I'm listening to my CHE T-shirt (Radio Version)
/ an appropriated sonic commentary through L and N
for electric guitar, no input mixer, 6 variable speakers, and laptop with a midi controller
Premiered on 01.05.2019 in live broadcast of SWR2 JetztMusik by Thilo Ruck
Rerecorded on 06, 07.02.2021
Performance Video : youtu.be/XFkV5-qm2sw

In this piece, there are 3 rhythm layers from several sound materials I conceptually took. 
1. The pulse rhythm from no input mixer, which could be considered as natural acoustical phenomenon like Ryuichi Sakamoto said that electronic music or electric instrument are not particularly different from acoustical music and instrument, because electricity, which is essential for the electronic music, is fundamentally physical nature phenomenon. 
2. The rhythm from sounds of the field recording, which I personally recorded on 05, 06. March 2019 in Venice and also in San Michele Cemetery, where Luigi Nono is buried. In the recorded sounds, you can basically hear the rhythms of water waving sound, and motor sound of boats, which are created not just by nature but also by human being or society. The rhythm of wave and ripple are created not just by gravity but also by the structure of this city. The motor sound has also on the one side impersonal rhythm but it has on the other side variable rhythms and speed because of the other boats and the traffic system of the city. 
3. The rhythm of a piece „Statement zu einem Faustschlag Nonos” by Nicolaus A. Huber. It has basically only rhythm which is played once by a part of inside of piano and 2nd time by cluster of whole orchestra with 4 forte. This is inspired from a personal story of Huber. Shortly before Nono’s death, Nicolaus A. Huber and Luigi Nono met as jury of a competition. At that time, Nono was very ill and while they were reading the participated scores, sometimes he beat a desk with his fist with heavy, massive rhythm in quasi 4 forte. After Nono’s death, Huber wrote this piece with the memory of Nono’s fist action. This is the rhythm, which is strongly conceptualized and made by a history about a composer and also about their political worldview.

-You can read more description about the piece in my homepage-
cargocollective.com/uikyunglee/I-m-…ropriated-sonic

I'm listening to my CHE T-shirt

Time Exposed and...
/ Hommage à Hiroshi Sugimoto and La Monte Young (2021)
for bass flute, 2vibraphones, 2keyboards, electric guitar, string quartet and electronics

Performed on 31.10.2021 by Vertixe Sonora in Auditorio Martín Códax (Vigo, Spain)

Performance Video : https://youtu.be/hBE9Pd0_3Bc

Covid-19 and the climate change that we are experiencing right now are calling for major changes in our daily life, politics, and economic system, which have been formed for the last 200 to 300 years by a machine civilization, capitalism, and globalization.
This requires a big shift in the positive sensibility of the vertically upward energy that we have so far in our senses and fantasies.
In this piece, I tried to explore the possibility of horizontal time through Bergsonian duration time and phenomenal time in our nature rather than the typical and traditional developmental musical time. Also I tried to approach the possibility of our sense of artificial but continuous time in a affirmative way.
From this idea, the thoughts and works of Hiroshi Sugimoto and La Monte Young gave me huge inspiration. In particular, the word „Time Exposed” in the title of the work is one of Sugimoto's series of works, in which he shoots phenomena caused by pushing the camera's exposure time to the extreme by exceedingly long exposure times of the camera. The work produced in this way shows the transformed space that the photographed space already has but could not be seen. Similarly, La Monte Young transforms the space surrounding the music by choosing reduced sounds within an extremely long musical time.
With this concept, rhythm, the anthropologic material, and the timbre of instruments are crucial elements for this transformed space. The meeting of random and intentional rhythms in an accidental space, and the timbres of the instruments with specific connotations make this space not just as a simple abstract space but also a complex theatrical space. This artificial soundscape is my own dialectical exploration of the continuous of time.

Time Exposed and...

Mouvement et répercussion : Oh Domine! Oh mama!
for amplified ensemble and electronics

Commissioned and performed by S201
Live Recording on 19.07.2025 in Szene 10, Essen

1. Mouvement et répercussion_01
2. Mouvement et répercussion_02 : 1940
3. Mouvement et répercussion_03
4. Mouvement et répercussion_04 : Out of my bondage, sorrow and night
5. Mouvement et répercussion_05 : Si vis vitam, para morten (S.Freud)
(If you want to endure life, prepare yourself for death.)


• Programm Note

“Every perception is already memory. Practically, we perceive only the past…”
Henri Bergson

“The past carries with it a secret index by which it is referred to redemption. Is not the air that once surrounded earlier generations brushing against us now? Isn’t there in the voices to which we lend our ears an echo of those now silenced?”
Walter Benjamin

This piece began with a conversation between my mother and me. One day, I called her to find out whether a traumatic childhood memory had really happened the way I remembered it.
This is the memory: I was around four or five years old, and we were visiting relatives. My mother was hanging laundry outside when she suddenly collapsed. I remember running after the taxi in tears as it took her to the emergency room. The next memory cuts directly to a hospital room: my mother lying in bed, surrounded by members of her church. They were holding a short prayer service and singing the gospel hymn “Out of My Bondage, Sorrow and Sigh.”

