The performers were Mark Trayle (electronics), Gascia Ouzounian (violin), Chris Brown (piano), Paul Stapleton (percussion), Dan Goren (trumpet), Don Nichols (percussion), Simon Rose (saxophone), Gustavo Aguilar (drums), Han-earl Park (guitar), Ulrich Mitzlaff (’cello), Tasos Stamou (zither), Dominic Lash (double bass), Christopher Williams (double bass), Nuno Rebelo (guitar), Richard Scott (synthesizer), Steven Davis (drums), Pedro Rebelo (piano), Justin Yang (saxophone) and Franziska Schroeder (saxophone). Shortly after the performance, I wrote:
Thanks in to the members of my local trio (as Richard pointed out, it’s very hard not to feel the pull of tribalism), Ulrich Mitzlaff and Gascia Ouzounian; to the emergent section leader of the neighboring trio Pedro Rebelo (with whom, during the rehearsal/trial run, I would share looks when things (creatively) self-destructed); to the Simon Rose-Dan Goren-Paul Stapleton unit which, in the best possible sense, seemed to have an agenda entirely their own; to the two bass players, Dom Lash and Christopher Williams, who entertained my left ear; to the remarkable drummers, Gustavo Aguilar and Steve Davis, who always knew, better than the rest of us put together, how to push/pull such a large ensemble during free play; to Franziska Schroeder for soaring over the group; Chris Brown for the asymmetrical hocket between Pedro, Justin and myself; to the electro-dudes, Mark Trayle and Richard Scott, who always sounded like themselves (especially the bass sample, Richard) and who generously gave visual/physical cues in relation to their performance; to the other guitarist, Nuno Rebelo, who artfully avoided collisions—I think we played well together, even if we rarely played at the same time; and to Justin Yang for creating, with Gustavo, that all too brief Shepp/Sanders moment—a moment of ascension—that helped to remind me what this was all about.
And of course, thanks to Pedro, Steve and Franziska for hosting, organizing and inviting, and to Evan Parker for taking time to guide us and the music.
I feel privileged to have been part of a large ensemble of improvisers of that caliber… and to have, through necessity and accident, found myself seated in the ideal position on stage (right in the middle—between the two pianos, the two drummers). I’m still thinking through the implications of tactics within such a context (especially in open improvisation), and am itching to do it again. [Original article…]
Sunday, January 13, 2013, at 6:00pm: a performance by Eris 136199 (Nick Didkovsky: guitar; Han-earl Park: guitar; and Catherine Sikora: saxophones) takes place at The Brecht Forum (451 West Street, New York, NY 10014) [map/directions…]. Also performing: Music Now! (Ras Moshe, Luke Stewart, Tom Zlabinger, Max Johnson, John Pietaro and Tor Yochai Snyder), and We Free Strings (Melanie Dyer, Sonya Robinson, Nioka Workman, Charles Burnham, Larry Roland and David Harewood). Admission: $11.
Remember: side effects of Eris 136199 may include temporary deafness, involuntary teleportation, spontaneous combustion, and molecular implosion. In addition, lab animals have been shown to dance without skill to the sound of double guitars and saxophone 😉
Eris 136199 plays on the crossroads of noise, melody, rhythm, space, density, contrast, synchronicity, asymmetry, serendipity and contradiction. Eris 136199 is the noisy, unruly complexity of composer, computer artist and guitarist Nick Didkovsky, the corporeal, cyborg virtuosity of constructor and guitarist Han-earl Park, and the no-nonsense melodic logic of composer and saxophonist Catherine Sikora.
A composer who enjoys blurry boundaries, Nick Didkovsky founded the avant-rock big band Doctor Nerve, and is a member of Swim This with Gerry Hemingway and Michael Lytle. He is a pioneer of small-systems computer music, and has composed music for ensemble including Bang On A Can All-Stars and the California EAR Unit.
