This year's WAVE FRONT artist-in-residence is Brian Chu Yin-Woo (龢wo4) from Hong Kong. Before the end of his residency in Chicago, Brian will play a solo improvisation set with frame drum, cassette player feedback and found objects. Following the performance, Brian will give a short presentation, sharing insights into the underground music scene in his hometown and the ways in which it has inspired the ideas behind his creative process.

Wo4 (Brian Chu Yin-Woo) is continually attracted by the coincidental rhythms that are produced in the course of daily life. It is this curiosity that animates his desire to sounding objects out, testing them for their resonant possibilities.

Through his improv, he explores the properties of sound in a percussive way. Through this process, he hopes to elaborate a unique language that corresponds to each passing immediacy.

龢 (“Wo” pronounced with the fourth accent in the Cantonese language) is a word that originally signifies the euphony that results from the sound of several bamboo reed flutes playing at once, and connotes harmony. Having assumed this name, Brian hopes that a resonance and a rapport can be established lying between contemplation, emotion, and the many-layered frequencies of reverberant sound, all of these entering into an interplay with one another and negotiating ephemeral forms of balance.

The WAVEFRONT ARTIST RESIDENCY is an international artist residency exchange partnership between ESS and soundpocket, a sonic arts organization based in Hong Kong. Since the program began in 2015, soundpocket has sent five artists—DAVE CHOW, CHER NG CHUN-TUNG, MARK CHUNG, and SAMSON CHEUNG—to spend a month as artists-in-residence at ESS, and ESS has sent Chicago artists DAVID BOYKIN and SARA LUDY to spend a month in Hong Kong.