Reminder: The Sound of Science, Newcastle (plus London, Leeds, Dublin, Letterkenny, Derry and Belfast)

Platinum electron configuration (© 2022 Andrew Delanoy and Wesley Stephenson)
© 2022 Andrew Delanoy and Wesley Stephenson

This Saturday (March 19, 2022), at 7:00pm (doors: 6.30pm): Han-earl Park performs as part of The Sound of Science event at Gosforth Civic Theatre (Regent Farm Road, Gosforth, Newcastle NE3 3HD). The event is free, but booking is recommended. [Get tickets…]

Also in March 2022

Han-earl Park is also performing in London with Lara Jones and Pat Thomas (March 20), performing a solo set in Leeds (22), and, with rit. and Una Lee, in Dublin (24), Letterkenny (25), Derry (26) and Belfast (27). See the performance diary for details.

Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe

Funded by Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe.

Han-earl Park at The Sound of Science, Newcastle

Platinum electron configuration (© 2022 Andrew Delanoy and Wesley Stephenson)
© 2022 Andrew Delanoy and Wesley Stephenson

Saturday, March 19, 2022, at 7:00pm (doors: 6.30pm): Han-earl Park performs as part of The Sound of Science event at Gosforth Civic Theatre (Regent Farm Road, Gosforth, Newcastle NE3 3HD):

Cyborgs, bodies, chaos, simulation and improvisation…

Han-earl Park will visit Newcastle to perform solo, and discuss [with Corey Mwamba and Graeme Wilson] his ongoing interest in chaotic systems, computation, and the collision of physiology and physics in his music, from guitar technique to the construction of musical automata.

Also performing will be Johnny Hunter’s ‘Pale Blue Dot’ Sextet (Johnny Hunter: drums; Mark Hanslip: saxophone; Seth Bennett: bass; Gemma Bass: violin; Aby Vulliamy: viola; and Michael Bardon: ’cello).

Set order
  1. 7.00pm: Han-earl Park (guitar).
  2. 7.40pm: Panel Discussion: Han-earl Park/Corey Mwamba/Graeme Wilson.
  3. 8.15pm: Panel Discussion: Johnny Hunter/Corey Mwamba/Graeme Wilson.
  4. 8.40pm: Johnny Hunter’s ‘Pale Blue Dot.’

The event is free, but advance booking is strongly recommended. [Get tickets…]

See the performance diary for up-to-date info. [Gosforth Civic Theatre page…] [Facebook event…]

The Sound of Science

To celebrate British Science Week 2022 music promoters Jazz North East are proud to present ‘The Sound of Science.’ With additional support from Newcastle University’s Faculty of Science and Gosforth Civic Theatre, audiences are welcomed to experience a series of concerts and discussions drawing connections between science and music.

Programmed events will specifically explore the interplay of chemistry, physics, ecology and biology, and the ways in which these disciplines have been employed by, and communicated through, composers and musicians. We will hear from 28 musicians, artists and scientists across the four day event.

“From climate change to vaccines, the importance of science to the way we live has never been clearer. Its relationship to music however is rarely explored and it is for that reason we have assembled those working in and between these two seemingly disparate fields. Our events shine a spotlight on the role of science within music composition and improvisation, with a view to inspiring audiences new to one or both subjects.

“Presented and discussed through music making practice, this project aims to increase understanding of science and its social implications, and build audience confidence in discussing these issues. Inviting all ages and every level of expertise, the festival will spark new ideas around how science and music can be communicated and combined.” — Wesley Stephenson (Festival Producer)

Acknowledgements and Thanks

Jazz North East gratefully acknowledges and thanks the support of Arts Council England, Golsoncott Foundation, Scops Arts Trust, the Royal Society of Chemistry, Newcastle University Faculty of Science, British Science Association, Soapbox Science, Euan Preston and Palace of Science, Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe, Fonds Podium Kunsten Performing Arts Fund NL, Jazz North, Sound and Music, Sunderland Culture, New Jazz and Improvised Music Recordings and Gosforth Civic Theatre.

Also in March 2022

Han-earl Park is also performing in and Leeds, and in London with Lara Jones and Pat Thomas, and, with rit. and Una Lee, in Dublin, Letterkenny, Derry and Belfast. See the performance diary for details.

Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe

Funded by Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe.

A field, a cliff, a landscape: the backlot of the world… (a listening guide to Of Life, Recombinant)

Of Life, Recombinant (NEWJAiM9), my latest disc and my first solo* album, is out now on New Jazz and Improvised Music Recordings.

