Although nowhere near a big a revision as the last major update, I’ve made some significant changes to my bio. Below is the new verbose, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink, 472 word version [shorter versions…].
Improviser, guitarist and constructor Han-earl Park (박한얼) (www.busterandfriends.com) 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 in Austria, Denmark, Germany, England, Ireland, The Netherlands, Scotland and the USA.
Park engages a radical, liminal, cyborg virtuosity in which mind, body and artifact collide. He is driven by the social and revolutionary potential of real-time interactive performance in which tradition and practice become creative problematics. As a constructor of musical automata, he is interested in partial, and partially frustrating, context-specific artifacts; artifacts that amplify social relations and corporeal identities and agencies.
Ensembles include Mathilde 253 with Charles Hayward and Ian Smith, Eris 136199 with Nick Didkovsky and Catherine Sikora, and Numbers with Richard Barrett. Park 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, Mark Sanders, Josh Sinton, Louise Dam Eckardt Jensen, Gino Robair, Tim Perkis, Andrew Drury, Pat Thomas and Franziska Schroeder. He has guested with Gargantius Effect (Murray Campbell and Randy McKean), the Mark Hanslip/Dominic Lash/Phillip Marks Trio, and Swim This (Nick Didkovsky, Gerry Hemingway and Michael Lytle); performed as part of large ensembles led by Wadada Leo Smith, Evan Parker and Pauline Oliveros; and participated in improvisative meetings with Gerald Cleaver, Andrea Parkins, Tom Rainey, Mike Pride, Anna Webber, Jack Wright and Ingrid Laubrock. He has studied with improviser-composers Wadada Leo Smith, Richard Barrett, Joel Ryan, Mark Trayle, Chick Lyall and David Rosenboom, composers Clarence Barlow and Marina Adamia, and interactive media artist Sara Roberts.
Festival appearances include Freedom of the City (London), Sonorities (Belfast), International Society for Improvised Music (New York), dialogues festival (Edinburgh), VAIN Live Art (Oxford), Center for Experiments in Art, Information and Technology Festival (Los Angeles) and Sonic Acts (Amsterdam). In addition to numerous self-released albums, his recordings have been released by Slam Productions, Creative Sources, Vicmod Records, FrImp, Owlhouse Recordings and DUNS Limited Edition. His music has been featured on anthologies released by Bridge Records, farpoint recordings and Frog Peak Music. He has performed live on Resonance FM (London), Drift Radio (Scotland), and KVMR 89.5 FM (Nevada County), interviewed on RTÉ Morning Ireland and RTÉ Nova (Ireland), and his recordings have been broadcast around the world.
Park taught improvisation at University College Cork (2006–2011), and founded and curated (2007–2011) Stet Lab, a space for improvised music in Cork. He is a recipient of grants from the Arts Council of Ireland (2007, 2008 and 2009) and Music Network (2009 and 2010), and of the Ahmanson Foundation Scholarship (1999) and the CalArts Scholarship (1999 and 1999–2000).
[Han-earl Park’s biography (16–472 words) plus press quotes…]
I’ve also taken the opportunity to create a new video playlist of selected performances. With 52 videos, and clocking in at around 13 hours, my previous playlist of ‘recent’ performances was no longer able to be an effective portfolio reel. Thanks as always to the videographers (Don Mount, Kevin Reilly and Scott Friedlander), and to all the performers.
And I’ve just updated the press quotes. For the record, it now reads as follows:
“Guitarist Han-earl Park is a musical philosopher…. Expect unexpected things from Park, who is a delightful shape-shifter….”
— Brian Morton (Point of Departure)
“Han-earl Park… is as at home in underground Noise as he is dueting with free jazz heroes like Paul Dunmall. Park uses pedals to smudge and smear chords or rolls out strange robotic grumblings, a technician playing electricity as much as the guitar.”
— Daniel Spicer (Jazzwise)
“Kaleidoscopic music, a rubato flux of superimposed noises in which lightning-fast progression from one galvanising sound event (noise thru silence) to another….”
— Tim Owen (Dalston Sound)
“Though short, percussive, hard-to-notate sounds dominate Han-earl Park’s sound, he does utilize the totality of the guitar’s sonorities—just not in the proportions demanded by the nostalgic (retrospective, reactionary, etc.) owners of major media….”
— Stanley Zappa (The New York City Jazz Record)
“Park is the one to pay close attention to… the development of his ideas is fascinating and very logical….”
