Leo Chang and Levi Lu

Leo Chang:

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 as/with VOCALNORI, which amplifies vocal sounds through gongs via electronic instruments. He also plays Korean double reed instruments (piri and taepyungso) in untraditional ways, often processing his piri playing using electronics.

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 & many others. He has composed for the for the S.E.M. ensemble, the Rhythm Method, and the JACK quartet.

Levi Lu:

Qiujiang Levi Lu/卢秋江 (they/them) is a Beijing-born, NYC-based performance artist, vocalist, experimental improviser, composer, and lecturer in music at University of Pennsylvania. For their solo performance art practice, Lu designs Max/MSP-based electroacoustic feedback systems with cyborg-like body augmentations inspired by Objectophilia/animism, which include special microphones and speakers placed within bodily orifices, augmented amplified laptop, and a custom-mapped flight joystick controller. Their resulting performances consist of choreographed, ritualistic improvisations that build on ancient Chinese drumming traditions and explore body dysmorphia, sexuality, spirituality, and mortality, linking together sound, movement, and violence in divine ceremony. As a collaborative musician/improviser, Lu makes up half of the Chinese-American experimental electronic act Warp Duo with fellow improviser and violinist Scott Li, which fuses deeply emotional and melodic music with maximalist sound design. Lu has also performed extensively across the country with artists such as Ka Baird, Camilo Ángeles, Zoh Amba, Laura Cocks, Dana Jessen, Wendy Eisenberg, Dave Ballou, Devin Grey, Drew Wesely, Manuel Perez III, Adam Kantz, Julian Pujols Quall, etc.

As a composer, Lu writes instructed improvisation pieces for acoustic and electronic performers and improvisers. Lu’s commissioned works often take a meta, unorthodox approach to music technology, exploring human-machine relationships, audio-visual interactivity, mind-body connection, and the phenomenology of musical performance. Previous commissions have included Popebama, Luke Helker, and Ensemble Decipher.