| Bora Yoon | |
|---|---|
| Background information | |
| Birth name | Bora Yoon |
| Born | 1980 |
| Genres | Avant-garde, Contemporary classical |
| Occupations | Singer-songwriter performance artist multi-instrumental sound architect |
| Website | http://www.borayoon.com/ |
| Notable instruments | |
| mobile phones, vox, electric violin, musicbox, Tibetan singing bowl, water, keys, guitar, live samples and loops | |
Bora Yoon (born 1980) is an American musician who uses unconventional instruments in her music.
Contents |
Yoon grew up in the United States outside Chicago, Illinois.[1] 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, with a first love of choral music.
Yoon's eclectic musical style uses unconventional sources (everyday found objects, chamber instruments and digital devices) to generate music.
She explores where sound connects to the subliminal through the timbre languages offered in the voice, violin (now viola), water, ancient Tibetan singing bowls, cell phones, music boxes, glockenspiel, guitar, walkie talkies, metronomes, shortwave radios, kitchenware, found sounds, and electronics.
Using a sound designer’s approach to performance composition with song form, she can ably tune to sizzling bacon fat and harmonize to the whir of a G5, to create music that plays with sensory associations and spatial idiosyncrasies, with much spontaneity and little regard to the classifying genres of instrumentation.
UK's WIRE magazine noted Yoon's "nuanced timbre and careful of space [as] enchanting attributes of her airy and almost disembodied performance." The Ithacan said "Yoon is a remarkable talent..." while Noise Art Magazine wrote "...operatic and intense, genre-scrambling and iconoclastic... smart and different... a cut or three above the rest." Her work and musical innovations have been featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.
As a performer, Yoon has toured her experimental soundwork internationally, presenting her works at Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, the KBS/Nam June Paik Museum in Seoul, Patravadi Theatre in Bangkok, the Melbourne International Arts Festival, the Guggenheim Museum, Tonic, Roselee Goldberg’s PERFORMA Arts Biennial, John Zorn’s Stone, the annual Pop!Tech conference, MTV Networks, and in universities across the globe, including residencies at Bard College and the Walker Art Center. Additionally, she has curated experimental music for the SummerScreen series in the historic McCarren Pool, premiered a one-woman experimental opera by Paul Steven Ray, and created new vinyl-pressed works in collaboration with Reykjavik-based sound artist Ben Frost (Bedroom Community) for the Journal of Popular Noise (Spring/Summer Issue 08).
Yoon’s wide-ranging talents have led to collaborative performances with electronics giant SAMSUNG, media philosopher DJ Spooky, and the late poet Sekou Sundiata in the America Project and multimedia swansong: The 51st (dream) state. She has performed with Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble, Maestro Helmuth Rilling, members of Bang On A Can All Stars, guitarist Kaki King, multimedia artist R. Luke DuBois, tabla artist Suphala, beatbox artists Adam Matta and Taylor McFerrin, and Voices of Ascension choir.
An accomplished 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 ft (5,100 m2), empty McCarren Pool for the site-specific dance piece Agora II, and created and performed the multi-speaker live sound score for the aerial dance piece Rapture, reverberated off the dynamic curves of Frank Gehry’s Fisher Center (Bard College) as part of a collaboration with award-winning choreographer Noémie Lafrance.
On April 27, 2008, the Young People's Chorus of New York City presented the world premiere of Semaphore Conductus, a spatial acoustic choral sound installation inspired by the conduction of energy, signals, and sounding devices (conch, gramophone, megaphone, cell phones) commissioned for, and sung in surround-sound by, the Young People’s Chorus of New York at Columbia University's Miller Theatre.
On January 31, 2009, the SAYAKA Ladies Consort of Tokyo, directed by Ko Matsushita, presented the world premiere of "CPS/RPM", the sequel of Semaphore Conductus, in Casals Hall, Nihon University, Tokyo Japan, to critical acclaim.
Bora Yoon stars in Samsung Anycall commercial film for the "Talk Play Love" advertising campaign, broadcast in South Korea in 2007-8.
Bora Yoon has provided the musical score for dance film 'Heute Nacht' by An Films, and 'Faces of Seoul', an independent film by Korean filmmaker Gina Kim, due for release in 2010.