Shifting and switching from No Wave skronk to interstellar guitarist-as-drummer virtuosity, from stampedes of miniature Pomeranian Buffalos to All-You-Zombies heterophonies, Han-earl Park (박한얼) has been performing beautifully messy, joyously difficult, ambiguous and discordant improvised musics for over twenty years. Park is the mastermind behind ensembles including Eris 136199 with Catherine Sikora and Nick Didkovsky; Juno 3 with Lara Jones and Pat Thomas; and Gonggong 225088 with Yorgos Dimitriadis and Camila Nebbia; and performs as part of a duo with Richard Barrett. [More…]
Watch the first eight minutes of ‘Bandwidth,’ my audio-visual piece performed as part of SPLICE back in October.
What happens to interaction when gesture and context are removed by distance? A playful, noisy exploration of the oblique fictions of Here and Now, and Then and There.
Feel the grass under your feet, and the steel girders flying over your head.
As reeds pop, strings snap, and membranes flutter and resonate.
Trace the folds in the fabric of the interactive.
I feel enormously privileged to be part of this trio with Yorgos and Camila, and super happy to be recording this beautiful confusion of clicks, flutters and snaps, of standing waves and intermodulations. Please come be part of this process!
Guitare du jour. (Thanks to Anton Hunter, Cafe OTO and Alex Ward.)
Thanks so much to everyone behind-the-scenes who made the music happen. Thanks so much to Wesley Stephenson and Charles McGovern at Jazz North East, and to everyone at The Globe. Thanks to Fielding Hope at Cafe OTO for again hosting Juno 3, and my warmest thanks to the awesome, awesome people working at OTO on the night who helped us navigate the Jazz Festival crowd (if you were there, you’ll know what I mean), and to Kevin Shoemaker who exercised his creativity behind the desk. And thanks to Ian Perry, Richard Belfitt, Jonny Hill and everyone at OUT FRONT! and at Déda, and thanks so, so much to the smart, creative and tenacious Corey Mwamba—always a pleasure to play Derby!
A 100% sincere ‘boo’ to the airline who sent my guitar to the wrong airport, but an equally sincere thanks to the guitarists who generously lent me their instruments for a night each in Newcastle, London and Derby: to Alex Ward (rock’n’roll!), and to Anton Hunter (you can take the Tele out of Nashville, but you can’t take the Nashville out of a Tele).
Finally, thanks so much to the musicians who joined me on stage: to Heather Roche and Anton Hunter for the chirps, slaps, snaps, twangs, slides, honks, skronks and growls. And to the amazing Lara Jones and awe-inspiring Pat Thomas—yeah, how about that moment from the second OTO set!—I look forward to many more noisy adventures in the future.
Funded by Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Community.
Track listing: Orbital Dusk I (6:04), Orbital Dusk II (4:20), Orbital Dusk III (2:29), Orbital Dusk IV (6:03), Diel Vertical Migration I (6:31), Diel Vertical Migration II (4:38), Diel Vertical Migration III (4:33), Diel Vertical Migration IV (7:36), Metastability (7:24). Total duration: 49:36.
Juno 3 is Han-earl Park (guitar), Lara Jones (saxophone and electronics) and Pat Thomas (electronics). Captivating, gripping and fascinating, Juno 3’s music is a particle sim of sounds which spelunks from derelict urban ravines to cybernetic rainforests, while catching auditory glimpses of crashing robotic waves, and strange telegraphic messages from space.
Nautiloid capsule tumbles
across field lines.
An impracticably agile,
graceful derailment.
As Corey Mwambasaid on Freeness about our music, “wonderful energy, constant motion, and roiling in noise. And immense amount of grit and power.” I can honestly say this trio sounds like nothing out there.
Track listing: Orbital Dusk I (6:04), Orbital Dusk II (4:20), Orbital Dusk III (2:29), Orbital Dusk IV (6:03), Diel Vertical Migration I (6:31), Diel Vertical Migration II (4:38), Diel Vertical Migration III (4:33), Diel Vertical Migration IV (7:36), Metastability (7:24). Total duration: 49:36.
This promises to be music with great depth and vibrance!
about the musicians
Improviser, guitarist and constructor Han-earl Park (박한얼) has been crossing borders and performing fuzzily idiomatic, on occasion experimental, always traditional, open improvised musics for twenty years. He is the mastermind behind ensembles including Eris 136199 with Catherine Sikora and Nick Didkovsky; and Sirene 1009 with Dominic Lash, Mark Sanders and rit.; and has a duo with Richard Barrett.
Anton Hunter is a composer and improviser living in Manchester. He leads the 11-piece Article XI band as well as his own trio, both with records on Efpi Records. Also ongoing is a duo with baritone saxophonist Cath Roberts called Ripsaw Catfish, Cath’s quintet Sloth Racket, the trio Beck Hunters and a myriad of other different ensembles, ad hoc and otherwise.
