Joo Won Park (joowonpark.net) makes music with electronics, toys, and other sources that he can record or synthesize.   He is the recipient of Knight Arts Challenge Detroit (2019) and the Kresge Arts Fellowship (2020).  His music and writings are available on ICMC DVD, Spectrum Press, MIT Press, PARMA, Visceral Media, MCSD, SEAMUS, and No Remixes labels. He currently teaches Music Technology at Wayne State University.

Read and watch more about Joo Won in The Key Magazine (2013), Two-Five-One (2015),  Cleveland Classical (2019), Killscreen Magazine (2019), The D Brief (2021), and Relevant Tones (2024).

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Reviews

“Nolda Very Much” by Joo Won Park was premiered at the festival by Dr. Kang. The piece is based on distinctive Korean traditions. The crisp articulations of the clarinet and the accompanying electronic sound effects urge audiences to find playfulness. – Reveille, Feb 2023

PS Quartet No. 1, also from 2017, by Korean-born, Michigan-based composer Joo Won Park, in which four performers manipulate audio and video via PlayStation controllers–which was very entertaining both to see and hear. – New Music Box, Sep 2022

Taking advantage of the faceted atrium’s unusual acoustics, Park’s original score for electric guitar, percussion and eight laptop computers emanated from small amplifiers distributed throughout the skylit room, whose tall panels of teakwood resonated with every whisper and rhythm. At one point, the entire ensemble of dancers rushed from one end of the space to the other, as if the McGregor Center was a cruise ship rocking and rolling in turbulent seas. Cloud cover during the 3 o’clock performance brought somber qualities to the action, but, when repeated at 5 o’clock and lit vividly by the setting sun, it was an ascension. – Dance Magazine, Aug 2022

Func Step Mode seems to synthesize every electronic alarm that ever existed and deluges the listener with them in a perpetuum mobile of thudding and shrieking. Not for the nervous, then, but I’ll grant that it communicates a manic joy. – Fanfare Magazine, Issue 45:2 (Nov/Dec 2021)

It’s one thing to push yourself out of your comfort zone. It’s quite another to deliberately put yourself in risky situations over and over again — part of the artistic strategy of electroacoustic composer and improviser Joo Won Park. “I like to solve a puzzle in front of the audience. – Cleveland Classical, May 2019

The only lighthearted work here, relatively speaking, is Joo Won Park’s Large Intestine. As suggested by the title, its premise is rather gross. In it, the composer imagines himself to be a taco “on a journey to a man’s digestive system, and this is what I heard inside the bowel.” Fortunately, this is not a music video. – Fanfare, April 2019

Joo Won Park who has brought his fascinating brand of electroacoustic composition and improvisation to venues as diverse as Brooklyn rock club Goodbye Blue Monday, internationally acclaimed art spaces Dreamland in Louisville and Behive in Korea, and electronic music festivals from Rutgers to Asheville to Indianapolis – Columbus Underground, February 2017

The most interesting part of the piece was the spatialization, and because of the articulate and high-pitched sounds that sounded like crosswalk indicators, listeners could track each performer’s movement around the hall without seeing them. The strict metric grid blurred as they reached the outer edges of the hall, making the audience’s awareness of space and distance even more heightened. – I Care If You Listen,  August 2016

Joo Won Park gave an amusing recital of live electro-acoustical works in which his instrumentarium included Lego pieces, chattering teeth and a Slinky – Wall Street Journal, January 2015 

In the hands of Philadelphia-based Joo Won Park, the no-input mixer is less a matter of singing than full-on, tantrum-level glossolalia, a heavy gurgle of electric fissues. Up above is Park’s October 1402 (for no-input mixer and computer), which at times sounds like an arcade game on its last legs, and at others like freakazoid hardcore free jazz improvisation.- Disquiet, October 2013 

Joo Won Park is a rising star among modern composers. He produces music by recording everyday sounds as well as some more unusual ones and designing his own instruments from these sounds, using specialized programs to process the sounds via computer. Some of the programs are so specialized, in fact, that he codes them himself, line by line. It is a painstaking process, but one that yields spectacular results.- Pathways Magazine, Oct 2010

Both in terms of manipulating sound, and simply using sound, Joo Won Park is fantastically talented, and it is apparent in every second, with every subtle change, with every click and swirl of this piece. With each phase, each time one texture moves into the next, one is certain that it could have occurred in no other way. Beautiful. – Asymmetry Magazine, April 2010