Bora Yoon is a vocalist, composer, and multi-instrumentalist — who explores where sound connects to the subliminal creating architectural soundscapes from everyday found objects, chamber instruments, digital devices, and voice.
Featured on the front page of The Wall Street Journal and in WIRE magazine for her musical innovations— Yoon conjures a kind of sonic surrealism: using unconventional instruments, historic or architectural spaces, and psychoacoustics to create an immersive sensory synthesthesia.
As a composer, Yoon addresses the dimensionality of space and sound in her original works. A site-specific and architectural composer, unique works include choral surround-sound composition Semaphore Conductus, kinetic choral work, “Doppler Dreams” for sopranos on bicycles in a historic WPA abandoned pool, live score for arial dance untop the architecture of Frank Gehry, and ARCO, the first symphonic commission created specifically for the vast Park Avenue Armory drill hall space, with composers Paul K. Fowler, Paul Haas, and SYMPHO.
As a solo performer, Yoon has presented her unique and experimental soundwork internationally, at Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Nam June Paik Museum (Seoul), Singapore Arts Festival, Festival of World Cultures (Poland), Walker Art Center, Bang on a Can Marathon, TED, and museums and galleries across the globe.
Her music has been awarded by the New York Foundation for the Arts, Asian American Arts Alliance, Billboard, BMI, and the Arion Foundation; published by SubRosa, Innova, Swirl Records, and the Journal of Popular Noise; presented by TED Conferences, and electronics giant Samsung; and commissioned by the SYMPHO, Young People’s Chorus of NYC and the Sayaka Ladies Chorale of Tokyo.
Yoon’s diverse talents have yielded a wide range of collaborators including longtime collaborator artist Luke DuBois, poet Sekou Sundiata, site-specific choreographer Noémie Lafrance; DJ Spooky, Ben Frost, and Kaki King. Her work is featured 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, which premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2011, and the Singapore Arts Festival in May 2012.
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. She is endlessly fascinated by the intersection of space and sound, maps, human Venn diagrams, handsome sounding kitchenware, sonorities, and the pulleys and strings that hold everything together.
Upcoming plans include forthcoming record, ‘Sunken Cathedral’ co-produced by R. Luke DuBois, Music video / Sonic Surrealist Art films featuring the works of kinetic sculptor Uram Choe, and interdisciplinary music theater work, of the same title, in development at the HERE Art Center Residency Program and Beth Morrison Projects for 2014-15.
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KAKI KING
SOUND UNBOUND
Bora Yoon