About

Leo 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. He has performed in various venues and gatherings, notably the Vision Festival, Pierre Boulez Saal, Pioneer Works, NYC Winter Jazzfest, the Lot Radio, Basilica Hudson’s 24-Hour Drone, MATA Festival, Ostrava Days Festival, New York City Electro-Acoustic Music Festival, and the International Computer Music Conference. Leo holds a PhD in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Leo’s collaborations include: Young Mong, a ritualistic electroacoustic project led with Alex Zhang Hungtai, involving Che Chen and Tashi Dorji; Nakji, a Korean experimental diasporic music project involving gamin, DoYeon Kim, eddy kwon, Vong Pak, Che Chen, Jeonghyeon Joo; Unnameable Element, a multimedia/multimodal performance project with Chris Williams, Lester St. Louis, and Miriam Parker; playing in William Parker’s Universal Tonality Ensemble; various duo projects with the likes of Luc Vítková, Jason Nazary, Jeonghyeon Joo, Erin Rogers, Adrianne Munden-Dixon, among others; composing for the S.E.M. ensemble, the Rhythm Method, and the JACK quartet. From 2017 to 2021, Leo organized Ensemble Consensus, a collective of experimental artists who designed and practiced unique methods for co-creation across numerous projects.

Keep in touch:

E-mail
listentoleochang at gmail dot com

Instagram
@listentoleochang