Described by Brian Morton as “a musical philosopher… a delightful shape-shifter”, Han-earl Park is drawn to real-time cyborg configurations in which artifacts and bodies collide. He has performed with some of the finest practitioners of improvised music, is part of Mathilde 253 with Charles Hayward and Ian Smith, and Numbers with Richard Barrett.
Catherine Sikora is “a free-blowing player’s player with a spectacular harmonic imagination and an evolved understanding of the tonal palette of the saxophone” (Chris Elliot, Seacoast Online). She has a long-standing duo project with Eric Mingus, and performs as part of ensembles led by Elliott Sharp, François Grillot and Matt Lavelle.
Together, Didkovsky, Park and Sikora forges an improvisative space where melody can be melody, noise can be noise, meter can be meter, metal becomes metal, bluegrass turns to bluegrass, jazz transforms into jazz, all there, all necessary without imploding under idiomatic pressures.
Performance by Eris 136199 (Nick Didkovsky: guitar; Han-earl Park: guitar; and Catherine Sikora: saxophones). Also performing: Music Now! (Ras Moshe, Luke Stewart, Tom Zlabinger, Max Johnson, John Pietaro and Tor Yochai Snyder), and We Free Strings (Melanie Dyer, Sonya Robinson, Nioka Workman, Charles Burnham, Larry Roland and David Harewood). Admission: $11.
[Details…]
[Brecht Forum page…]
The Backroom @ Freddy’s Bar
627 5th Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11215
8:30pm
Performance by Han-earl Park (guitar), Catherine Sikora (saxophones) and Josh Sinton (saxophone and clarinet) as part of On The Way Out. Also performing: Robert Dick (flutes), Nick Didkovsky (guitar), Andrew Drury (drums and percussion) and Michael Lytle (clarinet and analog electronics). Recommended donation: $10.
Seeking performances in Europe, 2014 for the cyborg ensemble of interactive, semi-autonomous, technological artifact and machine musician io 0.0.1 beta++ (itself) with human musicians Han-earl Park (guitar), Bruce Coates (saxophones) and Franziska Schroeder (saxophones). Interested promoters, venues and sponsors, please get in touch! [Detailed proposal…]
Taken from the album by Han-earl Park plus Marian Murray, ‘Recursion, Closure’ by guitarist-constructor Park is today’s featured download at All About Jazz! A rare solo recording, the performance was recorded live at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, and explores, with resonant buzzes and feedback, the complex, cavernous acoustics of the space, and the interactions between artifact (guitar) and the body (guitarist). Thanks again to AAJ downloads editor Dave Sumner for selecting the recording.
This’ll be the final release in the current series, after which I plan to take a little break. A rerelease of a recording originally put out in December 2011, this new version will be available in a variety of formats (including lossless), and as a ‘name your price’ album.
Seeking performances in Europe, 2014 for the cyborg ensemble of interactive, semi-autonomous, technological artifact and machine musician io 0.0.1 beta++ (itself) with human musicians Han-earl Park (guitar), Bruce Coates (saxophones) and Franziska Schroeder (saxophones). Interested promoters, venues and sponsors, please get in touch! [Detailed proposal…]
Seeking performance opportunities; particularly in Europe 2014: the cyborg ensemble of interactive, semi-autonomous, technological artifact and machine musician and improviser io 0.0.1 beta++ with human musicians Han-earl Park, Bruce Coates and Franziska Schroeder.
This quartet (or faux-quartet, if you prefer) performs demanding free improvisation calling on a range of extended techniques. Pieces of dismantled gestures, destabilizing timbres, and impressive synergy.
François Couture (Monsieur Délire)
An idea that would be pleasing to the Futurists of a century ago, a total hymn to modernity…. The completely improvised session requires a lot of attention from the listener, to be fully repaid by that which is a successful experiment.
