Han-earl Park

Han-earl Park at Stet Lab (Cork, December 9th 2008). Photo by John Hough.

Han-earl Park (박한얼) (www.busterandfriends.com) works from / within / around the traditions of idiom-agnostic, experimental improvised musics, sometimes engineering theater, sometimes inventing ritual. He feels the gravitational pull of collaborative, multi-authored contexts, and has worked with animators, filmmakers, poets, theater and mime performers, dancers and installation artists. As a musician (guitar, banjo, bass guitar, piano, electronics and software) he has performed in clubs, theaters, art galleries, concert halls, and (ad-hoc) alternative spaces in Denmark, England, Ireland, The Netherlands, Scotland and the USA.

As a constructor of low- and mid-tech electronic and software devices, and as an occasional score-maker, Park is interested in partial, and partially frustrating, context-specific artifacts; artifacts that amplify social relationships and, in some instances, objects that obscure the location of the author.

He is involved in ongoing collaborations with Bruce Coates, and with Franziska Schroeder, fifteen year long associations with Alex Fiennes and Murray Campbell, and has performed with Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith, George E. Lewis, J. D. Parran, Paul Dunmall, Pauline Oliveros, Thomas Buckner, Kato Hideki, Mark Sanders, Chick Lyall, Jan Langedijk, Stu Ritchie, Koen Nutters, Pedro Rebelo, Katie O’Looney, Elspeth Murray, Mark Trayle and Hannes Raffaseder. He is also the constructor of io 0.0.1 beta, an interactive musical artifact, and cofounder of the Church of Sonology. In addition to Smith, Lyall and Trayle, he has studied with the improviser-composers Richard Barrett, Joel Ryan and David Rosenboom, composers Clarence Barlow and Marina Adamia, and the installation artist Sara Roberts.

Park is a recipient of grants from the Arts Council of Ireland and Music Network, and a recipient the Ahmanson Foundation Scholarship and the Calarts Scholarship. He has appeared at festival including Sonic Acts (Amsterdam), the Center for Experiments in Art, Information and Technology Festival (California), dialogues festival (Edinburgh), Sonorities (Belfast) and VAIN Live Art (Oxford). In addition to numerous self-released CDs, his work has been released by Owlhouse Recordings, frimp.co.uk and Frog Peak Music. He has performed live on Resonance FM (London) and on Drift Radio (at mediascot.org), and his recordings have been featured on Kalvos and Damian’s New Music Bazaar (Vermont), and You Are Hear (at www.youarehear.co.uk) which was selected as Critics’ Choice by The Independent (UK).

Park is founder and curator of Stet Lab, a monthly improvised music space in Cork, Ireland, and teaches improvisation at the UCC Department of Music.

press and quotes

“Careful, crafty and well-played with that restrained yet fractured guitar that sounds so good. Han-earl’s sound seems to be in between Derek Bailey and Philip Gibbs.”

— Bruce Lee Gallanter (Downtown Music Gallery, NY)

“Innovative…”

— The Computer Music Journal

“Electro weirdo…”

— BBC – Collective

“Doesn’t sound like sewage!”

— Kalvos and Damian’s New Music Bazaar

“Beautiful music, incredibly focused…!”

— Nick Didkovsky (Doctor Nerve / Punos Music)

“Bandy-legged Han-earl Park (gitah)… drugged the ref and delivered a few kidney punches with a horseshoe in his boxing mitt.”

— Jamie Smith (Owlhouse Recordings)