Spectacle comes in different shapes and forms, in the quietest breaths to cacophonous squalls. From the first singing drones and soft voice incantations, Leo Chang’s Live at CPR had me. Metallic resonances bleed into deep, almost guttural rattles while feedback hovers at the edge of control. It feels wild and uncontained, visceral and immediate. The album is captivating sonically all on its own, but learning about his process and approach, digging into the foundations of this work, opened new emotive layers for me. Experimentation becomes the connective tissue, harnessing the tension between indigenous Korean music and digital electronics. He melts these traditional and contemporary frameworks into something sprawling and meticulous, creating an entire new soundworld. Chang’s forward-thinking work howls on Live at CPR, pulling our focus to a sharpened point where it becomes impossible to ignore.
Live at CPR is OUT NOW.
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What are some of your earliest sound memories from childhood?
One memory I have is when I was like 6, and my younger cousin was a
toddler, he had incredibly sensitive hearing, and he’d be able to hear trains come before any of us could, and we’d follow him to the window to strain to listen to the train and then watch it go by.
Growing up, what was your relationship to traditional Korean music and instruments? Were they part of your environment or something you discovered later?
I think the main relationship I had with it was a combination of curiosity and confusion–I didn’t come from a musical family, so I was mostly just observing without getting any explanations, and I remember feeling like there were so many types of sounds simultaneously under the umbrella of music and feeling frustrated about not understanding the why behind musical stylistic differences. Temporality and history are hard to fully grasp as a child, especially when most of the music I was exposed to had its origins in faraway places. Traditional music felt like something I was supposed to like and take pride in, and even as a kid, I think I noticed how it wasn’t really popular and not many adults around me knew much about it, yet most people talked about it in the same generic vaguely patriotic vein of “our peoples’ music” or “our original music.” Since historical context wasn’t part of my music education until I was much older, the why of it all stayed unanswered for a long time. The most clarifying context for me continues to be how global capitalism, as a form of neocolonialism and imperialism, suffocates indigeneity and tradition into preservation; only then did I feel like I really understood why my relationship to traditional Korean music (and tradition broadly) was shaped the way it was.
Had you worked with gongs before building your first electronic setup, or was learning their acoustic properties part of the process?
I didn’t work with gongs before, so definitely more the latter. A lot of people assumed I was a percussionist once I started working with them, but if anything I am a vocalist, and I was using my voice to learn about the resonance of different gongs, and I essentially tried to keep digging deeper using as many electronic techniques I could fold into the mix, and then at a certain point the setup became more than just about electroacoustics between voice and gong.
The instrument you built has gone through many iterations since 2019. What are some of the major evolutions it’s undergone?
It went from a creative way to amplify my voice through the resonance of gongs, to programming a polyrhythmic drum machine onto them based on traditional rhythmic patterns; then, for a while, I went down the path of how many audio processing techniques can I use at various stages of the signal chain without losing the sense of acoustic resonance. At the same time, I got into doing sampling and resampling with the instrument. And of course, for the hat, I got into audio feedback and digging into various real-time processing techniques to try to get a big range out of that sound, and working with movement sensors to add to the interactivity between movement and sound.
Can you talk about what the kkwaengwari and jing mean to you, both as sonic objects and as cultural symbols?
They’re objects that are so deeply integrated in what is perceived to be traditional–they have been used in all kinds of pre-colonial music, including folk, court, shamanism, and other religions. The association with shamanism was probably the most significant for me: the resonances of these gongs are what were thought to aid the connection between earthly and spiritual realms, and with shamanism being the main indigenous spiritual practice of Koreans, the resonance of these gongs has played an important role for Korean people for a long time. So part of the reason I wanted to build an instrument that uses these gongs is because it felt like a way for me to connect with a native spirituality that I and many other contemporary Koreans have lost touch with, even if very tangentially.
Tell me about encountering sangmonori for the first time. What struck you about it?
I saw performances of it when I was young here and there, but it’s also used quite often to promote Korean traditional culture at airports and in tourism ads and such. So the dissociation that comes from marketing it so heavily certainly is a part of it for me. Visual representation of tradition being so ubiquitous, while having no meaningful connection to the original practice, is a contemporary Korean reality. It’s a feeling of being a tourist in your own culture and museumification of your selfhood.