Vittorio (MusicZoom)
We watch and listen carefully because we know we’re seeing a kind of manifesto in action. What is an automaton? A sketch, a material characterization of the ideas the inventor and the inventor’s culture have about some aspect of life, and how it could be. io and its kind are alternate beings born of ideas, decisions and choices. It is because io stands alone, an automaton, that the performance recorded on this CD not only is music, but is about music.
An extraordinary meeting between human and machine improvisers. Featuring the machine musician io 0.0.1 beta++ with guitarist Han-earl Park and saxophonists Bruce Coates and Franziska Schroeder, the performance is part critique and part playful exploration, both a boundary-breaking demonstration of socio-musical technologies and an ironic sci-fi parody.
Constructed by Han-earl Park, io 0.0.1 beta++ is a modern-day musical automaton. It is not an instrument to be played but a non-human artificial musician that performs alongside its human counterparts. io 0.0.1 beta++ representing a personal-political investigation of technology, interaction, improvisation and musicality. It whimsically evokes a 1950s B-movie robot—seemingly jerry-rigged, constructed from ad-hoc components including plumbing, kitchenware, speakers and missile switches—celebrating the material and corporeal.
The performances with this artificial musician highlights society’s entanglement with technology, demonstrates alternative modes of interfacing the musical and the technological, and illuminates the creative and improvisative processes in music. The performance is a radical and playful engagement with powerful and problematic dreams (and nightmares) of the artificial; a dream as old as the anthropology of robots.
The construction of io 0.0.1 beta++ has been made possible by the generous support of the Arts Council of Ireland.
Special thanks to Randy McKean for organizing the tour, Ken Schumacher of Live Vibes Recording for the engineering, and to Corey Mwamba for feedback during the mastering process.
In front of a small but appreciative audience, the California-based Gargantius Effect, including [Han-earl] Park, Murray Campbell, Randy McKean, Scott Looney and Gino Robair, slip in and out of something approaching Webern-ian counterpoint on Nor Cal 8-2011. Looney and Robair join in later on this disc of various tour dates, leaving the other three to explore the outer limits of timbre, especially on the epic “Old Robots Never Rust”. Campbell’s violin slides are an excellent foil to the more vocal qualities in Park’s improvising, not to mention similar devices used by multi-reedist Randy McKean as the trio converge and diverge in pitch space. When Robair and Looney appear, electronics and hyperpiano are difficult to distinguish, but first-rate audio keeps everything in proper perspective and the improv is always edge-of-seat energetic.
“Han [Han-earl Park] is a very old friend of mine. We’ve done a lot of strange things in various parts of Europe. He’s somewhat responsible for me ending up in Nevada County. About ten years ago he was studying at CalArts, and I came over to play in his graduation show. Part of that trip was my first visit to Nevada County, where many things spinned out from that.
“Also finding this gentleman [Randy McKean] here in Grass Valley; finding not only a great improvising player, but one that plays bass clarinet, was a huge thing that helped me stay. It was a complete leap in the dark to move out here. I was raised in a rural area, I always known that that was the thing to do, but leaving a metropolitan zone [The Hague] and coming out here with nothing—no plan—was a shot in the dark, and finding that there were things like this [McKean] in the woods made it a lot easier to stay.
“So these are two of my favorite people to play music with.”
The Gargantius Effect is the brainchild of Murray Campbell (violins, oboe and cor anglais) and Randy McKean (saxophone, clarinets and flutes). Like the Stanislaw Lem story of the same name, in which armies of warring soldiers are linked together to form a peaceful, blissfully-aware omni-mind, so, too, these longtime collaborators and Nevada County natives transform the connections and crossfires of the various genres in which they usually find themselves—the Euro-café of Beacoup Chapeaux, Balkan swing of Chickenbonz, chamber jazz of Bristle—into scintillating bits of free improvisation, compositional constructs and mechanized mayhem.
