About

Leo Chang is a Korean improviser, composer, sound artist, and scholar of experimental music currently living in Brooklyn. Born in Seoul, Leo lived as an expat in Singapore, Taipei, and Shanghai, and then moved to the United States in 2011. Needing to assimilate to various cultures and thereby cultivating an irreverence towards rules and norms from a young age, Leo expresses rootlessness and multiplicity within identities through his music. Leo traces the origins of his fractured identity-formation to colonial legacies that continue to this day. His art is an act of home-making inspired by various musical and ideological movements that have sought to question power dynamics and imagine egalitarian possibilities. His primary methods are improvisation, written text, graphical notation, and electronic processing.  Leo frequently performs with self-made electronic setups that draw on Korean folk practices and instruments.

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 transformed creative prompts into music by designing rehearsals that center playful co-creation.

Leo has shared his artistic practice at various gatherings and venues: 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 New Music Festival, New York City Electro-Acoustic Music Festival, and the International Computer Music Conference. His projects have been supported by the Brooklyn Arts Council, Korea Foundation, Arts for Art, EMPAC at Rensselaer, Chashama, and the Tank, among others. Leo’s upcoming and recent discography can be found on Mung Music, Infrequent Seams, Notice Recordings, Dinzu Artefacts, Tripticks Tapes, and SUPERPANG.

Leo is a 2024 Jerome Commission artist for Roulette Intermedium and an Artist in Resident at the Center for Performance Research. He holds a PhD in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Keep in touch:

E-mail
listentoleochang at gmail dot com

Instagram
@listentoleochang