— Jeph Jerman (The Squid’s Ear)
“Pieces of dismantled gestures, destabilizing timbres, and impressive synergy.”
— François Couture (Monsieur Délire)
“Han-earl Park’s relationship to the guitar is something akin to John Butcher and the saxophone. Both know how to fill a space and manipulate amplification with skill, but there’s no way of predicting what sounds will emerge as the next moment approaches.”
— Marc Medwin (The New York City Jazz Record)
“Park applies every technique to his detuned ax—tapping, sliding, muting, twisting the machine heads. It’s simultaneously disciplined and barbaric.”
— Greg Burk (MetalJazz)
“Remarkable strategies from the guitarist which involve investing each string with a different weight as he coaxes tones from near the machine head all the way down past the bridge.”
— Ken Waxman (JazzWord)
“Park is one of those scary polymath guys who seems to have a tremendous facility for music, both improvising and composing it, and he has played in many groups and at many festivals, appearing around the globe in seemingly ubiquitous fashion. Scariest of all is his intense and speedy guitar technique, which… presents a rush of tangled information that would require a bank of dedicated computers to solve it….”
— Ed Pinsent (The Sound Projector)
“Han-earl Park’s idiosyncratic guitar style was beguiling, his array of tiny, sharp sounds glinting like fragments of broken glass.”
— Scott McMillan (The Liminal)
“Park is especially adept at steering the group down side streets they might have otherwise ignored and utilizes simple techniques to arrive at unique sounds….”
— Tom Burris (Free Jazz)
“Music both spontaneous and premeditated, music that launches into several directions at a time…. Lively, relevant, dizzying electroacoustic music; music that seems to be daring us to try and catch it.”
— François Couture (Monsieur Délire)
“An acoustic lucid computational delirium, whose trajectory is impossible to outguess.”
— Vito Camarretta (Chain D.L.K.)
“Careful, crafty and well-played with that restrained yet fractured guitar that sounds so good. Han-earl’s sound seems to be in between Derek Bailey and Philip Gibbs.”
— Bruce Lee Gallanter (Downtown Music Gallery)
“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….”
— Beppe Colli (CloudsandClocks)
“It is… impractical to verbally interpret the bazillions of events that this CD warrants, for the joy of individuals who take pleasure in getting their brain zapped and scrambled by the rivalry between transonic beauty and extreme structural atomization. This is in fact a full hour of frantically jagged live improvisation…. Indeed the methods through which the (mostly) clean sounds of the electric guitar get stretched, warped, mangled and thrown back at the source demolish any propensity to rumination. As if a premix of Fred Frith, Hans Reichel and—why not—Christopher Willits had been subjected to a journey inside the circuits of a billboard. Mere seconds before its explosion, that is.”
— Massimo Ricci (Touching Extremes)
“Imaginatively dissonant barbedly-wire phrases and false-harmonic scatterings….”
— Ed Pinsent (The Sound Projector)
“I think, without exception, there has not yet been an opening to any one of his compositions where I have not had an adverse reaction, either repelling me back in my seat or leaving me shaking my head in exasperation of the noise coming out of my speakers. But the thing of it is, without exception, I find myself listening straight through to the final note. Somehow Han-earl Park finds a way to convert my ears to his music one song at a time…. There is no other artist in which I describe this way.”
— Dave Sumner (Bird is the Worm)
“Free jazz, in no uncertain terms. I don’t know what it is about Han-earl’s groups’ sounds. Ten seconds in, I think to myself, ‘Man, this isn’t my thing.’ But by the time the tune is over, I realize that I’m totally into it and enjoying it. If a musician can convert my ears within the span of one tune, in my eyes, that’s a sign of talent.”
— All About Jazz
“Le corde tese di Park imbastiscono un plateau scabro ma di lungo e persistente respiro, vivente nelle articolazioni e nella tessitura della sua fisica elettroacustica….”
Translation: “The tight strings of Park improvise a rugged plateau but of long-term and lasting, living in the articulation and in the range of his electroacoustic physics….”
— Romualdo Del Noce (Jazz Convention)
“Innovative…”
— The Computer Music Journal
“Electro weirdo…”
— BBC – Collective
“Doesn’t sound like sewage!”
— Kalvos and Damian’s New Music Bazaar
“Beautiful music, incredibly focused…!”
— Nick Didkovsky (Doctor Nerve / Punos Music)
“Bandy-legged Han-earl Park (gitah)… drugged the ref and delivered a few kidney punches with a horseshoe in his boxing mitt.”
— Jamie Smith (Owlhouse Recordings)