Événement

Leo Chang "Jeonmonori"

The Jeonmonori is an electronic reimagining of the sangmo, a hat with a long, spinning whip made of ribbon attached to its crown, which is worn and played during the sangmonori, a Korean folk tradition where the instrumentalist/performer plays and dances simultaneously with their percussion instrument. I created the jeonmonori by modifying a sangmo hat, replacing the spinning ribbon with a lightweight, mini microphone. While wearing the hat, I move in the middle of four hanging gongs that are amplified with transducers. The act of the mic moving within the amplified gongs creates feedback between the transducers and the mic-ed hat-whip, resonating the gongs, while my position and the speed at which the whip is spinning, among other factors, determines musical variables of feedback such as pitch, rhythm, and dynamics.

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Leo Chang is a Korean experimental musician, improviser, composer, and sound artist based in New York. Informed by his transient lived experience, Leo plays with sounds, instruments, forms, and social practices outside of their original context. He does so using electronic audio processing and sound design, performance, individual and group improvisation, graphical notation, and text scores. In the past six years, he has been focused on building electronic performance setups derived from Korean folk practices and instruments. For instance, he built an instrument where he amplifies Korean gongs (used historically in folk, shamanic, and court music) with transducers and resonates them with his voice, microphone feedback, and other processed audio input. Leo is a Commissioned and Resident Artist at Roulette Intermedium, Center for Performance Research Artist-in-Residence, a recipient of a Korea Foundation Cultural Exchange Grant, and Brooklyn Arts Council grant.