Ken Ueno's creative approach to composition shares an affinity with the percussion world; there is an underlying spirit of experimentation, problem solving, and deconstruction as a path to innovation that guides them. This clear eyed perspective on the materials of sound and their possibilities makes percussion music an ideal forum to hear Ueno's work. The works on this recording share an interest in microtonality, transformation of noise timbres into pitched material, and an investigation of instrumental possibilities.
| # | Audio | Title/Composer(s) | Performer(s) | Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total Time | 66:35 | |||
| 01 | Wavelengths | Wavelengths | Karen Yu, vibraphone | 12:22 |
| 02 | ...a.m... | ...a.m... | The Up:Strike Project, Karen Yu, percussion, Samuel Chan, percussion, Emma Ng, percussion, Eugene Kwong, percussion | 19:49 |
| 03 | I am the uncle who sees past lives | I am the uncle who sees past lives | Ken Ueno, extended voice, ADRUNNOGNT | 20:24 |
| 04 | Phase Patterns of Likeness Slightly Off | Phase Patterns of Likeness Slightly Off | The Up:Strike Project, Rebecca Lloyd-Jones, percussion, Matthew Lau, percussion, Samuel Chan, percussion, Bevis Ng, percussion | 14:00 |
One of the core concerns in Ken Ueno’s work is examining the transformation of timbres, from noise to pitch, from obscurity to clarity, from sparseness to density. No instrument category is better suited to the austerity of this kind of sonic inquiry than percussion, and percussionists have consistently been key allies of Ueno’s throughout his musical life. Ken Ueno’s work is both intensely focused on those characteristics that capture his interest, while remaining broadly inquisitive with respect to where he might find new sources of inspiration. One finds Ueno excavating diverse spaces in academic, experimental, DIY spaces, always armed with an openness and wonder about the fundamental nature of sonic experience and how he might explore it in his next project. Wavelengths is a collection of four of his works, three of which are for various percussion instruments, and one for his own voice with sampled electronics, highlighting Ueno’s sensitivity not only to timbral modulation, but also his aesthetic convictions about temporal evolution and how it is manifested in the structure of his pieces.
Wavelengths for solo vibraphone and sine tones opens the album, written for and performed by percussionist Karen Yu. Ueno uses sine waves, played by small speakers placed onto specific bars of the vibraphone, as a vehicle to explore and expand upon the vibraphone’s equal temperament. The acoustic beatings produced between the sine tone and the played vibraphone notes, a variable that Ueno further manipulates by making subtle changes to the sine tones, also become sources of rhythmic extrapolation that are developed in the performed vibraphone part. The vibraphone motor also plays a role in this pattern of stretching and relaxing tension in the piece, and later in the work, performed sounds are recorded and played back through another set of speakers, creating multiple layers of self-referentiality and subtle pitch interaction. Splashes of arpeggiated harmonic color animate the grinding acoustic foundation that Ueno steadily manages in this hypnotic work.
Read More…a.m… for percussion quartet charts a trajectory between white noise at its opening to a tolling chorus of tuned metal pipes by its end. “Hacked” digital alarm clocks provide the immersive timbre of the work’s opening bars, placing the listener inside a liminal zone that suggests the line between sleep and wakefulness. Ueno shatters the stasis with one short accent on the snare drum, before returning to a gradually modulating drone. There is an implicit invitation to listen to the sound inside a noise texture which is vintage Ueno, an assertion that there is always a layer deeper within which to listen. More interruptions follow, a pitched metal pipe and then a taut snare drum roll which itself becomes the focal point for an extended contemplation. …a.m… evolves through different vocabularies of timbre, from the static noise of the alarm clocks, through the percolating rolls of the snares and occasional bell interruptions, to wave-like cymbal swells, and finally to the wind chime texture of metal pipes. At its midpoint, we hear the most virtuosic material for the ensemble, as the performers spar with each other in rhythmic bursts of timbral heterophony.
Experimental vocal performance has been a key component of Ueno’s practice for many years, and he has developed an individual vocabulary that incorporates throat singing and extensive extended vocal techniques. I am the uncle who sees past lives combines Ueno’s vocal performance practice with a fixed media electronic part assembled out of samples created for a sound installation by the artistic partnership ADRUNNOGNT (Arnont Nongyao and Nguyen Ngoc Tu Dung) presented at the Thai Wonderfruit Festival. In this sense, the piece is based on a collage of a collage in a sense, but in this performance, we hear some of the same musical parameters with structural implications that were at work in the other pieces, namely a focus on timbral modulation and acoustic beatings as a formal element. Ueno writes: "I am the uncle who sees past lives is an exploration of resonance—not just sonic, but metaphysical. It is about the ways sound lingers beyond its source, the ways past lives echo into the present. In this piece, the jungle, technology, the human voice, and the surrounding world all converge in a singular, ephemeral experience."
