Suk-Jun
Kim

Born 1970 in Taebaek (Korea), lives with his wife and their cats in Florida. Studied theology at Yonsei University (Seoul), graduated 1996. Music education at the Ontario Institute of Audio and Recording Technology OIART (audio engineering, sound design), degree 1998; at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois (electronic media, electroacoustic music), at the Centre de Création Musicale Iannis Xenakis, Paris CCMIX (computer music) and at the University of Florida, Gainesville (electroacoustic music), where he earned his doctorate in 2008.

Suk-Jun Kim composes primarily electroacoustic music, and has repeatedly received prestigious awards for his pieces. Many of the usually multichannel works are inspired by a poetics of space and location involving both sound and listener. Initially the pieces seem sparing in their sound design; the always intelligible inner development of a never very large number of sound-objects corresponds with clearly described movements in space. But even with their gentle calmness and transparency, the sounds nevertheless generate subliminal questions, whose answers are constantly delayed in a kind of sonic dream logic that lends the works their tension.

During his stay as a guest of the Berlin Artists-in-Residence program, Suk-Jun Kim will realize further pieces in connection with his series Welcome to … , which deals with metaphorical concepts of place and space and their representation in the medium of electroacoustic sound. His composition Welcome to Hasla, inspired by Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities, was performed in January 2009 during the Ultraschall festival in Berlin.

Homepage: Suk-Jun Kim