The project through which C. Spencer Yeh turned a violin, a voice and a pile of electronics into one of the most prolific and well-connected careers in American experimental sound.
Burning Star Core, often written BxC, is the principal music vehicle of C. Spencer Yeh, and the Bureau files it at Tier III as a distinctive voice and an unusually busy connector across the American experimental field. Yeh was born in Taipei in 1975 and came to the United States as a child; he studied radio, television and film at Northwestern, worked at the campus station and interned at a record label, and built an interdisciplinary practice in which sound is one strand among video, writing and performance. He began Burning Star Core in 1993, releasing early work on his own Drone Disco label.
The instrument at the centre is the violin, but not in any traditional sense. Yeh trained on it as a child and abandoned the training as a teenager, dating his real start to the four-track tape recorder, and the project's vocabulary is a personal one built from bowed violin, processed voice and electronics. The sound ranges widely, from long-form drone to wet harsh noise to free improvisation, and the live work is an assault on every sense at once.
Two records mark the turn outward: A Brighter Summer Day (2002), the first to reach distribution beyond the underground, and The Very Heart of the World (2006), which drew attention for setting genuine playing against wet noise, gibberish talk and free percussion. But the discography proper is almost beside the point next to the collaborations. Yeh has worked with a startling range of figures, John Wiese, Tony Conrad, Aaron Dilloway, Toshiji Mikawa, Paul Flaherty and Chris Corsano, Okkyung Lee, and many more, which makes him one of the connective tissues of the scene as much as a maker within it.
The work has also moved comfortably into the established art world: video distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, performances and exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney and the Walker, and editorial roles at Triple Canopy and BOMB. The breadth is the point; Yeh treats sound, image and text as one practice.
The Bureau's reading. Burning Star Core is filed at Tier III as a distinctive violin-and-electronics project and as the hub of one of the most prolific collaborative careers in American experimental sound, a connector whose reach across the field is itself the reason for the entry.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Anthropocene · last revised c. the Anthropocene