Born in Canada, clarinetist Heather Roche trained in England and now lives in London. She gives workshops in clarinet technique and composition all over Europe, and has premiered many solo works for her instrument, including pieces by Maija Hynninen, Simon Emmerson, Lisa Robertson, Christopher Fox, Dai Fujikura, and others.
Funded by Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Community.
A ‘first-take’ made on a rainy day. First in a new series of studies (‘#onetakestudy’) that folows on from the #lockdownminiature series, and on parallel tracks to #spliceimprov.
I’m not 100% sure this improvisation holds focus entirely for its duration, and it could do, for my taste as a listener, with more contrast, but it meanders in a pleasing way. A kind of reverie on an overcast day. Enjoy.
As the looper becomes more a part of my sound, I begin to again question the disconnect between gesture—visible, weighty—and the auditory. As I watch myself in play (in video playback), I find myself alienated from the experience. [Read the rest…]
See the pinned comment to read my thoughts about this piece, and what I think doesn’t work about it.
What happens to interaction when gesture and context are removed by distance? Han-earl Park and Carina Khorkhordina each perform their compositions for solo improviser and video projection. Building on their work developed before (and during) ‘all-our-lockdowns,’ SPLICE is a playful, noisy exploration of the oblique fictions of here and now, and then and there.
It’s an unusual situation for me, as an improviser, whose work depends on a certain kind of immediacy of response—of audience feedback—to present a work for the first time ‘for real’ after having lived with it for this long. ‘Nervously excited’ doesn’t even begin to describe how I’m feeling. Please, please join me next week on this moment of discovery.
The music on this album transports me to scenes from retro-scifi stories to those of present-day mass transit. It is, to my ears, the sounds of junction crossings, signals from space, and mysterious telegraphy; sometimes evoking impressions of walking by streams under footbridges, at others, of rushing through Manhattan Chinatown. Recorded live at Cafe OTO during the trio’s first meeting, we knew then that we had something special.
I think the sounds and the performances on this disc are all ’round captivating, gripping and fascinating, and the production work, exceptional. Take the journey with us: I’m super proud of the music, and I am thrilled to finally share this with you!
Get ready for the latest release of challenging and imaginative music from Ramble Records with Juno 3, the debut album from the trio of Han-earl Park, Lara Jones and Pat Thomas. Recorded by Shaun Crook live at Cafe OTO, London, and mixed (refracted and rephrased) by Han-earl Park, the album is a particle sim of sounds which spelunks from derelict urban ravines to cybernetic rainforests, while catching auditory glimpses of crashing robotic waves, and strange telegraphic messages from space.
Nautiloid capsule tumbles
across field lines.
An impracticably agile,
graceful derailment.
Juno 3 is Han-earl Park (guitar), Lara Jones (saxophone and electronics) and Pat Thomas (electronics). The eponymous album document the first meeting—interactive, relational—by this trio as it takes a journey: launching from the familiar of the Hackney club space into future imagined By Others. We coax it into our space.
Motion and motifs. (Switching gears, shedding engines.) Modes of transport change from first principles: future-past transit networks give way to bioengineered surfboards.
Bodies collide, unwind, and we’re up again. Reaching crossings; navigating junctions.
Intermodal is the only game we know. Networks (and bodies and vessels) weave, twist, cross then interweave, intertwist and intercross. (We, nocturnal monstrous shapes, turn and return to the deep.)
And, as the album comes to a close (thump’n’snap—bodies unwind), we find ourselves awakened back in the familiar club space. Or: half familiar. The same chairs, the same tables, the same staff. But not the same chair, not the same table, not the same staff.
Orbital Dusk I (6:04), Orbital Dusk II (4:20), Orbital Dusk III (2:29), Orbital Dusk IV (6:03), Diel Vertical Migration I (6:31), Diel Vertical Migration II (4:38), Diel Vertical Migration III (4:33), Diel Vertical Migration IV (7:36), Metastability (7:24). Total duration: 49:36.
Recorded live March 20, 2022, Cafe OTO, London.
Recorded by Shaun Crook.
Mixed by Han-earl Park. Mastered by Chris Sharkey.
Art by Han-earl Park. Design by Atharwa Deshingkar.
Thanks to Richard Barrett, Heather Frasch and Richard Scott; to Fielding Hope and everyone at Cafe OTO, Laura Cole and everyone at Fusebox, Wesley Stephenson of Jazz North East, and Peter O’Doherty of Northern Lights Project. Shoutouts to Corey Mwamba, Graeme Wilson, rit. and Una Lee. The performance was presented with funding from the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe.
