Bora Yoon is an experimental multi-instrumentalist, composer and performer, who creates architectural soundscapes from everyday found objects, chamber instruments, digital devices, and voice.
Yoon—who’s been featured in WIRE magazine and on the front page of The Wall Street Journal for her musical innovations—explores where sound connects to the subliminal and its performance environment through the timbres of the human voice, viola, water, Tibetan singing bowls, radios, cell phones, metronomes, music boxes, glockenspiel, guitar, found sounds, custom-built instruments, electronics, antiquated audio technology, and acoustics.
Using a sound designer’s approach to performance composition that is steered by a penchant for a song, she creates music that plays with sensory associations and spatial idiosyncrasies, with much spontaneity and little regard to the classifying genres of instrumentation.
An interdisciplinary composer, Yoon addresses the dimensionality of space and sound in her original works: she conceived the stereophonic sound mural “Doppler Dreams” for seven sopranos on bicycles in Brooklyn's 55,000 sq. foot, abandoned McCarren Pool for the site-specific dance piece Agora II. She also composed Semaphore Conductus, a choral work sung in surround, inspired by the conduction of energy and signals, featuring an antiphonal of sounding devices through time (conch, gramophone, megaphone, cell phones).
As a solo performer, Yoon has toured her experimental soundwork and new record
( (( PHONATION )) ) internationally, presenting at Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Nam June Paik Museum in Seoul, Patravadi Theatre in Bangkok, the Bang on a Can Marathon, John Zorn’s Stone, the annual Pop!Tech conference, and universities across the globe.
Yoon’s wide-ranging talents have led to collaborations and performances with musicians Dj Spooky, Ben Frost, Kaki King, data artist R. Luke DuBois, multimedia theatre companies Ridge Theatre and Dhamma Theatre West, site-specific choreographer Noemie Lafrance, composer Michael Gordon, poet Sekou Sundiata, and the League of Electronic Musicians & Urban Robots (LEMUR).
Yoon’s music has been presented by the Electronic Music Foundation and electronics giant Samsung; commissioned by the Young People’s Chorus of NYC and the SAYAKA Ladies Chorale of Tokyo; awarded by the New York Foundation for the Arts, Asian American Arts Alliance, Billboard, BMI, and the Sorel Organization; and published by Swirl Records, MIT Press, SubRosa, Innova, and the Journal of Popular Noise.
A graduate of Ithaca College’s Conservatory of Music and creative writing program, she is classically trained in the school of studied thought and improvisational sciences, and is steeped in a first love of choral music, acoustics and frequencies. She is endlessly fascinated by the intersection of space and sound, maps, human Venn diagrams, handsome sounding kitchenware, and the pulleys and strings that hold everything together.
She is currently scoring and performing the live music for Haruki Murakami’s “Wind Up Bird Chronicle“– an interdisciplinary theatre adaptation, directed by Stephen Earnhart. Presented by the Barshynikov Art Center and Asia Society, and organized through Carnegie Hall for a city-wide Japanese theatre arts festival in March of 2011.
Upcoming plans include forthcoming record, ‘Sunken Cathedral’, and technology development for ‘The Body Electric’, custom sensor design for performance with Harvestworks and Electronic Music Foundation.
www.borayoon.com
// IMG Artists // BMI //GRAMMY // Asian Arts Alliance
"Nuanced timbre and careful use of space. enchanting." --WIRE magazine
"Analog and digital" --THEME magazine
"Totally unique." -- KoreAm Journal
/////// MAILING LIST /////////
Name:Email:
