ABOUT LISA KORI
Lisa Kori’s forthcoming first album, Daughter of the West, is borne of uncovering her family's roots in the American West. Stuck sitting in dusty Chinese general stores, her great-grandmother dreamed of being the first Chinese singer in Texas, a dream which sadly never came to pass. Her paternal great-great-grandfather became a Chinese-American activist in San Francisco Chinatown, frustrated with the erosion of Chinese civil rights. Her maternal great-grandfather voyaged from Japan to work the sugar cane fields in Hawaii, eventually making his way to California, only to be sent with his entire family to an internment camp during WWII. Co-produced with Grammy-winning engineer Marc Whitmore and recorded with industry veteran Jono Manson, Daughter of the West is arranged with a traditional country band and layered with Asian instruments such as erhu, pipa, guzheng and shamisen.
Lisa Kori’s journey through music has been circuitous. Raised in Hawaii and Oregon, she began playing piano and folk guitar as a child. Her teenage years brought a focus on classical music, culminating in a scholarship to study musical composition at Oberlin Conservatory. After becoming disillusioned with the world of academic music, she switched her major to New Media, spanning the electronic music, art and film departments. This led to a fellowship to research electronic music and sound art in fifteen countries around the world, documenting the work of creators she met along the way. She collaborated with ethnomusicologist David Novak to publish their combined research as a chapter in the third edition of Handmade Electronic Music by Nicolas Collins.
Continuing her travels, she spent time as an artist-in-residence at FABRICA in Treviso, Italy, EYEBEAM in Brooklyn, New York, and Hangar in Barcelona, Spain. She performed as a noise musician with her own synthesizers and software patches, and collaborated on a diverse array of experimental projects: Open Fit with Kyle McDonald, a process for creating open source pants on the fly, Anti-NIS Accessories with Caitlin Morris, a speculative fiction project imagining the future of surveillance, and Sway with Caitlin Morris, a room-sized interactive sound installation that premiered at Sónar Festival in Barcelona in 2014.
In 2018, Lisa Kori began to miss the joy of her early days playing folk music. Chronic health issues also forced her to stop working long hours as an artist and researcher. Simplifying her lifestyle, she moved to an off grid house in rural New Mexico, and stumbled into the thriving Southwest Americana music scene. She began collaborating with local country and folk acts such as Dear Doctor, Clementine Was Right, and Lucy Barna, while slowly crafting her eclectic and heartfelt style as a solo musician. She is fortunate to count Eliza Gilkyson, Don Richmond and John Gorka as her musical mentors.
Rather than a historical retelling, the songs in Daughter of the West are a compilation of hopes and dreams of what it means to be of East Asian descent in the American West.
Daughter of the West is supported in part by:
Private Patrons
Lisa Kori’s artist website is at lisakori.net.
Lisa Kori’s full CV as a musician, artist, actor and performer can be found here.
