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.

Han-earl Park

Based in Brooklyn, during 2012, Han-earl Park has been performing with Michael Evans, Louise Dam Eckardt Jensen, Josh Sinton, Andrew Drury and others. He participated in Gowanus Company IV at the Douglass Street Music Collective, and as part of Out Of Your Head Brooklyn. A particular musical highlight was the performance with Tim Perkis and Harris Eisenstadt at The Stone (NYC) on September 7. On May 27, Eris 136199 (Nick Didkovsky, Han-earl Park and Catherine Sikora) debuted at Citizens Ontological Music Agenda/ABC No Rio (NYC).

2012 also saw the release of Richard Barrett and Han-earl Park’s ‘Numbers’ (CS 201 cd) from Creative Sources. A CD with a “bazillions of events” and of “transonic beauty and extreme structural atomization” according to Massimo Ricci, the record made Délire actuel’s 2012 Demanding Music Top 30. Barrett and Park performed in Scarborough on May 3, 2012. During that micro-tour, Park also performed as part of Mathilde 253 (with Charles Hayward and Ian Smith) at Freedom of the City (London), and as guest performer with the Mark Hanslip/Dominic Lash/Phillip Marks trio at Jazz @ The Oxford (London).

Audio recordings coming out in 2013 include ‘apophenia: A atomic symphony in 10 movements ii you seek iii a comfortable spot to listen iv to this v track the sofa perhaps vi or the vii floor however viii standing hand ix suspended over the volume x control you xi find that xii it is’ as part of ‘The $100 Guitar Project’ (BRIDGE 9381A/B) from Bridge Records, and the rerelease of the download album with Paul Dunmall and Mark Sanders which will be the final in the current series of download releases from busterandfriends.com (an earlier release in that series was with io 0.0.1 beta++ collaborator, Franziska Schroeder).

In addition to continuing his work with existing projects including Eris 136199, in 2013, Park will be performing and documenting a set of interactive, improvisative macros (he hesitates to actually call them compositions). Catherine Sikora and Josh Sinton and Park will perform an initial test-run at On The Way Out/Freddy’s (Brooklyn) on March 26.

Bruce Coates

‘Node/Flow/Mass Disaster Box’ at Magna (Rotherham, November 4, 2012). Photo © 2012 Bruce Coates.

Notable performance events in 2012 included the ‘Node/Flow/Mass Disaster Box’ at Magna (Rotherham) in November:

‘Node/Flow/Mass Disaster Box’ is an improvised sound piece bringing together 50 vocal and musical improvisers from the Midlands and South Yorkshire, performing on this magnificent post-industrial site. Birmingham Improvisers’ Orchestra and Juxtavoices, a unique Sheffield experimental anti-choir, provide the core of the performers along with musicians from all over the country.

Devised by Geoff Bright and Walt Shaw, the piece works with the idea of social processes and flows where individuals gather in groups, congregate as large collectives and disperse once again. Through sound improvisation it explores the history and atmosphere of the building and the spririt involved in the evacuation of the workplace. All inspired by the original 1970s steelworks’ ‘Diaster Box’, which contained plans, maps and procedures for evacuation in the event of a catastrophic explosion. [Read the rest…]

In addition to performances by the Birmingham Improvisers’ Orchestra, new projects for 2013 include a duo with Walt Shaw, and a trio with Christopher Hobbs (percussion/electronics) and Virginia Anderson (clarinets) which will be debuting at Fizzle (Birmingham) on February 5.

Franziska Schroeder

Franziska Schroeder, Showcase Concert 2012 flyer. © 2012, Franziska Schroeder. Photograph by Caroline Forbes.

In 2012 Franziska Schroeder had a few exciting gigs, such as playing with her trio FAINT at the Perspective on Musical Improvisation in Oxford, commissioning new works for saxophones, premiered at the Sonic Arts Research Centre, Belfast, playing at the Sounds New Contemporary Music Festival in Canterbury, as well as doing a great new work with Evan Parker and a group of traditional and improvising contemporary musicians, premiered at the Sonorities Festival of Contemporary Music, Belfast.

Schroeder was the Artistic Director of the Sonorities Festival, and she is also now the Chair of the Events Committee of the School of Creative Arts (CATE) at Queen’s University Belfast.

Schroeder published two chapters, one on the changes of form in music as brought forth by digital platforms. The chapter is ‘Shifting Listening Identities—Towards a Fluidity of Form in Digital Music’, and appears in S. Broadhurst and J. Machon (eds.), Identity, Performance and Technology: Practices of Empowerment, Embodiment and Technicity (Palgrave Macmillan).

The other chapter is co-authored with choreographer and pianist Imogene Newland and is entitled ‘The Musical Body—Devising a choreo-musical interpretation for the work Tierkreis (1974–75) by Karlheinz Stockhausen’. The work will appear in Nine Ways of Seeing a Body: Body & Performance (Triarchy Press) in 2013.

Schroeder is working hard on editing and writing for a forthcoming volume on improvisation, to include writings by David Borgo, Georgina Born and Evan Parker. Forthcoming in 2013: Improvisation in the 21st Century (Cambridge Scholars Publishing).

And last, Schroeder received a teaching development grant from the HEA (Higher Education Academy) to run the PhD public engagement training called ‘BIG EARS – learning to design sonic arts’ [Twitter…].