This suite might be my first self-consciously poetic work if not for the fact that I couldn’t have told you that’s what it was when I was in the middle of it (visibility low; uncertain, uncertain, uncertain). Of Life, Recombinant is the work in which I most want listeners to hear, in it, themselves.

Walls rusted lichen curve into a canopy. / Concrete weaves of roots. / Dew-covered moss memory foam. / You find your usual spot on the armchair, or maybe the comfort of your favorite beanbag. Perhaps your companion animal (is it a cat?) chooses to sleep on your lap. Maybe you lay between two speakers. Or having embraced the solitary, you wear headphones. / Music starts. / Look out the window—a field, a cliff, a landscape: the backlot of the world. Of neon. Of sodium. Of broken machinery. Fences. Or walls. Do walls surround you? Home to insects. Mammals, reptiles, and plants, molds and funguses? / Watching the light of dawn (or is it dusk?). See the light-wall of apartments. Leaves waving. Or are the trees bare? And distant as the hillside. Images refracted by veins of rain. No, the sky is clear: stars, pinprick rear-projections. But drowned in a sea of streetlights—streaking—traffic etches unpredictable figures across the darkened ceiling. My eyes hunt muscae volitantes. Hear those creaks. (I’ve missed something.) The sound of floorboards next door. (Do I seek ghosts?) My roommate. My Family. My guest. My host.
© 2021 Han-earl Park [Higher resolution image…]

I always hope that my music reflects and diffracts very human truths; that they depend, and perform, and engage with them. But with Of Life, Recombinant, I think, (I hope) that the work is fueled by, and has in its core, compassion.

Thanks again to the project director at NEWJAiM, Wesley Stephenson, for inviting me to have my work represented on this most awesome label. Thanks also to Annette Krebs for helping me, with one simple question, to decide to release these listening guides to my listeners.

[About this album…] [Get the CD/download from NEWJAiM (Bandcamp)…]

* Ostensibly solo. It’s complicated.

The perfect distillation of uneasy listening (reviews: Peculiar Velocities and Of Life, Recombinant)

Eris 136199: Peculiar Velocities

Grunting tonal bursts? atmospherics? weaving sinuous melody? In his review of Eris 136199’s Peculiar Velocities, Paul Acquaro at Free Jazz describes a “masterful slice of trifurcated dialog” by turns “haunting, gracious and grating”, with tones that cut “like an exacto-blade.” He writes that, by the third track (‘Peculiar Velocities I’) of the album:

The guitars have adopted a slightly different aesthetic, using choppy, brittle sounds, they lay down a fractured soundscape replete with sonic barbs and suspended tones. Sikora finds her footing on this shifting ground and plays freely. As the track continues into ‘Peculiar Velocities II’ the fascinating part is realizing how connected the three actually are: this is not parallel play, rather it connects deep in the sub-systems. [Read the rest…]

Meanwhile Todd McComb’s Jazz Thoughts finds “vignettes within an overall urban fantasy soundscape”, and according to Ed Pinsent at The Sound Projector:

This music does stem from a knowledge and practice of free improvisation, and can fit inside various ‘art music’ categories, but on one level to me it feels as good as any ‘noise rock’ served up by Sonic Youth, The Dead C, or any new-wave influenced beat combo who tend to attract the ‘angular’ adjective. [Read the rest…]

Having previously selected Peculiar Velocities as one of the Best of 2020, Dave Foxall writes in aJazzNoise that:

It’s mind-twisting stuff. Intensely ‘musical’ (whatever that means) and harshly jarring, gently testing Broca’s convolutions, seeking points of entry and storage, delicately inserting sounds, probing for reaction, disconcertion and delight. (i.e. It gets inside your head)….

An uncomfortable joy, a can’t-be-reproduced-in-the-laboratory combination of rare elements, a new musical alloy, an ongoing experiment, the perfect distillation of uneasy listening. [Read the rest…]

[About this album…] [Get the CD/download (Bandcamp)…] [All reviews…]

CD: €11 minimum (‘name your price’) plus shipping.*†
Download: €8 minimum (‘name your price’).†

CD photo: Eris 136199: Peculiar Velocities (BAF002) by Han-earl Park, Catherine Sikora and Nick Didkovsky (artwork and photo copyright 2020, Han-earl Park)CD photo: Eris 136199: Peculiar Velocities (BAF002) by Han-earl Park, Catherine Sikora and Nick Didkovsky (artwork and photo copyright 2020, Han-earl Park)CD photo: Eris 136199: Peculiar Velocities (BAF002) by Han-earl Park, Catherine Sikora and Nick Didkovsky (artwork and photo copyright 2020, Han-earl Park)CD photo: Eris 136199: Peculiar Velocities (BAF002) by Han-earl Park, Catherine Sikora and Nick Didkovsky (artwork and photo copyright 2020, Han-earl Park)CD photo: Eris 136199: Peculiar Velocities (BAF002) by Han-earl Park, Catherine Sikora and Nick Didkovsky (artwork and photo copyright 2020, Han-earl Park)

* Limited edition glass-mastered CD. CD includes additional material (liner notes, artwork, etc.) not included in the download version of the album.

