Banrei - short bio

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Banrei (Jake Harper) is a sound artist, mostly known for his work with sirens and large-scale public sound installation. 

He has performed and exhibited extensively around the world, including at the Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the National Gallery of China, Beijing. He was recently selected to represent Antarctica at the Venice Biennale of Art 2017.  

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extended bio

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Born in 1988 in Washington DC. Harper spent the early part of his career as a keyboardist and programmer in New York. His first recording credit was on a song produced by John Legend (though he was mis-credited as the cellist - he had in fact performed on keyboard).  From 2006 - 2010, he performed in groups with a diverse range of artists including Theophilus London, Machinedrum, Jimmy Edgar, DMC (Run DMC) and M-1 (Dead Prez).

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His work as a programmer often required chopping up music samples for looping in electronic music production. The procedure involves zooming into millisecond windows of a sample in search of the loop point - the exact moment that allows a sample to repeat correctly and form part of a beat. He discovered through this process a surprising class of sounds living in the dynamics of ultra-short time.  The rejectamenta and leftover fragments of these early sampling projects became clearer over time, slowly evolved into the chop methodology and the burst central to his current work. 

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In 2010, he saw a photo of Soundwalk Collective in an issue of Purple Magazine and sent them a cold email. The email included a remix of their Ulysses Syndrome composition with a request to be allowed to intern for the group. He was invited to join as a full-fledged member shortly thereafter, leading to his first exposure in the international contemporary art scene with exhibitions at the Pompidou and the National Museum of China, and his departure from utilizing sound within a musical discipline to an exhibition-focused context.

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From 2012 to 2015, he departed from making work to pursue a life as a Buddhist monk and priest in Nagoya and Tokyo, Japan.  Upon returning to the US in July of 2015, he adopted the name 'Banrei', a word found on communal graves in a Buddhist graveyard that roughy translates as 'a myriad of souls', emblematic of sublime compassion. Shortly thereafter, he began releasing and exhibiting sonic works as a solo artist under the name.  

In 2016, Harper formed Public Decibel, an architecture firm that seeks to solve urban design and placemaking challenges with sound.