Burning Star Core for Krautrock

Launched in 1993, Burning Star Core is the pseudonym of Taiwanese-American musician and multimedia designer Chih-Fu Spencer Yeh. Originally based in Cincinnati, Ohio, since moving there at age five, Yeh is currently stationed in Brooklyn, New York. Having played since his youth, Yeh's primary instrument is the violin, which he augments with guitars, synthesizers, electronics and voice to craft an intrepidly trippy and challenging 21-century krautrock, propelled by a distinct sense of humour and a vision to expand the possibilities of sound and its manipulation. Yeh runs the DroneDisco vanity label, which is only one of many venues through which Burning Star Core have issued over sixty recordings across cassette, CD-R and vinyl. Self-described as a "catch-all" project documenting his various creative whims, Yeh's varied approach encompasses ambient drone, musique concrète, blown-out motorik rock excursions, fractured pop songs, electroacoustic noise ranging from the caustic to the blissful, and Kurt Schwitters-esque vocal improvisations.

A prolific collaborator, Yeh has worked and played live with a number of sound artists such as Thurston Moore, Weasel Walter, John Wiese, Kemialliset Ystävät, Carlos Giffoni, Aaron Dilloway and Tony Conrad, and cut records with psychedelic noise and rock bands Prurient, Yellow Swans, Hototogisu and Comets on Fire. While Yeh remains the centre of the project, the live and studio lineup swells and shrinks with collaborators, with Burning Star Core temporarily adopting a more "rock"-based orientation by the mid-2000's with the addition of Hair Police's Trevor Tremaine and Robert Beatty along with noise music maverick Mike Shiflet. Yeh's interest in creating mutant sounds began in his youth, witnessing a television performance by the Residents and later experiencing a complete paradigm shift discovering Nurse With Wound's Homotopy to Marie, Sonic Youth's Confusion Is Sex and Merzbow's Venereology. His wide-ranging tastes in both film and music - particularly prog - would inform the developing Burning Star Core aesthetic, with its sound also influenced by later Coil, Henry Flynt, and Takehisa Kosugi and the Taj Mahal Travellers.

Among his many releases, curious progheads are advised to investigate Yeh's most critically acclaimed work, from A Brighter Summer Day's ecstatic violin-and-electronics drone to the free jazz-meets-krautrock cacophony of 2007's Operator Dead... Post Abandoned, the Faustian sound collage of 2010's Papercuts Theater and the colourful neo-kosmische musik of 2008's Challenger, and albums which collect a plethora of styles like The Very Heart of the World and Blood Lightning 2007. In the early 2010's, Yeh - worrying Burning Star Core lacked definition due to his habitual eclecticism - began to slowly perform and release music under his given name, choosing to focus more exclusively on violin and voice experiments and mostly jettisoning his rock inclinations. While Burning Star Core remains on hiatus, Yeh played a handful of live shows under the moniker in the mid-to-late-2010's, and issued a second retrospective compilation, Statue of Trust 2004-2007, in 2017.

Yeh's vast body of work is warmly recommended to fans of Ashtray Navigations, Volcano the Bear, Sunroof!, Takehisa Kosugi, Nurse With Wound, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Vibracathedral Orchestra and Tony Conrad (with and without Faust).

"Challenger" (2008)

"Blood Lightning 2007" (2007)

"A Brighter Summer Day" (2002)

"Practice April 4th 2008" (2012) <----some major Tony Conrad+Faust action here

"Operator Dead... Post Abandoned" (2007)

"Ghosts of Niagara" (collaboration with Prurient) (2008)

"The Very Heart of the World" (2005)

"Mes Soldats Stupides '96 - '04" (2005)

"Statue of Trust 2004​-​2007" (2017)