final Stet Lab event of 2009

Monday, December 7th 2009

9:00 pm (doors: 8:45 pm)

Upstairs @ The Roundy [map…]
Castle Street
Cork, Ireland

€10 (€5)

The final Stet Lab event of 2009 will take place on Monday, 7th December, upstairs at The Roundy, Castle Street, Cork, Ireland. The event will feature the innovative Belfast-based improviser-composer, multi-instrumentalist and computer artist, Justin Yang.

The club’s very first cover band will comprise Justin Yang (saxophones and electronics) and Han-earl Park (guitar). Park remarks, however, that “who we’re covering, and how we’re covering it, is a little bit of a secret. Consider it a challenge to the audience to discover it themselves.”

A native of California, Justin Yang is currently exploring the use of real-time computer animation as notational and interactive constructs at the Sonic Arts Research Centre in Belfast. He is a musician who eschews the prioritization of pitch, rhythm or timbre and instead utilizes communication as the driving factor in his work. A student of both Anthony Braxton and Brian Ferneyhough, Yang says his work “lives in the spaces between composition / improvisation; jazz / classical / vernacular; electro-acoustic / instrumental; notated / graphically-scored / freely-improvised; [and] performance-art / sound-art / installation-art”.

Performing alongside this special guest at Stet Lab is the club’s founder and curator, Cork-based guitarist and improviser Han-earl Park.

Opening the event will be three performers reunited on the Stet Lab stage: Marian Murray (violin), Susan Geaney (flute) and Veronica Tadman (voice). They have been improvising for many years as individuals and as part of larger improvising ensembles but this is the first night for the trio to perform together as a unit.

“I am really looking forward to, and delighted to be, performing with Marian and Susan,” says Tadman who is no stranger to Stet Lab. “I have missed having the two of them at Stet Lab the past year and it will be fantastic to be able to perform with them.”

The event will begin at 9:00 pm (doors open at 8:45 pm) and entry is €10 (€5).

Stet Lab will return in 2010 with Istanbul-based improviser and electronic musician Korhan Erel on Monday, 11th January.

the performers

Justin Yang belongs to a generation of artists which can alternatively be thought of as post-idiom, post-scene, post-fame, post-artistic role (maybe as Morton Feldman suggests post-music). Like many of his contemporaries, Yang’s work lives in the spaces between composition/improvisation; jazz / classical / vernacular; electro-acoustic / instrumental; notated / graphically-scored / freely-improvised; performance-art / sound-art / installation-art; and it is developing within a contemporary movement towards an ontologically new notion of art. Yang’s work, reflecting contemporary practices across the artistic spectrum, is characterized by an intensive exploration of technology. Whether, like Evan Parker or John Butcher, it is the mechanical technology of Adolphe Sax, or the digital world engendered by Max Matthews; as McLuhan after Benjamin posits, the artistic merit of this work is inseparable from its means of production. It is a live art whether free-improvisation, materials algorithmically triggered in real-time, or a collection of electronic oscillations which only make sense when combined acoustically. It is characterized by interactivity, produced by a decentralized, multi-nodal network of operators, making not only the materials an extemporaneous expression but the means of organization an in-the-moment invention as well. The trappings of this work, its essential backbone, is no longer scales or motives, rhythms or timbres, but infrastructure—how to compellingly engage the performer in a network of communication and interaction with other performers, whether it be man or machine—moving the performance model from one of expression/production to that of navigation/exploration; what Anthony Braxton would call ‘the mystery of navigation through form’.

Yang’s 3VDB, inspired by the Morton Feldman composition Three Voices and the work of improviser Derek Bailey, is a self-contained system for performer with live electronics. It is made up of a live microphone, live processing software, two amplified speakers on each side of the performer, programmable foot controllers, and screen-based animated graphic feedback.

Han-earl Park works from/within/around the traditions of idiom-agnostic, experimental improvised musics, sometimes engineering theater, sometimes inventing ritual. He prefers collaborative, multi-authored contexts, and has worked with animators, film makers, 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.

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, Kato Hideki, Mark Sanders, Chick Lyall, Jan Langedijk, Stu Ritchie, Koen Nutters, Pedro Rebelo, 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.

Park is a recipient of grants from the Arts Council of Ireland, and a recipient of the Ahmanson Foundation Scholarship and the Calarts Scholarship. He has appeared at festivals 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).

Additionally, Park founded and curates Stet Lab, a monthly improvised music space in Cork, Ireland, and teaches improvisation at the UCC Department of Music.