Jason Kahn’s work with electronics involves chaotic feedback systems and placing his body in the circuit flow. Grabbing open leads with the hands makes and breaks circuits, causing the synthesizer to overload or momentarily collapse.

Jason Kahn
Born 1960 in New York, Jason Kahn is a artist, musician and writer. He lives and works in Zürich.

Kahn’s work with electronics involves chaotic feedback systems and placing his body in the circuit flow. Grabbing open leads with the hands makes and breaks circuits, causing the synthesizer to overload or momentarily collapse. Various contact microphones, electromagnetic inductors and the synthesizer’s own output via a mixing board are used to modulate the parameters of the synthesizer. This results in a very dynamic system, often difficult to control, but allowing great expressivity—much like any acoustic instrument, but electronic.

Live radio captures during the concert and recordings made beforehand in the performance space and its environs provide further working material for each concert. In the end, these performances are essentially site-specific works, improvising with the space at hand, both in the sense of its physicality and the sounds found there. Every performance is different, not only because the music is improvised but also because the source material used pertains directly to each space being played in.