Phase Patterns of Likeness Slightly Off for four percussionists is a sibling work to Wavelengths, reveling in the sonic properties of the vibraphone, now heard as a four part chorus. Written for Karen Yu’s ensemble The Up:Strike Project, the piece contains some of the albums densest ensemble writing, unfolding from the initial burst of harmonic color into flourishes of charged, coagulated energy. But the music lives just as much in the sustains between these phrases, as Ueno makes extensive use of the vibraphone motors to modulate the resonating harmonies, injecting them with pulsating waves. After approximately two minutes, attention is focused primarily on these sustained sonorities themselves, as they are further activated by subtle rolls and changing motor speeds. For much of Phase Patterns of Likeness Slightly Off the four vibraphones move as if in a flock of birds, preserving their independent trajectories while flowing effortlessly within the larger contours of the group. The final three and a half minutes signal a shift, as Ueno creates a steadier foundation of pulse and its subsequent divisions that serves as the frame for a pitch migration towards the higher register, zeroing in on closely spaced intervals and the brilliant resultant acoustic dialogue that emerges between them.
– Dan Lippel
Wavelengths recorded at A Asterisk Music, Hong Kong, on December 22, 2023
...a.m... recorded at the Multimedia Theatre in the School of Creative Music, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, on July 22, 2024
I am the uncle who sees past lives recorded at Wonderfruit 2024, in Pattaya, Thailand on December 16, 2024.
Phase Patterns of Likeness Slightly Off recorded at the Sheung Wan Civic Center, Hong Kong, on September 5, 2023
Producer: Ken Ueno
Audio engineer: Anthony Yeung
Audio engineer, I am the uncle who sees past lives: Krissada Ponchai (XOH)
Mastering: Anthony Yeung
Cover photo: Ken Ueno
Composer portrait (p. 2): EMPAC/Mick Bello
Design: Marc Wolf, marcjwolf.com
A Berlin Prize and Rome Prize winner, Ken Ueno is a composer, performer, sound artist, and scholar. His music has been championed by leading performers and ensembles around the world. Shiroi Ishi, composed for the Hilliard Ensemble, remained in their repertoire for over a decade and was performed at venues such as Queen Elizabeth Hall (London) and the Vienna Konzerthaus, and broadcast on Italy’s RAI 3. Another work, Pharmakon, was performed nationally by Eighth Blackbird throughout their 2001–2003 seasons. A portrait concert of Ueno’s work was presented at MaerzMusik in Berlin in 2011.
As a vocalist known for his bespoke extended techniques, Ueno has performed his vocal concerto with major orchestras including the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Warsaw Philharmonic, the Thailand Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra. He has collaborated with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Du Yun, and maintains ongoing projects with Arnont Nongyao, Kung Chi Shing, Viola Yip, Matt Ingalls, and Karen Yu.
His sound art installations have been exhibited internationally at venues including the Taipei Fine Arts Museum; the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), part of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), in Mexico City; Tai Kwun, the Osage Gallery, and Eaton HK in Hong Kong; the Telfair Museum in Savannah; and Art Basel, as well as at museums and galleries in Beijing and Guangzhou. One of his largest projects, Daedalus Drones—an installation featuring a fence-labyrinth housing a swarm of flying drones choreographed for performance—was installed at the Asia Society of Hong Kong and featured in the New Vision Arts Festival in 2019.
In 2024, he was a featured artist at Noise Fest, curated by the West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong. That September, the Arditti String Quartet premiered his latest string quartet at the Takefu International Music Festival, where Tosiya Suzuki also debuted Ueno’s concerto for bass recorder. Most recently, in April 2025, he was featured at A Bunch of Noise, Shanghai’s leading noise music festival.
Ueno is currently a Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His writings have appeared in The Oxford Handbook, The New York Times, Palgrave Macmillan, The Drama Review (TDR), and Wiley & Sons. He is co-editor of East Asian Voices of Resistance Against Racism in Music (Ethics Press), and his biography is included in The Grove Dictionary of American Music. He also served as guest editor of Sonic Ideas (Vol. 17, no. 33), curating the special issue Listening Against the Grain—AI, Music, and the Politics of Sound and contributing the lead article, “Wrong is Right: How AI Extends Postmodernism and Mis-maps Cantonese Music.”
https://kenueno.com/A sound artist and curator based in Hong Kong, Karen Yu’s interests revolve around improvisation with sound objects and bodily movement, and how artistic practices and personal contributions could weave people together in a space through collaborations. With a background in contemporary percussion performance, Yu is currently the Artistic Director of Contemporary Musiking Hong Kong, a Co-Founder of the chamber percussion group, The Up:Strike Project, and an Associate Musician of Hong Kong New Music Ensemble.