† Both digital and physical purchases give you streaming via the free Bandcamp app, and option to download the recording in multiple formats including lossless.

Of Life, Recombinant

And finally, in his LondonJazz News review of Of Life, Recombinant, Tony Dudley-Evans describes a music of ‘industrial sounds,’ by turns ‘ambient’ and ‘dramatic,’ with elements of minimalism. Plus:

Sinister sounds reminiscent of a hospital MRI scanning machine. [Read the rest…]

[About this album…] [Get the CD/download from NEWJAiM (Bandcamp)…] [All reviews…]

Of Life, Recombinant (NEWJAiM9)

cover art (copyright 2021 NEWJAiM)
Graphic design by Andrew Delanoy. © 2021 NEWJAiM Recordings.

November 26, 2021: Of Life, Recombinant (NEWJAiM9), Han-earl Park’s latest album, is out now on New Jazz and Improvised Music Recordings!

Of Life, Recombinant is unlike anything I’ve done before, and the music goes to some strange and unexpected places (are those sounds of a networked biome, or the echos of, and through, an urban maze?). The album is a single improvisative suite that takes the guitar, and the solo form, as the starting point to fabricate a composition in the studio. The piece is the result of over a year of work, and I’m so very much looking forward to finally sharing this music with you!

[Get the CD/download from NEWJAiM (Bandcamp)…]

CD: £12 plus shipping. Download: £6.

news and updates

February 20, 2024: Mixing noisy, pretty, gentle and disorderly peculiar music

https://soundcloud.com/hanearlpark/mix-engineer-works Wondering what mixing strategy could possibly work for your recording of noisy, pretty, gentle and disorderly peculiar music? Hit me up if your left-of-field recording is in need of some…

January 29, 2024: The unknowability of connection, and a little science fiction (Free Jazz: Sunday Interview)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jewNzu1KL1Q Violence and cruelty? Fantastical, twisted, dark, deeply affectionate humanism? Improvisation as embodiment and personification? Place, subjectivity and interiority? As part of the Free Jazz: Sunday Interview, in response to a…

[All articles on Of Life, Recombinant (NEWJAiM9)…]

description

Of Life, Recombinant tells multiple stories at once, opening up a wide aperture and displaying stunningly drawn vistas…. Leading listeners down long corridors of chilly anticipation… playing up the subtle intimacy of quiet tones…. And unmistakably, Park’s guitar is itself a treasure chest of delights—long, thrilling sections of beauty fold into chilly, dread-inducing dreamscapes….

— Lee Rice Epstein (Free Jazz)

We listen, we wait. Breathing deeply, relaxed enough yet ready to be sucked in by some vortex of illusion. We absorb the blows of sudden mutations connected by threads of metallic (in)coherence…. Each spin adds further layers of interpretation, not to mention the sheer aural thrill.

— Massimo Ricci (Touching Extremes)

Along with what’s kept there is always something left and something new. The country twang tune with popping harmonics from ‘Naught Opportune.’ The unsettling mandolinesque trill or quivering sustain in hazy delay from ‘Are Variant.’ The distorted suck, psychedelic and ecstatic, in slow crescendo from ‘Of Life, Recombinant’…. In between chaos and composure, it is something closer to the complexity of life.

— Keith Prosk (harmonic series)

[More reviews…]

On NEWJAiM’s ninth disc of adventurous music, guitarist and improviser Han-earl Park takes the solo form, and, refracting improvisations through studio-based techniques, flips the form on its head.

Walls rusted lichen curve into a canopy.
Concrete weaves of roots.
Dew-covered moss memory foam.

Rather than attempting to ‘reinvent’ the guitar, Park navigates the gaps and borders of the instrument, and what it means to be a guitarist. Park creates a music that alternately embraces and short-circuits genre tropes and expectations. Of Life, Recombinant doesn’t shy away from the solitude of the solo form; instead it tightly hugs aloneness—its joys and fears.

Of Life, Recombinant explores the ways in which studio-based techniques can be used as a fluid compositional strategy in the context of improvisative play; how techniques such as montage, collage, and the language of dissolves, cross cuts and match cuts might be enrolled to explore improvisative counterpoint and juxtapositions, the pleasures of discord, parallelism and linearity, and the repurposing of gestures and their meanings.

