About Bonnie

Baltimore City
Bonnie Jones is a Korean-American improvising musician, poet, and performer working with electronic sound and text. She performs solo and in numerous collaborative music, film, and visual art projects.

Bonnie’s work explores the fluidity and function of electronic noise (field recordings, circuit bending) and text (poetry, found, spoken, visual). Her art seeks opportunities within different mediums to expose the fluid nature of individual identity, history, form, and meaning.
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we listen, how we remember



Site-specific performance and sound installation, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD, 2016

we listen, how we remember was commissioned by the Walters Art Museum for their public performance series, ART/SOUND/NOW. Artists were asked to choose a gallery in the museum and create a performance that activated different ways of experiencing the art. we listen, how we remember was an invitation to the audience to consider the sonic history of art and artifacts.

we listen, how we remember responds to the Migration Art, Byzantine, and Pre-Medieval art galleries. The Migration Art period was a turbulent 700-year time in European history after the fall of the Roman Empire. I was inspired by the fact that this art was born of migration and movement. The objects, by necessity, were portable and utilitarian and the visual themes expressed the movement of people, culture, ideas, and religion.

In the design of these objects you see Paganism crossing with Christianity as Germanic tribes interacted with Celts. Objects made with rare jewels and metals were influenced by tribes that were exposed to Asian regions through movement in Eastern Europe. The objects also held, within their materials, the history of power, violence, and erasure; of people whose cultural identities were absorbed and altered.

A short reading and performance opened the work, where I used objects with attached tranducers to naturally “filter” sound using rocks, objects, and other materials. Afterwards, the audience was invited to move through the galleries and sound installation. Sounds were placed throughout the gallery’s rooms, emanating from objects positioned on the floor, hidden speakers placed under benches, and larger speakers placed out of sight, and included recordings of the museum’s HVAC and ambient sounds, shortwave radio samples, and sine tones. These materials enabled perception of sound to shift as the audience moved through the rooms. I chose frequencies that activated resonant frequencies in the objects and tuned one set of sounds to establish tritones (diminished fifths) or what during the Renaissance was referred to as the “Devil’s Interval” for is dissonant character.

we listen, how we remember imagines art objects and artifacts as lively and noisy with complex, layered histories. The work imagines that sound has imbued a physical, bodily, and perceptual history into these objects that can be activated and released.
  • we listen, how we remember
    we listen, how we remember
    Performance installation. History, sine tones, samples, objects, moving bodies. Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD, August 2016.
  • we listen, how we remember
    Performance installation. History, sine tones, samples, objects, moving bodies. Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD, August 2016.

And if I live a thousand lives I hope to remember one



Recorded audio on 6-minute looping cassette. 2015 – present

Audio Palimpsests are works created by manipulating, in live performances, a tape cassette player and a TDK EC-6M 6 minute looping cassette tape. The player is used during the performance to create playback and feedback by indiscriminately pressing the player’s controls (record, stop, forward, rewind).

Each work in this ongoing series is a six minute recombinant document of numerous live performances over the past several years where I recorded, re-recorded, and erased the sounds of audio tape feedback, myself and other musicians. The cassette is continually recording over itself every six minutes, an audio palimpsest of personal performance history.

The cassette itself becomes a site for performances of the past and for ones that never existed, and the releases document this impossible performance. 
  • And if I live a thousand lives I hope to remember one
    And if I live a thousand lives I hope to remember one
    Conceptual cassette sound work. Electronics, cassette, feedback. Constructed from several live performances, October 2015.
  • And if I live a thousand lives I hope to remember one
    Conceptual cassette sound work. Electronics, cassette, feedback. Constructed from several live performances, October 2015.

by the time



Electronic music composition, SOUNDWORKS, London ICA, London, 2012.

"by the time" was commissioned by the London ICA as part of their "Soundworks" exhibition, launched in conjunction with their presentation of Bruce Nauman's "Days." The work explores language and meaning through time and space, using electronics and field recordings. It present the paradox at the heart of sound, that ephemerality is also deeply embedded in our memories and bodies.  
  • by the time
    by the time
    Installation view, sound works are selected from embedded screen and played back through speakers in the room. by the time. Electronics, samples, field recordings. Soundworks, London Institute of Contemporary Art, June 2012.
  • by the time
    Sound work. Electronics, samples, field recordings. Soundworks, London Institute of Contemporary Art, June 2012.

the p in pattern



Solo electronics, improvisation and “the p in pattern”, Options Series, ESS, Chicago, 2018. Curated by Andrew Clinkman, Tim Daisy, and Ken Vandermark.

the p in pattern, explores language, noise, and pure tones as compositional materials that subvert listener’s expectations and explore the boundaries between speech, meaning, and sound. This piece takes it’s title from the explanatory pronunciation text that you would see in a foreign language phrase book. The “p in pattern” is how one such phrasebook described the Korean, Hangul consonant ㅃ.
  • the p in pattern
    the p in pattern
    Solo electronics improvisation. Circuit bent electronics, sine tones, samples, and microphones. ESS, Chicago, IL, May 2018.
  • the p in pattern
    Solo electronics improvisation. Circuit bent electronics, sine tones, samples, and microphones. ESS, Chicago, IL, May 2018.

Improvised Music, Bonnie Jones & Michael Zerang



Duo improvisation, Bonnie Jones (electronics); Michael Zerang (percussion), High Zero Festival, Baltimore, MD, 2015.

A first time meeting of accomplished improviser Michael Zerang, percussion and Bonnie Jones, electronics at the High Zero Festival of Experimental and Improvised Music. This 30 minute set explores the dynamic range of timbres and textures of circuit bent electronics and percussion. 
  • Improvised Music, Bonnie Jones & Michael Zerang
    Improvised Music, Bonnie Jones & Michael Zerang
    Improvised music collaboration. Bonnie Jones, electronics and Michael Zerang, percussion. High Zero Festival, Baltimore, MD, September 2015.
  • Improvised Music, Bonnie Jones & Michael Zerang
    Improvised music collaboration. Bonnie Jones, electronics and Michael Zerang, percussion. High Zero Festival, Baltimore, MD, September 2015.