The jeonmo seems like such an elegant solution, replacing the ribbon with a microphone. How did you arrive at that idea?
Around the time I had the idea, I was (still am) really into sets that leaned into the performative within noise and improvised music, so seeing the likes of evicshen, Ka Baird, Levi Qiujiang Lu, Kwami Winfield, and Sam Newsome, probably had a lot to do with this instrument. Also, at the same time, I was sonically really into sets that sculpted feedback in interesting ways, and I remember being mesmerized by Luke Stewart, Alex Zhang Hungtai, and Leila Bordreuil’s solo sets. Those influences, combined with the line of thinking around tradition that I talked about in the previous question is probably how jeonmo happened.
Do you see your work as specifically Korean, or as something that speaks to broader experiences of cultural displacement and hybridity?
It has to be both. Cultural displacement and hybridity is as Korean as kimchi and bibimbap. I was talking to choreographer Daeun Jung last year about this topic, and she brought up this paradox: much of what is considered the canonic Korean traditional dance and music repertoire were created in the 1960s, roughly the same time as Fluxus, except one is considered a preservation of history and the other is still considered avant-garde contemporary. Even the idea of Korean people as a singular ethnic group is a 20th-century notion, manufactured by the Japanese Empire to justify the colonization of Koreans (inspired by the racialization of Black people in the U.S.). So the idea of Koreanness exists today because of cultural displacement via its colonization. The cultural hybridity is everything that followed, and artists being creative within the situation they find themselves in, which I consider myself a part of.
The pursuit of meaning through interdependency between electronic and traditional instruments feels deeply personal. What does liberation of Korean identity mean to you?
Liberation of Korean identity for me starts with acknowledging the entrenched narratives about Koreanness were written by Japanese and U.S. colonizers, understanding that we need to refuse being this poster child for global capitalism, and realizing that profiting from selling K-culture is not actually meaningful progress towards liberation. We can’t even access the entire Northern half of the Korean peninsula and the people who live there, how can we define Korea, this Korea that? So for me, liberation right now is about resisting definitions and identifications of Koreanness, and accepting all the messy, ego-shattering contradictions and paradoxes of contemporary realities as distinctly Korean as well. My hope is that putting electronics and traditional instruments on the same level and improvising noisy music with them could be a small contribution in that direction—connecting and confounding at the same time.
An hour-long improvisation is a significant commitment. How do you prepare mentally and physically for that kind of sustained performance?
I lean on a collection of sonic places I can go to with the various tools I have built within my setup: broadly, they are audio feedback, singing through the gongs, polyrhythmic gong-drum-machine, resampling audio played through gongs, and playing piri or taepyungso (double reeds). I have various zones (for example, audio feedback only zone, or singing + audio feedback zone) where I know I can come up with anywhere between 10 to 20 minutes of interesting material. So I arrange them usually spontaneously, and then I know with roughly 4 to 6 zones, I can comfortably do an hour, and it’s just a matter of arranging them into a form. The deeper I develop what I can do within a single zone (whether in private or through doing multiple performances), the longer I feel I can make it interesting when I want to, which gives me more peace of mind that I can manipulate duration and organize form in the way I want in real-time.
The five tracks are arranged in a nonlinear sequence from the original performance. What guided your decisions about reordering them for the album?
I tried to isolate standalone pieces by listening to the audio recording without the visuals of the jeonmo and the whole performance, and then I rearranged them based on listening through those isolated tracks a few times over. The different ordering felt necessary after editing down an hour-long thing to separate moments totaling 35 or so minutes because when kept linear, the difference in energy from one track to the next was either too similar or too drastic. So a new sequence formed rather intuitively to give the album an arc.
How do you think about the relationship between gesture, movement, and sound in your practice?
It’s the most recent addition to my practice, so I feel like I’m still figuring this part out. Overarchingly, I guess I want to feel like there’s enough interdependency between gesture/movement/sound, and I want the interactive environment to feel playful, and a lot of that comes down to feeling the right level of being in and out of control. It helps that feedback behaves a bit differently in each room, so there’s always that variable to play with, too.
As always, to close, what are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
There are always those trees that birds gather in around sunset and sunrise, and they just chirp away like crazy. It makes me really happy when I get to catch one of those trees at the right time and listen nearby. Sounds in caves also, and any unique naturally or mechanically occurring acoustic phenomenon, really.
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