Conceived as a single improvisative suite, the techniques and strategies used to build Of Life, Recombinant were developed over a year during periods of lockdown. The bulk of the suite was recorded in a single contiguous take, a single improvisation, in June of 2021. That recording remains, more-or-less-intact-but-broken, as the title track, while fragments of it litter, as improvisative detritus, through the rest of the album.

Han-earl Park (copyright 2021 Nella Aguessy)
Photo © 2021 Nella Aguessy
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 twenty years. He has performed in clubs, theaters, art galleries, concert halls, and (ad-hoc) alternative spaces across Europe, Korea and the USA.

Park 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. He is the constructor of the machine improviser io 0.0.1 beta++, and instigator of Metis 9, a playbook of improvisative tactics. He has performed with Wadada Leo Smith, Paul Dunmall, Evan Parker, Lol Coxhill, Pauline Oliveros, Josh Sinton, Louise Dam Eckardt Jensen, Gino Robair, Tim Perkis, Andrew Drury, Pat Thomas and Franziska Schroeder.

His ensembles have appeared at festivals including Jazz em Agosto (Lisbon), Freedom of the City (London), Brilliant Corners (Belfast), ISIM (New York), dialogues festival (Edinburgh) and Sonic Acts (Amsterdam). His recordings have been released by labels including SLAM Productions and DUNS Limited Edition. Park taught improvisation at University College Cork, and founded and curated Stet Lab, a space for improvised music in Cork.

New Jazz and Improvised Music Recordings

The New Jazz and Improvised Music Recordings project was established during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, offering a creative output for musicians when live performance opportunities were unavailable and encouraging artist independence.

Emphasising sustainability for artists and music studios, the ethos of sustainability also carries through the production process by employing a carbon neutral manufacturing plant and distributors, using recycled and biodegradable materials whenever possible.

The New Jazz and Improvised Music Recordings project is brought to you from the director of Newcastle Festival of Jazz and Improvised Music.

personnel

Han-earl Park (guitar) with Anne Wellmer (voice on track 4).

track listing

Game: Mutation (5:38); Naught Opportune (≥ 10:42); Are Variant (≥ 8:06); Of Life, Recombinant (≥ 29:22). Total duration ≥ 53:48.

recording details

Music by Han-earl Park.

Recorded by Han-earl Park, June 2, 2021.
Additional recording by Han-earl Park, April 3, 2021, and by Anne Wellmer June 27, 2021.

Mixed by Han-earl Park.
Mastered by Chris Sharkey.

Graphic design by Andrew Delanoy.
Portrait photography by Nella Aguessy.

Project director: Wesley Stephenson.

“Many thanks to everyone that contributed and supported our Crowdfunder campaign for the New Jazz and Improvised Music Recordings project. This release was made possible with additional support from Arts Council Ireland, Arts Council England and North East Local Enterprise Partnership. Additional thanks to Chris Sharkey for mastering and Andrew Delanoy for graphic design. Very special thanks to Nella Aguessy for the portrait photograph of Han-earl Park, you can find some really great work on her website.” — NEWJAiM Recordings.

“Thanks to Annette Krebs, Richard Barrett, and Anne Wellmer, and hugs for Asha and Melanie. The construction of this piece was made possible by funding from the Arts Council of Ireland” — Han-earl Park.

© 2021 NEWJAiM Recordings.
℗ 2021 Han-earl Park.

Also from Han-earl Park

cover art (copyright 2020 Han-earl Park)

Peculiar Velocities (BAF002) [details…]

Personnel: Han-earl Park (guitar), Catherine Sikora (saxophone) and Nick Didkovsky (guitar).

Track listing: Ballad of Tensegrity I (≥ 5:12), Ballad of Tensegrity II (2:28), Peculiar Velocities I (3:46), Peculiar Velocities II (3:36), Sleeping Dragon (5:22), D-Loop I (≥ 6:16), D-Loop II (5:13), Polytely I (≥ 5:01), Polytely II: Breakdown (5:33), Anagnorisis I (2:09), Anagnorisis II (2:19). Total duration ≥ 46:54.

© + ℗ 2020 Han-earl Park.

Cover of ‘ Two+ Bagatelles’ by Han-earl Park (photo copyright Jazz em Agosto / Petra Cvelbar)

Two+ Bagatelles [details…]

Personnel: Han-earl Park (guitar).

Track listing: Zero (01:03), One (10:27), Two (05:28). Total duration: 16:59.

© + ℗ 2019 The Vortex / Han-earl Park.

updates

11-26-21: released!
06-26-22: add review quotes.