Han-earl Park

Han-earl Park left Brooklyn at the end of 2013. The last few months in New York were marked by, among others, performances with Andrea Parkins, Anna Webber, Gerald Cleaver, and Evan Parker. In November, as a kind of leaving party, Kyoko Kitamura and Josh Sinton organized Gowanus Company.

Released by SLAM Productions, ‘Anomic Aphasia’ (SLAMCD 559) documents two of Park’s New York-based projects: the ensemble Eris 136199 with Catherine Sikora and Nick Didkovsky, and Metis 9, a playbook of improvisative tactics, devised in collaboration with Sikora and Josh Sinton. The album has been described as “beautiful noise” (KFJC 89.7 FM), “ein glorioser Bastard aus Noise und süßer Träumerei” (Bad Alchemy), and given “☆☆☆☆½” by All About Jazz.

Back in Europe, Park has been working with several musicians: performing with Dominic Lash and Corey Mwamba as part of the Tubers MiniFestival (Manchester); with Hilary Jeffery, Andrea Parkins and Simon Rose at Ma Thilda (Berlin); with Justin Yang and Caroline Pugh at the Sonic Arts Research Centre (Belfast); and others. He has also made trips back to New York to perform with Tom Rainey, with Mette Rasmussen, Michael Foster and Pascal Niggenkemper, as part of Eris 136199 (with Nick Didkovsky and Catherine Sikora), with Andrew Drury, and with Mike Pride and Catherine Sikora. The recording ‘A Little Brittle Music’ with Dominic Lash and Corey Mwamba, will be released in November.

In December, Park’s current working trio with Dominic Lash and Mark Sanders will be joined by Caroline Pugh for a Culture Ireland funded tour with performances in Birmingham, Bristol and London. He will also be back in Brooklyn later in December to perform with Ingrid Laubrock, and with Nick Didkovsky and Josh Sinton.

Bruce Coates

Bruce Coates has been busy performing in many situations including performing Improvisations and Piece for Bill Viola by Chris Cundy as part of the Cheltenham Improvisers Orchestra (Wilson Art Gallery, Cheltenham); with Paul Dunmall, Corey Mwamba, Seth Bennett, Walt Shaw and Mark Sanders, and with Alan Jenkins, Lorin Halsall and Walt Shaw, as part of the Subjects and Structures exhibition by Andrew Coates and Walt Shaw (Artsmith LIVE Gallery, Derby); and as part of Steve Troman’s Days of May Project with Ruth Angell, Sid Peacock (Cafe Ort, Birmingham).

Coates’ regular ensembles and projects include South Leicestershire Improvisers Ensemble, a monthly ensemble of shifting line-ups (Beerhouse, Market Harborough, and Quad Studios, Leicester); A, B and C (with Lee Allatson and Stewart Brackley); and CHA (with Christopher Hobbs and Virginia Anderson).

Coates also participated in Centrifuge’s Developing an Aesthetic symposium in 2015 (Crewe).

Both the performances as part of Walt Shaw’s Subjects and Structures exhibition, and A, B and C have a recording forthcoming.

Franziska Schroeder

Barely Cool (PFMCD090). Artwork by Arthur Lacerda. © 2015 pfMENTUM.

Just released by pfMENTUM: Franziska Schroeder’s CD, ‘Barely Cool’ (PFMCD090) with Marcos Campello and Renato Godoy. Recorded in Rio de Janeiro. The recording was made during Schroeder’s ethnographic research of free improvisation in Brazil.

Aiming to apply strategies of listening taken from network performance to the context of theater, Schroeder recently received an Arts and Humanities Research Council impact grant for ‘Distributed Listening—socially engaged art,’ a collaboration between the Sonic Arts Research Centre, Queen’s University, the Lyric Theatre (Belfast), Theatre company 42 Street (Manchester), The Science Festival Northern Ireland, and The Young Vic (London):

Enabling theatre practitioners and participating communities to engage in network music performance strategies/technologies (‘distributed listening’), normally only available in HE institutions.

The project team will develop a custom-designed app for mobile devices (smart phones) that allows young community participants to explore various listening strategies.

We have teamed up with two theatre companies, the Lyric Theatre, Belfast and 42nd Street, Manchester. 42nd Street is a young people’s mental health charity providing innovative services to young people with mental health problems. Both companies regularly work with community participants, practising ‘socially engaged arts’, a form of active citizenship, art that intends to effect social change, that is artist-led and participant focussed. The theatre companies have identified 20 young adults each who, during 8 weeks workshops will learn to use the new app in order to create a creative theatre piece based on the idea of ‘distributed listening’.

In addition, Schroeder has a new collaboration with concert harpist Tanya Houghton. They will premiere four new works for saxophone, harp and electronics at SARC, Belfast, 17 December, 2015.

Progetto rumoristico, destrutturato, ad elevato tasso di provocazione e insieme di ispirazione ed ascolto “altri”, io 0.0.1 beta ++ salta il preambolo ed esiste d’emblée nelle iperacide note della distorta chitarra di Han-Earl Park che di getto aprono le lievitanti turbolenze di un trio minacciosamente sensibile (o viceversa) e forte, peraltro, di una piuttosto enfatica auto-presentazione “Sul palco: due uomini, una donna e un artefatto, un mélange sospeso di hardware industriale, militare e domestico. Gli umani reggono oggetti lucidi e graziosi, ma il marchingegno si regge solitario; e mentre la donna e gli uomini producono suono (vibrando l’aria) toccando e diteggiando i graziosi oggetti, l’artefatto suona senza esser toccato affatto. Esso e gli umani improvvisano insieme, rispondendo alle reciproche gestualità musicali”.

