS CHOI was born in Korea but grew up and currently lives in Toronto, Canada with his wife and two children. Some of his acting credits include Banana Boys, lady in the red dress (fu-GEN); Hamlet, The Odyssey (Stratford Festival); Death of a Salesman, Kim’s Convenience (Soulpepper). As a writer, his debut play, Kim's Convenience, won the Best New Play award and the Patron's Pick at the 2011 Toronto Fringe festival. It then toured across Canada and was adapted into a TV series of the same name on CBC and Netflix for 5 seasons. Ins was a writer, executive producer and co-creator of the TV series. He also wrote the plays Subway Stations of the Cross, Bad Parent, and Son of a Preacherman.
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