Tamara Yadao is a Filipino‑American composer, musician, and interdisciplinary artist whose work bridges experimental practice, intercultural experience, and repurposed technologies. Beginning piano at the age of four, she developed a lyrical, baroque‑inflected style that later expanded into experimental pop explorations and ambient soundscapes using Game Boys, game consoles, electronics, synths, and vocals.

A Brooklynite at the turn of the 21st century, Yadao immersed herself in the borough’s conceptual art and music community, performing freely improvised sound with laptop‑processed guitars, toys, and radio transmission, while organizing DIY shows in galleries and alternative spaces. During this period, she cultivated a fascination with vintage game console sound chips, reimagining hardware and software through inventive misuse — a form of conceptual repurposing that challenges intended technological functions.

Through her chip music project Corset Lore and the game art duo foci + loci, which she co‑founded with Chris Burke in 2010, she has been both creating multi‑layered sound worlds shaped by experimental and underground music paradigms. Among others, she has presented her work internationally at MoMA PS1 (New York), Centre Pompidou (Paris), and Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart), including the Rethinking Affordances symposium in 2018.

She has spoken about virtual instrument design at Dartmouth College and at the Museum of Arts & Design in New York City. She has also received an American Composers Forum grant and an Individual Artist grant from the New York State Council on the Arts. She holds an MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts in New York City, a foundation that informs her interdisciplinary approach and ongoing exploration of intercultural sound and adaptive composition. Yadao is currently supported by an Asian Cultural Council fellowship in Philippine ethnomusicology, studying José Maceda’s research at UP Diliman on kulintang music, further deepening her exploration of intercultural sound and adaptive approaches to composition.

Her most recent release, 81 Terpsichore, Corset Lore’s first full‑length and loose concept album, imagines a futuristic community locked in a race to the top of a conformist food chain. Set during a non‑stop mall party, the album balances science fiction and social commentary with the intimacy of a diary entry. This hybrid, chip‑adjacent work draws on fragments of lo‑fi Game Boy sketches and layered vocals to explore shifting states of subjectivity, discipline, fragility, and human connection.

Corset Lore logo by Richard Alexander Caraballo

Photo by Marjorie Becker / Chiptography.com