Bora broadcast in Korea — starring in Samsung Anycall commercial film for nightly 9pm news timecheck.  Posted below for your amusement & multi-culti bemusement.

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an aerial dance piece untop Frank Gehry architecture | Fisher Center, Bard College

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Sekou Sundiata's call to a Nation, on the precipice | a multimedia work

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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 venue 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” in Brooklyn’s 55,000 sq. foot, abandoned McCarren Pool for dance piece Agora II, for seven sopranos on bicycles.  She also composed Semaphore Conductus, a choral sound installation performed in surround, inspired by the evolution of conducted energy and signals through time (conch, gramophone, megaphone, cell phones).

As a solo performer, Yoon has toured her original soundwork ( (( 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.

Her 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 Billboard, BMI, and the Arion Foundation; and published by MIT Press, Swirl Records, and the Journal of Popular Noise.

Yoon’s diverse talents have yielded a wide range of collaborators including musicians DJ Spooky, Ben Frost, Kaki King; data artist Luke DuBois; site-specific choreographer Noémie Lafrance; multimedia theatre companies Ridge Theatre and Dhamma Theatre West; composer Michael Gordon; poet Sekou Sundiata; and the League of Electronic Musicians & Urban Robots (LEMUR).

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.

Upcoming plans include custom instrument design and performance collaborations with Brooklyn’s League of Electronic Musicians & Urban Robots (LEMUR); recording remix projects with DJ Spooky, Meredith Monk, and early music group New York Polyphony; a wax cylinder record for UK phonograph artist Aleks Kolkowski’s museum collection—while ( (( PHONATION )) ) continues to resonate and rarefact in concert.

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.

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ABOUT ( (( PHONATION )) ): 
( (( PHONATION )) ) is an interdisciplinary songcycle and multimedia performance by composer/performer Bora Yoon with live video manipulations by R. Luke DuBois — exploring where sound connects to the subliminal using found sounds, new and antiquated instruments, electronic devices, and voice.  Using a sound designer’s approach to performance composition that is steered by a penchant for a song, ( (( PHONATION )) ) engages with music as music, and not as part of a genre, taking the means to one end, and using it for another to form new utterances of sound and the beginnings of a new sonic language, within its spatial, architectural, technological, and narrative  context.    In every case, a particular sonic geography is evoked that might be inspired by a simple, found-sound in the world, or an expression of a sonic paradox bouncing around only in the mind.

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