This album documents Gargantius Effect’s August 2011 tour of Northern California with special guest and fellow Sonologist Han-earl Park (guitar), who had just returned to the States after years in Europe, teaching, and playing with the likes of Paul Dunmall, Charles Hayward and Franziska Schroeder. In addition to the recording of the performance at The Tin House (Grass Valley) on August 25, 2011, the August 30, 2011 session at Studio 1510 (Oakland) features Bay Area veteran improviser, composer and electronic artist Gino Robair (energized surfaces, voltage made audible), and hyperpianist Scott R. Looney (hyperpiano).
The Gargantius Effect is the brainchild of Murray Campbell (violin, oboe and electronics) and Randy McKean (reeds). Like the Stanislaw Lem story of the same name, in which armies of warring soldiers are linked together to form a peaceful, blissfully-aware omni-mind, so, too, these long-time collaborators channel their contrarian impulses into synchronized bouts of free improvisation, compositional constructs and mechanized mayhem.
Murray Campbell
Murray Campbell has described himself as a Sonologist ever since it was recommended to him as a more respectable occupation than “musician” for the purposes of immigration control. In this capacity he has worked with Alex Fiennes on an octaphonic spatialisation system un-muted at Dialogues Festival (Edinburgh).
He currently resides in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California where he is designing an off-grid solar-powered geodesic wavefront recreation system with the aim of upsetting the bears.
He finds writing about himself in the third person slightly disturbing.
Randy McKean
Randy McKean has burrowed into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada but still wants to blow your mind. Whether his mission is executed by his chamber jazz quartet Bristle, through sideman gigs with the likes of the Euro Café messabouts Beaucoup Chapeaux, or via performances of his pieces for orchestra or string quartet, matters not to him, as long as his objective is achieved. Perhaps one of his CDs—Bristle’s Bulletproof (Edgetone), So Dig This Big Crux (Rastascan), or the Great Circle Saxophone Quartet’s Child King Dictator Fool (New World)—will do the job.
Han-earl Park
Improviser, guitarist and constructor Han-earl Park has been crossing borders and performing fuzzily idiomatic, on occasion experimental, always traditional, open improvised musics for over fifteen years. He has performed in clubs, theaters, art galleries, concert halls, and (ad-hoc) alternative spaces in Austria, Denmark, Germany, England, Ireland, The Netherlands, Scotland and the USA.
Park is part of Mathilde 253 with Charles Hayward and Ian Smith, Eris 136199 with Nick Didkovsky and Catherine Sikora, and Numbers with Richard Barrett. He is the constructor of the machine improviser io 0.0.1 beta++, a project performed in coalition with Bruce Coates and Franziska Schroeder. He has recently performed with Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith, Paul Dunmall, Lol Coxhill, Mark Sanders, Gino Robair, Tim Perkis, Pat Thomas, Andrew Drury, Josh Sinton, Dominic Lash, and as part of ensembles led by Wadada Leo Smith, Evan Parker, and Pauline Oliveros. Festival appearances include Freedom of the City (London), Sonorities (Belfast), Sonic Acts (Amsterdam), dialogues festival (Edinburgh), and CEAIT (California). His recordings have been released by labels including Slam Productions and Creative Sources.
Park taught improvisation at the UCC Department of Music, and founded and curated Stet Lab, a space for improvised music in Cork.
Gino Robair
Gino Robair has created music for dance, theater, radio, television, silent film, and gamelan orchestra, and his works have been performed throughout North America, Europe, and Japan. He was composer in residence with the California Shakespeare Festival for five seasons and served as music director for the CBS animated series The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat. His commercial work includes themes for the MTV and Comedy Central cable networks.
Robair is also one of the “25 innovative percussionists” included in the book Percussion Profiles (SoundWorld, 2001). He has recorded with Tom Waits, Anthony Braxton, Terry Riley, Lou Harrison, John Butcher, Derek Bailey, Peter Kowald, Otomo Yoshihide, the ROVA Saxophone Quartet, and Eugene Chadbourne, among many others. In addition, Robair has performed with John Zorn, Nina Hagen, Fred Frith, Eddie Prevost, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, Myra Melford, Wadada Leo Smith, and the Club Foot Orchestra.
