Bora Yoon is a one-woman orchestra using everyday timbre occurrence, chamber instruments, and technology’s hubris, to design space in music.
Recently featured on the front page of The Wall Street Journal for her musical innovations, Yoon explores the amalgam where sound connects to the subliminal through the associated timbre languages of the human voice, violin, water, ancient Tibetan singing bowls, cell phones, musicboxes, glockenspiel, guitar, found sounds, and electronics. Her approach to sound design and performance composition is sensible to its space, association, context, and environment, to create site-specific zeitgeist moments of breathable works, with much spontaneity and little regard to the classifying genres of instrumentation.
An accomplished composer, Yoon explores the nexus of architecture and sound in her original works, having designed live stereophonic sound-murals for seven sopranos on bicycles in Brooklyn's 55,000 sq. foot empty McCarren Pool for site-specific dance piece Agora II, and the live sound score for aerial dance piece Rapture on Frank Gehry architecture with award-winning choreographer Noémie Lafrance.
As a performer, Yoon has toured her experimental soundwork internationally, presenting her works at Lincoln Center, BAM’s NextWave Festival, Nam June Paik's Museum in Seoul, the Melbourne International Arts Festival, the Guggenheim Museum, Tonic, Roselee Goldberg’s PERFORMA Arts Biennial, John Zorn’s Stone, on MTV Networks, and in universities across the country, including residencies at Bard College and the Walker Art Center. Additionally, she has curated the experimental music/film SummerScreen series, premiered a one-woman experimental opera by Paul Steven Ray, and has garnered awards from the John Lennon Songwriting Contest, Billboard, and the Arion Music Award committee.
The flexibility of her talents and skills has lent to collaborations with electronics giant SAMSUNG, media philosopher DJ Spooky, and the late poet Sekou Sundiata, in multimedia swansong: the 51st (dream) state. She has performed with Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble members, Maestro Helmuth Rilling, members of Bang On A Can All Stars, toured and recorded with guitarrist Kaki King (Sony, Velour Music), multimedia artist Luke Dubois (Harvestworks, Columbia), tabla artist Suphala, and beatbox artists Adam Matta and Taylor McFerrin.
A graduate of Ithaca College’s Conservatory of Music and creative writing program, she is classically trained in the school of thought and sciences, mired in a first love of choral music, acoustics and frequency, and has since thusly proceeded to put a pickup on everything she owned since her typical Korean musical upbringing to phonate. She is endlessly fascinated by maps, Venn diagrams, handsome sounding kitchenry, and the pulleys and strings that connect things together.
Future plans include designing a site-specific choral piece within the colonnades of Lincoln Center, a choral commission with YPCNY, new works to be vinyl-pressed in The Journal of Popular Noise v.4, and forthcoming record Sons Nouveau.
[BMI] [GRAMMY / Recording Academy Member]
"... a digital wonderwoman." --Sekou Sundiata
"...like music.. with a body." --Allison Sniffin, Meredith Monk Vocal Ensemble
"...a one-woman orchestra." -- DJ Spooky
Bookings & Inquiries:
James Egelhofer | IMG Artists
[email protected]
212.994.3507
Press & Publicity:
Amanda Ameer | First Chair Promotion
[email protected]
212.368.5949
Visit the new BORA YOON SHOP !
ear candy | eye candy | custom design trinkets
CLICK HERE FOR BORA YOON SHOP
SEKOU SUNDIATA's 51st (dream) state
Click HERE Audio Slideshow of 51st (dream) state
Remembering Sekou Sundiata
THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR (August 13, 2007)