More reviews of ‘io 0.0.1 beta++’ (SLAMCD 531) including Vittorio’s big thumbs-up at MusicZoom where he hails the recordings as a “total hymn to modernity”, in which the human musicians “throw themselves with passion on the ideas from the inanimate object”, and the listener will be “fully repaid by that which is a successful experiment”:
Il titolo da romanzo o di sigla di messaggio segreto è il nome della macchina sparamusica/rumori che fa bella mostra di sè sul palco e che senza alcun intervento dei musicisti intorno tira giù il suo catalogo di suoni con cui gli altri si trovano a confrontarsi. Un´idea che sarebbe piaciuta ai futuristi di omai un secolo fa, un inno totale alla modernità. Altro che strumenti acustici!
I tre musicisti coinvolti insieme alla macchina sono Han-earl Park alla chitarra, Bruce Coates al sax alto e sopranino e Franziska Schroeder al sax soprano. Non hanno nessuna paura per il confronto e così si avventano con passione sulla proposta dell´oggetto inanimato.
La session completamente improvvisata richiede molta attenzione da parte dell´ascoltatore, ripagata completamente da quello che è un esperimento riuscito. [Read the rest…] [English translation…]
Meanwhile, what to me is ‘playful’ may be ‘uncompromising’ to someone else:
Fra segmenti più atmosferico-minimali, e altri invece più frammentati e nervosi, si procede così, talora arrestandosi a una sorta di limbo emozionale, di quieta truculenza, peraltro sempre ammirevole per coerenza e rigore. [Read the rest…]
On the other hand, Ed Pinsent of The Sound Projector highlights the (fun, playful) material and interactive dimensions in the meeting between human and machine musicians:
The guitarist Park, sometime member of Mathilde 253 whose fine CD impressed us in March this year, is joined by two improvising saxophonists, Bruce Coates (from the Birmingham Improvisers’ Orchestra) and Franziska Schroeder (member of the trio FAINT), and the record documents the meeting of this trio with the “machine musician” io 0.0.1 beta++. This device is an automaton, a musical robot if you will, built by Mr Park; it’s not just another computer programme that plays random sounds or builds an “interactive” space for other laptop musicians, but actually occupies physical space and performs on the stage alongside its human counterparts. Shades of Pierre Bastien…. The multi-media artist Sara Roberts from California writes the liner notes and she does a much better job than I possibly could in articulating the cultural resonances of this man-meets-automaton event. [Read the rest…]
And Rui Eduardo Paes hears a meeting in which the human musicians bring their varied experience, in avant-jazz and in the space between electroacoustics and contemporary music, and in which the automaton “interactively reacting to what they do and even giving them cues”:
Os músicos de carbono envolvidos ora trabalham na área do ‘avant-jazz’, ora na da electroacústica de fronteira com a música contemporânea: Park com Charles Hayward, Wadada Leo Smith e Paul Dunmall, Coates com Tony Oxley, Lol Coxhill e o compositor indeterminista Christian Wolff, e Schroeder ao lado do pianista português Pedro Rebelo e em colaborações com Pauline Oliveros e Evan Parker. Todas essas experiências se reflectem em temas como ‘Ground-Based Telemetry’ e ‘Laplace: Instability’, sempre com o io a reagir interactivamente ao que fazem e até a dar-lhes deixas. [Read the rest…] [English translation…]
Quick thanks to Gino Robair for the invite and putting the whole thing together; Tom Duff hosting the show (and providing somewhere for this itinerant musician to crash for the night), John Shiurba for providing the amp, the beer and being a very crafty and generous guitarist; Tim Perkis for the musicality and musings; and Matt Ingalls for injecting high and low frequency noises at exactly the right time. Thanks also to Murray Campbell, Amber Cone, Izzy Goldschneider and Randy McKean for providing one of the oddest quasi-gigs I’ve performed at.
Apologies for the brevity of the acknowledgement, but things are a little crazy right now with the upcoming move to New York… See you on the East Coast!
I am seeking performances for the following projects/ensembles in Europe, April (possibly late-March or early-May) 2012 April 26 to May 11, 2012. Interested promoters, venues and sponsors, please get in touch!
First set of reviews of the CD ‘io 0.0.1 beta++’ (SLAMCD 531) including Beppe Colli’s take in which the “flesh-and-blood musicians” (Han-earl Park, Bruce Coates and Franziska Schroeder) demonstrate “excellent rapport” and “a good dose of telepathy”, while the machine musician (io 0.0.1 beta++) “works as a valuable stimulus for its fellow musicians”:
Closing track here, Return Trajectory is a good for instance of the excellent rapport existing among the aforementioned [“flesh-and-blood”] players, whose parallel traveling seems to suggest a good dose of telepathy—check the final moments, the two winds going towards a note in teleological mode. This is the track that, in my opinion, clearly shows more than a trace of these musicians’ formative influences, with Schroeder’s soprano reminding me of Evan Parker (elsewhere on the album she sounds quite more personal), while Coates’ alto is clearly reminiscent of the zig-zag wondering of Anthony Braxton (an influence that is also quite apparent elsewhere on the album, both on alto and sopranino). Han-earl Park’s guitar sits somewhere halfway between Joe Pass and Derek Bailey, being quite aware of the jazz vocabulary and the art of comping, though of course filtered through a modern sensibility, starting with timbre, but not as ‘indifferent’ to the surrounding as Bailey’s sometimes could be.
Were the album as good as its closing track, well… we’d only have a good album, nothing more. But—surprise!—as per its title, we have an ‘unknown quantity’ called io 0.0.1 beta++: a ‘musical automaton’ created by Han-earl Park whose improvising—so rich when it comes to timbres (which are sometimes more than a bit old-fashioned, a fact that goes well with its bizarre physical aspect, so reminiscent of 50s sci-fi movies), so mysterious when it comes to its decision-making—works as a valuable stimulus for its fellow musicians.
If on an aesthetic plane the main parallel that I can trace (one that I hope can be useful to readers) is with mid-80s Company, here the work as it’s offered to the listener appears to highlight the issue of the decisional process which is at the basis of improvisation when seen as a conscious ‘discipline of choices’. And in the CD liner notes penned by Sara Roberts I seemed to detect more than an echo of those debates which flourish about the famous (?) Turing Test. [Read the rest…] [In Italian…]
François Couture’s review of the “faux-quartet” with the “créature mécanique”io 0.0.1 beta++ which is “physically present on stage… and it interacts and improvises with the human improvisers”:
Ce quatuor (ou faux-quatuor, à la limite) propose des improvisations libres exigeantes faisant appel à de nombreuses techniques étendues, des pièces aux gestes décomposés, aux timbres déstabilisants, mais à la synergie impressionnante.
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. [Read the rest…]
And Bruce Lee Gallanter who teases a Turing test around io 0.0.1 beta++:
…More rare is that these three human musicians are improvising with a machine called io 0.0.1 beta…. Io was constructed by Han-earl Park and is an integral part of this quartet…. Io… adds its own diverse yet fractured sounds to the blend. On “Pioneer: Dance” Mr. Coates plays slightly twisted alto sax while io adds similar textural sounds. If I didn’t know better, I would think that this was a successful session of European improv by a quartet of gifted yet thoughtful [human] players who take their time to explore similar textures and terrain together. I am not so sure that machines will ever take the place of human improvisers in the future, however this disc shows that someone is working in the right direction. [Read the rest…]