Robair is a founding member of the Splatter Trio and the heavy-metal band, Pink Mountain. In addition, he runs Rastascan Records, a label devoted to creative music.
10–24–12: add recommended price. 05–20–13: updated the ‘also available for download’ list, and updated reviews. 11–01–15: add A Little Brittle Music to downloads list, and change currency from USD to EUR.
Seeking performance opportunities; particularly in North America during 2012–2013; and Europe, late-2013 and 2014 onwards (contact us for other locations and dates): composer, computer artist and guitarist Nick Didkovsky, guitarist, improviser and constructor Han-earl Park, and composer and saxophonist Catherine Sikora (saxophones).
Eris 136199 plays on the crossroads of noise, melody, rhythm, space, density, contrast, synchronicity, asymmetry, serendipity and contradiction. Eris 136199 is the noisy, unruly complexity of composer, computer artist and guitarist Nick Didkovsky, the corporeal, cyborg virtuosity of constructor and guitarist Han-earl Park, and the no-nonsense melodic logic of composer and saxophonist Catherine Sikora.
A composer who enjoys blurry boundaries, Nick Didkovsky founded the avant-rock big band Doctor Nerve, and is a member of Swim This with Gerry Hemingway and Michael Lytle. He is a pioneer of small-systems computer music, and has composed music for ensemble including Bang On A Can All-Stars and the California EAR Unit.
Described by Brian Morton as “a musical philosopher… a delightful shape-shifter”, Han-earl Park is drawn to real-time cyborg configurations in which artifacts and bodies collide. He has performed with some of the finest practitioners of improvised music, is part of Mathilde 253 with Charles Hayward and Ian Smith, and Numbers with Richard Barrett.
Catherine Sikora is “a free-blowing player’s player with a spectacular harmonic imagination and an evolved understanding of the tonal palette of the saxophone” (Chris Elliot, Seacoast Online). She has a long-standing duo project with Eric Mingus, and performs as part of ensembles led by Elliott Sharp, François Grillot and Matt Lavelle.
Together, Didkovsky, Park and Sikora forges an improvisative space where melody can be melody, noise can be noise, meter can be meter, metal becomes metal, bluegrass turns to bluegrass, jazz transforms into jazz, all there, all necessary without imploding under idiomatic pressures.
Nick Didkovsky, Han-earl Park and Catherine Sikora are also available for performance/improvisation/composition workshops and talks.
This Sunday (September 16, 2012), at 9:30pm: a performance by Jonathan Goldberger (guitar), Han-earl Park (guitar), Sean Ali (bass) and Will McEvoy (bass), plus Anna Webber (reeds), Ben Syversen (trumpet), TJ Huff (guitar), Dustin Carlson (guitar) and Mark Ziegler (bass), as part of Out Of Your Head curated by Josh Sinton. The event takes place at The Backroom @ Freddy’s Bar (627 5th Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11215) [map/directions…].
The Backroom @ Freddy’s Bar
627 5th Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11215
9:30pm
Performance by Jonathan Goldberger (guitar), Han-earl Park (guitar), Sean Ali (bass) and Will McEvoy (bass), plus Anna Webber (reeds), Ben Syversen (trumpet), TJ Huff (guitar), Dustin Carlson (guitar) and Mark Ziegler (bass), as part of Out Of Your Head.
[Details…]
[Freddy’s page…]
[OOYH page…]
Seeking performances in Europe, 2014 for the cyborg ensemble of interactive, semi-autonomous, technological artifact and machine musician io 0.0.1 beta++ (itself) with human musicians Han-earl Park (guitar), Bruce Coates (saxophones) and Franziska Schroeder (saxophones). Interested promoters, venues and sponsors, please get in touch! [Detailed proposal…]