Le corde tese di Park imbastiscono un plateau scabro ma di lungo e persistente respiro, vivente nelle articolazioni e nella tessitura della sua fisica elettroacustica; mentre sul versante “meccanico” dell’instrumentarium i modi performanti di Franziska Schroeder arricchiscono l’altra metà del sax (a fianco delle Matana Roberts, Alexandra Grimal, Ingrid Laubrock etc.) di una voce sperimentante e nuda, in sintonia e insieme dissonanza con i flussi paralleli e convergenti del free-player purosangue Bruce Coates, e il tutto si dipana entro uno svolgimento a canovaccio libero e istantaneo, lungo il suo deviante svolgimento interrogandosi (senza eccessivo paradosso) se l’autentica “alienità” sia rispettivamente appannaggio della cosa o, piuttosto e viceversa, dell’ “umano”.

E ancora così prosegue la sofisticata presentazione (peraltro abbastanza sinergica agli intendimenti dei tre): “io non ha inclinazione melodica e non ha addestramento narrativo per prevalere: vi è, però, un definito sentimento di connessione in ciò che Park chiama: gestualità non-periodiche, che nondimeno evocano periodicità”.

Ennesimo esempio di post-avanguardia “desiderante” (com’era in voga insinuare nell’era della sperimentazione più politicizzata—almeno negli intenti), io 0.0.1 beta ++ vive di ascolto trasmissivo e di performance aperta, che si abbevera nell’istantaneità, e nell’interplay sdogana il segno ed il polso strutturante dell’aleatorietà.

Insomma, l’avanguardia è tornata: non che fosse mai stata davvero latitante, ma gli interrogativi sonori, lacerati e critici, del trio pongono come oggetto radicale la disumanizzazione progressiva e le implicazioni del sempre più preponderante avvento della macchina, forse retrodatando le intenzioni alle prime decadi del secolo scorso e alle relative allarmistiche dottrine, ma riprendendole lungo le forme acutamente nervose e l’attenzione creativa dei medianici e cyborghiani performers e del loro interplay attrattivamente imperfetto. [Original article…]

Translation by Leofranc Holford-Strevens and Melanie L. Marshall:

A noisy, unstructured project, with a high level of provocation and at the same time of inspiration and listening to ‘other’, io 0.0.1 beta ++ skips the preamble and inhabits straightaway in the hyperacid notes of Han-Earl Park’s distorted guitar, which on one go open the fermenting turbulence of a menacingly perceptible trio (or vice versa), yet strong in a rather emphatic self-presentation: “On the stage: two men, a woman, and an artifact, a freestanding mélange of industrial, military, and domestic hardware. The humans hold graceful, polished objects, but the domed assemblage stands alone. And while the woman and men make sound (vibrate the air) holding and fingering the graceful objects, the artifact makes sounds without being touched at all. io and the humans improvise together, listening to each other, responding to each other’s musical gestures.”

The tight strings of Park improvise a rugged plateau but of long-term and lasting, living in the articulation and in the range of his electroacoustic physics, while on the ‘mechanical’ side of the instrumentarium the performing styles of Franziska Schroeder enrich the other half of the sax (alongside Matana Roberts, Alexandra Grimal, Ingrid Laubrock etc.) with a naked and experimental voice, together in harmony and dissonance with parallel and converging streams of the thoroughbred free-player Bruce Coates, and everything unfolds within a free and instantaneous improvisation, throughout its deviant development inquiring (without excessive paradox) whether authentic ‘otherness’ is the prerogative of the matter or, rather and viceversa of, the ‘human’.

And so the sophisticated presentation continues (quite synergistic with the intentions of the three): “io is not melodically inclined and has no narrative training to overcome; there is, though, a definite feeling of connection, in what Park calls ‘non-periodic gestures that nonetheless evoke periodicity.’”

Yet another example of ‘desiring’ post-avant-garde (as it was fashionable to suggest in the era of more politicized experimentation—at least intended as such), io 0.0.1 beta++ experiences a transmissive listening and open performance, which drinks in instantaneity and in the interplay displays the sign and the structuring pulse of the aleatory.

In short, the avant-garde is back: not that it ever really went away, but the questioning sounds, mangled and critical, of the trio set out as a radical object progressive dehumanization and the implications of the ever more dominant advent of the machine, perhaps backdating its intentions to the first decades of the last century and its alarmist theories, but taking them up through the acutely nervous forms and creative attention of medium-like and cyborgian performers and their charmingly imperfect interplay.

Incidentally, this review quotes from Sara Roberts’ liner notes.

[More info on the recording…] [All reviews…]

‘io 0.0.1 beta++’ (SLAMCD 531) is available from SLAM Productions. [Details…]

personnel: io 0.0.1 beta++ (itself), Han-earl Park (guitar), Bruce Coates (alto and sopranino saxophones) and Franziska Schroeder (soprano saxophone).

© 2011 Han-earl Park.
℗ 2011 SLAM Productions.