As an active performer, Yu has recently performed as a soloist in Since When (2023), a multimedia theatre performance by Joyce Tang and Chow Yiu Fai, and Somnium (2022), an installation/opera/trance by Steve Hui. As a curator, Yu has curated the latest edition of the annual sound festival in Hong Kong Sound Forms with Tai Kwun Contemporary, and co-curated the annual UNHEARD sound and music festivals with Eaton Hong Kong and _dtby, as well as the Noise Fest at Freespace West Kowloon.. Devoted to promoting sound art and sound pedagogy, she has recently curated a sound art initiative through Contemporary Musiking Hong Kong, Push the ENVELOPE, that aims to diversify our listening approaches and cultivate interests in sound-making as art-making.
Karen Yu obtained a Bachelor and a Master of Music (Music Performance, Percussion) from McGill University. Yu is an instrumental instructor at the University of Hong Kong and part-time lecturer at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts School of Theatre & Entertainment Arts.
The First Prize winner of the 2015 Percussive Arts Society International Solo Percussion Competition and 2014 Great Plains International Marimba Competition, Samuel Chan’s diverse performing experiences have taken him to celebrated concert halls on multiple continents. Samuel’s past highlight includes appearances as soloist with the Houston Symphony and Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra. He has performed with ensembles such as the Malaysian and Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestras, Hong Kong Sinfonietta, Hong Kong New Music Ensemble, and in summers at the Lucerne, Verbier, Tanglewood and Pacific Music Festivals. An avid chamber musician and a member of The Up:Strike Project, he was invited to perform on tour throughout Europe as Co-Principal with the World Percussion Group in 2017, and has collaborated with such acclaimed artists as Lawrence Lesser, Angelo Yu, Orli Shaham, and Aiyun Huang. He has also premiered works by Esa-Pekka Salonen, Ken Ueno and George Lewis.
Equally recognized as an educator, Samuel has presented clinics at renowned institutions including Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, Danish Royal Academy of Music, and Norwegian Academy of Music. He has taught as a substitute percussion faculty at the Tianjin Juilliard School. Samuel currently serves on the faculty of the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts’ Junior Music Programme and is an instrumental instructor at the University of Hong Kong. Samuel obtained his Artist Diploma from the Colburn School and Master of Music from The Juilliard School, after studying at the New England Conservatory and Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts.
Emma Ng obtained her Bachelor of Music (Honours) from The Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts majoring in Timpani and Orchestral Percussion, under the tutelage of Aziz D. Barnard Luce and James Boznos, both principals of the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, where she was awarded the Mr. & Mrs. Y S Liu Scholarship in 2022 and 2023. Recently, she has collaborated with the renowned ensemble, Third Coast Percussion and won Championship in Future King of Drums Tournament 2024. Previously, she was involved in the Soundscape Festival in Italy, Tan Dun’s Sound Vision Immersive Opera and Hong Kong Week@ Bangkok.
Arnont Nongyao (TH) and Nguyen Ngoc Tu Dung (VN) are two practitioners with different focuses but have similarities in their curiosity about experimenting with vibration and energy. Since 2019, occasionally, they will come together for collaborations and reunions through their duo name ADRUNNOGNT.
Rebecca Lloyd-Jones is a Lecturer at Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University, a Marimba One Education Artist, and the Artistic Director of Synergy Percussion. Praised as “captivating” (San Diego Union-Tribune), she has performed at major events such as the Percussive Arts Society International Convention, IMPULS (Graz), soundSCAPE (Italy) and held residencies at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Canada. Rebecca has performed with the PARTCH ensemble, Red Fish Blue Fish and was an adjudicator for the IPEA International Percussion Competition in Hong Kong (2024).
With an extensive research portfolio, Rebecca has received funding from the American Australian Arts Fund, the Creative Arts Research Institute (CARI), and was awarded the 2025 Elizabeth Wood Musicology Research Fellowship from the University of Adelaide. She presented her research at the Transplanted Roots Percussion Research Symposium 2017-2019 and served as the artistic producer for the 2022 symposium in San Diego, USA. As a composer, Rebecca’s works are released on labels including Populist (Los Angeles), New Focus Recordings, and MADE NOW MUSIC, and her pedagogical compositions have been published in the AMEB percussion syllabus.
