Tag: The Wire

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Confounding and strange, and radically exciting (best of 2025)

I’m very happy to find Proxemics, the latest album from Juno 3 (Han-earl Park: guitar; Lara Jones: saxophone and electronics; and Pat Thomas: electronics), in Free Jazz’ Top 16 Albums of 2025, and the Top 10 Albums of Sammy Stein (Free Jazz), Gregg Miller (Free Jazz), Lee Rice Epstein (Free Jazz/But does it swing?), and Antonio Poscic (The Wire/The Quietus/Research Music). (Plus as one-three-hundred-and-fiftieth of Thurston Moore’s 2025 list.)

Park’s one of the most compelling, noisy, and simultaneously humorous and challenging guitarists around…. Jones and Thomas are wonderfully simpatico…. This is just a radically exciting album…. [Read the rest…]

— Lee Rice Epstein (But does it swing?)

The music is challenging… visceral with confronting rhythms and keys that merge… creating a sense of clashing ideas, yet a willingness also to (eventually) end up on the same musical path. [Read the rest…]

— Sammy Stein (Free Jazz)

For once, this is non-idiomatic music worthy of being called such, only loosely tethered to traditions and so confounding and strange that simply listening to it makes you feel alive. [Read the rest…]

— Antonio Poscic (The Quietus)

I’ve said that, while I was mixing the album, I came to “realize this unapologetically unrefined music was probably unreleasable, but I also came to love it more for being delicate as a slab of granite.” I’m very happy that listeners worked hard to prove me wrong on whether the album would find its audience.

I’m honored to have worked with Lara and Pat on this album (you will not find a nicer bunch of trouble-makers), and very proud of the noise we achieved.

[About this album…] [Get the download/order the cassette (Bandcamp)…]

QLH: Sledgehammered

I’m also happy to see Sledgehammered by QLH (Quentin Tolimieri: synthesizers; Luca Marini: drums; and Han-earl Park: guitar) on a Jazz Noise’s Picks of 2025:

A bizarre, 80s-inflected, weirdo stew that absolutely grooves. [Read the rest…]

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Lumbering 30 kilogram box of wood, metal, glass, paper, fabric, plastic and 1960s over-engineering

‘Ephiphanies’, The Wire
© 2021 The Wire

In case you missed it, I wrote a short piece for the June edition of The Wire (issue 448) in which I muse about speaker cabinets, cyborgs, simulations, rooms-within-rooms, and the superstitions surrounding, and genre markers of ‘tone’:

All instrument-instrumentalists are cyborg creatures in which musical gestures and behaviours emerge from the collision of minds, bodies and artifacts; of physics, physiology, technology and culture. One peculiarity in the case of the amplified instrument-instrumentalist is the particular way this cyborg is exploded in space, spilling its components and organs across the stage. The guitar-guitarist may sit on one side of the stage, while the amp sits some distance away. It’s freakish, as if, say, a violin’s soundbox had severed itself from the rest of the instrument and crawled across the stage.

The speaker cabinet plays a curious part in this cyborg dance. The cabinet is both the sounding part of the instrument, an externalized soundbox removed from the tactile interface of the instrument, while also functioning as a room within the room. Every speaker cabinet has a particular signature, a particular character, and the particular room that the cabinet will live in for the performance, likewise, has a particular character that interacts with it (which will itself change when filled with an audience).

You can read the rest in the June issue of The Wire.

Recordings Discussed

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 ‘Eris 136199’ (BAF001) by Han-earl Park, Catherine Sikora and Nick Didkovsky (artwork copyright 2018, Han-earl Park)

Eris 136199 (BAF001) [details…]

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

Track listing: Therianthropy I (≥ 3:43), Therianthropy II (8:56), Therianthropy III (3:55), Therianthropy IV (6:30), Adaptive Radiation I (6:44), Adaptive Radiation II (8:48), Adaptive Radiation III (5:54), Universal Greebly (10:58), Hypnagogia I (8:03), Hypnagogia II (4:45). Total duration ≥ 68:25.

© + ℗ 2018 Han-earl Park.