KRAAK FEST 2025 HIGHLIGHTS: Leo Chang
As an improviser, composer, sound artist and experimental music scholar, there’s an aspect of research and experimentation to everything Leo Chang does. The New York-based Korean musician mainly focuses on finding untraditional ways to interact with Korean instruments and objects through electronic modification ~ here he speaks to us about seeking familiarity in sound and spirituality in collaboration:
You're quite the enigmatic figure on this year's line up! Can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you came into this line of experimentalism? We’d love to hear more about VOCALNORI and how you came up with this idea/instrument!
Growing up, I had little access to Korean traditional instruments, and that was quite normal for Koreans – piano was much more accessible than piri, for instance. I moved to the US alone when I was 17, and like many people who are placed in different cultural contexts, I started feeling an urge to connect to my native culture. So, emotionally speaking, this type of experimentalism started from homesickness and feeling rootlessness. I wanted to express meaning and joy with instruments far away from their original context. And so I started building electronic instrument setups with Korean folk instruments and practices, and playing them in the context of improvised music – VOCALNORI is one of them. This fascination started when I was a teaching assistant for a Peruvian artist named Efraín Rozas–the way he talked about experimental ways of building instruments, and how it can be a process for questioning our understanding of tradition and cultural authenticity was a big influence on me. The robot percussion instruments that Efraín built and performed with resonated with me in a deep way. This line of inquiry led me to systems like George Lewis’s Voyager and Pauline Oliveros’s Expanded Instrument System, which I couldn’t get enough of. Using transducers specifically for VOCALNORI came from my teacher Matthew Goodheart, who was part of a group of experimentalists researching creative uses of transducers with audio processing and he passed on some of those technical and artistic methods to me.
You’ve had quite the prolific history of collaboration and collective work. Have you always worked well in a group / with other people? Any collaboration that was particularly memorable?
I was initially drawn to collective work because I was fascinated about how group dynamics get established within group settings: what is and isn’t appropriate to say, what is common knowledge, expectations around timing of speech, implicit hierarchies or rules, etc. I wrote my dissertation on this – about the social nature of musical collaboration and how it mirrors various aspects of cultural assimilation. I think nowadays I am more interested in the spiritual aspect of meeting someone new, getting to know them, and the inherent generosity within a person choosing to spend their time with me and the gradual changes in vulnerability that occur when the match is right. In that sense I think I try to memorialize every collaboration in a meaningful way, it’s just logistically challenging to find the time to give every project the attention it deserves.
Yourwebsite is very extensive and organized. So impressive! You must love archiving?
That’s great to hear, I do find it satisfying.. But it is a bit of a love-hate relationship: I think sometimes it feels like there’s no end to archiving. I try to not put too much pressure on myself to record every show or anything like that, but try to get meaningful snapshots so that I can look back and experience the stages of how projects have changed.
It seems as if your music is often research-based. Does your PhD work have anything to do with this approach or is it rather the other way around?
A bit of both maybe. I was somewhat pushed into doing a PhD because it was one of the only ways at the time that I could find to stay in the country and continue my life with my partner and community, but at the same time I think it suited me enough that I found satisfaction within research-based work. I definitely enjoy the learning part of research more than the output of written articles or theses, which is maybe why synthesizing the research more abstractly via creative sound practice works well for me.
Leo Chang is on Bandcamp, Instagram and of course his impressively archived website :)
Come and see Leo's mysterious VOCALNORI do its thing at this year's KRAAK Fest in Het Bos! Tickets be here///