Rebecca graduated from the Victorian College of Arts with the Desma Woolcock award for academic excellence, received a Master of Music Research from the Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University, and holds a Doctorate from the University of California San Diego with Distinguished Professor Steven Schick.
Hailed by the Aspen Times for his “soulful and technically impressive solo” at his vibraphone concerto debut at the Aspen Music Festival, percussionist Dr. Matthew Lau performs a wide range of repertoire with an absolute commitment to communicate the meaning and essence of percussion music to its audience, from arrangement of Bach to avant-garde contemporary pieces by Donatoni, in high calibre performances with a whimsical twist. As a queer Asian percussionist, Dr. Lau challenges the conventional narratives and works to change the traditional prescribed career path.
Matthew is the co-founder and artistic director of Hong Kong contemporary percussion group The Up:Strike Project, and is part of the duo Fisher/Lau Project Matthew enjoys an international teaching & performing career, 2019–2022 engagements include appearance in universities, festival and competitions in countries like USA, Argentina, Mexico, Peru, Taiwan, Spain, Australia, and Russia. Matthew obtained his DMA in percussion performance from Stony Brook University under Eduardo Leandro. Matthew was awarded the prestigious LAB Grant from the Boston Foundation for 2022–2023. Matthew also receives additional projects & touring grants from Hong Kong Arts Development Council, and is named Award for New Artist at the 2018 Hong Kong Arts Development Awards. He is currently on the Board of Advisor and Keyboard Committee for The Percussive Arts Society, and Board of Directors for The Vibraphone Project Inc.
Dr. Lau is Premier Artist of Marimba One, Artist Endorser of Black Swamp Percussion, and Signature Artist of Encore/Salyers Mallets. In his spare time he is an avid yoga practitioner and believes proper alignment can get rid of certain soreness in percussion playing. He is also a Level 1 Master Knitter from The Knitter’s Guild Association.
Bevis Ng, a Toronto-based percussionist from Hong Kong, specializes in contemporary classical music. He is pursuing a Doctor of Musical Arts in Percussion Performance at the University of Toronto, supported by the Ontario Graduate Scholarship and Terence Clarkson and Cornelis van de Graaff Graduate Scholarship. His research focuses on rehearsal strategies for percussion chamber music.
Bevis founded two percussion ensembles: the award-winning KöNG Duo with Hoi Tong Keung and the Kairos Percussion Quartet. KöNG Duo has performed internationally in Germany, the Netherlands, and the U.S., and is a Marimba One ensemble artist. The newly formed Kairos Percussion Quartet, featuring Andrew Busch, Nikki Huang, and Thomas Li, has performed across Canada, including at the Aga Khan Museum and McGill University. In 2024, they were featured as the solo quartet in Kevin Lau’s Charon’s Dance with the University of Toronto’s Wind Symphony.
Bevis emphasizes the power of thoughtful programming, composer collaboration, and recontextualizing existing repertoires to make contemporary music more accessible. His co-curated project, good morning, hong kong, performed by KöNG Duo, combines video, lighting, voice, and music to explore nostalgia and longing for a lost home. Through his work, Bevis aims to make contemporary classical music more relatable and inviting for audiences.
As a concise introduction to Ueno’s universe, it would be hard to imagine a better collection than this percussion-focused portrait album. From the subtlety of the title track, composed for vibraphone and sine tones and played with sublime sensitivity by its dedicated Karen Yu, to the increasingly dense …a.m… for a percussion quartet playing snare drum, vibes, metal pipe, and hacked alarm clocks, his creativity and spirit of inquiry come through loud and clear. Yu’s Up-Strike Project does a beautiful job with that piece and also delivers the closing track, Phase Patterns Of Likeness Slightly Off. Its lush sonorities come as a relief after the intensity of I am the uncle who sees past lives, a “collage of a collage” with fragmented vocals and electronics that throb and whine. After seeing Ueno nearly drown himself for his art, I would have been disappointed not to have one piece that was at least somewhat confrontational!
— Jeremy Shatan, 1.10.2026
New Focus Recordings is an artist-led collective label featuring releases in contemporary creative music of many stripes, as well as new approaches to older repertoire. The label was founded by guitarist Dan Lippel, composer Peter Gilbert in 2004, and composer/engineer Ryan Streber in 2004, formed …Read More …
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