But during that phone call, my mother explained that my memory was a composite of several events that had occurred at different times and in different places. The collapse and the hospital visit happened on separate days; the visit from the church members took place in another city; and the hymn may have been sung in one place, but not in others.

This made me realize that we—consciously or unconsciously—reconstruct traumatic experiences by weaving together fragments of time and space into a coherent narrative.

A few months later, I came across a public statement by Alice Weidel, a politician from the far-right AfD party, in which she claimed that the Nazis were left-wing. This once again showed me how facts, truth, time, and space can be politically reinterpreted and recombined.

The idea that the past is constantly being reconstructed within the framework of memory became a central conceptual foundation for this piece.

The work is based on polyrhythmic passages centered on E-flat and incorporates four musical quotations:
– The first movement of Luigi Dallapiccola’s Canti di prigionia
– Benjamin Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem
– The penultimate text from the fifth movement of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2
– And the gospel hymn “Out of My Bondage, Sorrow and Night”, associated with the personal episode described above

Both Dallapiccola’s and Britten’s works were composed in 1940. Dallapiccola’s piece was written as an inner act of resistance against Italian fascism. Britten’s work—originally commissioned to commemorate 2,500 years of the Japanese imperial dynasty—was rejected for being too dark in tone. (Ironically, the piece ends in a beautifully tranquil D major.)

The brutal and tragic images we see in the news today often feel like the eerie return of entangled memories from the past.

Just as I unconsciously edited my own memory, perhaps forgetting—and the ability to re-edit—is also part of what enables human survival at all.

In the end, as Mahler and Freud once suggested, must we cross this boundary of death? And if so, what echo must we listen to there—or allow ourselves to hear?

So then, what would we hear today?

Mouvement et répercussion : Oh Domine! Oh mama!

my my my my my my············ for amplified cello and piano with a vibrator (2017)

Cello : Jaesung Im
Piano : Semin Son
Premiered in the concert '작곡을 전공한 서른 언저리의 이들은 무엇을 하는가'

my my my my my my············

In a merry starry night / a meta anthropologic soundscape 
Based on „Ave Maria” by Robert Parsons and the field recording on 24.12.2019 in Myeong Dong, Seoul
for mixed choir and live electronics

Premiered on 16.02.2020 in Kunstmuseum, Stuttgart
Performed by SWR-Vokalensemble

This piece consists mainly of 2 sound materials ; 1, Ave Maria by Robert Parsons, 2, field recording tracks that I recorded on 24.12.2019 in Myeong Dong, Seoul.

Myeong Dong is a famous town in Seoul as tourist attraction for shopping. So there are many shops and almost every shop is playing back music. The aim of this playback is to bring more customers to their stores. Most of the music they are playing is, of course, K-Pop. Therefore, you can hear K-Pop clusters on the streets. I found that the acoustic phenomenon of this K-Pop clusters is not only as sonically, but also conceptually and socially interesting. So I went to Myeong Dong on the evening of Christmas Eve 2019 and recorded the soundscape of the town. 
While I was walking on the streets for the recording, I was able to hear not only the K-Pop cluster but also some carol songs, the bell sounds from the Salvation Army who were collecting contributions and many voices of foreign tourists.
And at the side of the shopping street, there is a cathedral which was built in Korea very first. Many people were coming to the cathedral for the Christmas Mass and there was happening some events in the church.
Socially, Christmas Eve is considered somewhat sacred. Through this composition for mixed choir I wanted to express this social realities which were happening in this holy night on the very secular and commercial street. 
For this purpose, I chose Robert Parsons's Ave Maria which SWR-Vokalensemble sang in their Christmas concert in 2018, as a sonic drone cantus firmus to bring some sacred atmosphere, so this motet is sung twice as slow as the original tempo. Furthermore, there are live electronic processing like pitch shifting, distortion effectors and the field recording tracks to vail and hide the motet to express and reveal the capitalistic realities, illusions, and emotions of this town Myeong Dong. So I called this piece as a meta anthropologic soundscape.

In a merry starry night

an in-between ; I'm yours (urban mix - kissing on the center of capital monument)
for 2 electric guitars and field recording track from Gwanghwamoon, the centre of Seoul, Korea.  

Recorded in SWR Kammermusik Studio Stuttgart by AAA---AAA (Timm Roller, Thilo Ruck) and broadcasted from SWR2 JetztMusik on 21.10.2020

an in-between 
What is a process of subjectivization? It is the formation of a one that is not a self but is the relation of a self to an other.

Let me rephrase this: a subject is an outsider or, more, an in-between.

Quotation from text - Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization of Jacque Rancière

Ui-Kyung Lee

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