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…]
Han-earl Park and Caroline Pugh are performing March 8, 2017: Derry, N. Ireland; and Sirene 1009 is also performing April 7 and May 19, 2017: Cork, Ireland. [Details…]
Music where the “gorgeous plucked theme”, the “maniacal wails”, “booming, thunderous landscape of percussion”, and “sweetly sung passages of melodic intrigue” coexists? John Morrison, reviewing ‘Sirene 1009’ (BAF000) for Jazz Right Now, describes “a colorful, sometimes violent and revelatory listening experience that infuses modern aesthetics with the spirit of the ancient.” This, for example, is his take on Cliodynamics I:
Lash brilliantly alternates between bowed and plucked phrases as Sanders beats down a booming, thunderous landscape of percussion. Park provides a subtle bit of coloring strokes while Pugh leads the way, her maniacal wails and babbles briefly giving way to sweetly sung passages of melodic intrigue. Clocking in at ten minutes and forty four seconds, ‘Cliodynamics I’ drags listeners deep into the belly of the beast, a dark and ominous ocean of sound that only gets more intense with each passing minute. [Read the rest…]
I love that Morrison hears a music that is “ancient and primordial with ideas as open as the night sky, it is not hard to imagine that some of humanity’s first music would have sounded something like this.”
Elsewhere, in Bad Alchemy [BA 93]: “Riffing madness”? A “meta-unsettling effect”? Why is the “Elk of Entropy… smooched with acceleration-bebop”? And who “eats broomsticks and pukes horses”? In his review, despite the limitations of language (“what is permitted by decency” and “can only be hint euphemistically”), Rigobert Dittmann (a.k.a. rbd) attempts to use words like the band use sound:
Die Gitarre als Heringsdosenöffner, der knarzige oder plonkende Bass, das perkussive Dingdong oder schrottige Geruckele, das alles ist nur Ummäntelung für das… poo. Die Schottin steigert sich nämlich von der Anstrengung, nur ein-, nicht auszuatmen zum Hyperventilieren, sie probiert, sich die eigene Zunge in den Hals zu stopfen, sie radebrecht kryptovolapük, jodelt Sirenenalarm, quirlt das LLLL, kirrt auf Iiiii, imitiert eine Singende Säge, spickt Maggie Nicols mit Shelley Hirsch, schlürft rohes Rattenschaschlik und zischelt Verboteneres als das kleine Hexeneinmaleins etc. Ich kann das nur umschreiben, damit meine älteren Leser nicht in Gefahr kommen, ihre dritten Zähne zu verschlucken. Sanders paukengrollt und cymbalzischt zwar zu sonorem Pizzikato und surrender Laubsägerei noch einigermaßen im Rahmen des Guten und Schönen, aber auch die Gitarre kratzt und wabert so verstörend gegen den Strich wie es nur geht.
CD: €11 minimum (‘name your price’) plus shipping.*†
Download: €8 minimum (‘name your price’).†
* Limited edition glass-mastered CD. CD includes additional material (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.
*Registration included free download/unlimited streaming of a track, Cliodynamics III, from the album Sirene 1009 (BAF000).
There are a small number of discount places for students at CIT Cork School of Music and UCC Department of Music. To claim your place, UCC Music students, please contact John Godfrey; CIT Music students, please contact Han-earl Park. SOLD OUT.
Places are strictly limited. It is the workshop attendees’ responsibility bring their own instruments, and any necessary amplification, etc. We ask that all attendees be on time as there is only a 20 minute setup time (2:10pm to 2:30pm).
Are you a musician, artist, sound-maker or composer wanting to make music collectively? Are you an improviser in jazz, rock, folk or other tradition wishing to engage across traditions? Are you a performer finding it difficult to bridge the frameworks of idiom and the promise of open, free-play of improvisation? Are you an aspiring free improviser?
A practical, playful, hands-on masterclass, this workshop will offer a unique opportunity for performers to participate in musical interactions, and create spontaneous musical expressions. In addition to learning to realize the possibilities of improvisative play, the workshop will be an opportunity to meet and interact with local, national, and international practitioners of improvised musics.
The workshop is for:
Aspiring improvisers wanting to engage with a broader canvas of interactive strategies.
Performers and composers interested in alternative, collaborative music-making.
Performers seeking meaningful ways to deploy unorthodox or nonstandard sounds and gestures.
The quartet of improvisers who make up the ensemble Sirene 1009, represent many decades of professional experience in complementary fields. The artists have extensive experience as teachers and educators.
Mark Sanders has run music workshops in music schools from Cambridgeshire, England to Szeny, Poland, and at festivals such as the Poschiavo Jazz Festival in Switzerland. He has given masterclasses at Cheltenham Jazz Festival, Trinity School of Music, Middlesex Polytechnic Music Department, and the Guildhall School of Music and the Music Therapy Department. He has been a tutor in Free Improvisation at The Royal Academy of Music, London for thirteen years.
Dominic Lash has been involved in leading improvisation workshops at Newcastle University (2006 and 2008), Oxford University (2008 and 2009), Falmouth University (2012 and 2013) and Trondheim Music Academy (2013).
He has given private bass lessons since 2001.
Han-earl Park taught improvisation at University College Cork (2006–2011). He founded and curated (2007–2011) Stet Lab, an alternatively pedagogical space in Cork.
He has lead, or co-lead, workshops at University of Hull: Scarborough Campus (2012), and the Sonic Arts Research Centre, Belfast (2015). Park privately taught guitar and improvisation since 2004.
Caroline Pugh has 10 years of experience giving vocal workshops to children, students, mixed ability groups and adults in schools, universities (Queen’s University Belfast, Northumbria University, Saint Louis University, University of California at San Diego, Royal Scottish Conservatoire Scottish Music Youth Singing Project) and community centres.
She has 10 years of experience one-to-one vocals lessons; and 10 years of experience in working with people with learning difficulties and a variety of different assistive technologies, plus related training (University of Central Lancashire, Napier University, and Edinburgh College of Art).
She emphasizes collaborative workshops alongside other artforms, including dance, psychology, visual art and drama.
By Han-earl Park, Dominic Lash, Mark Sanders and Caroline Pugh
Believe it or not, despite playing together in different groups, this will be Caroline and my first performance in duo configuration. So, Derry-folk, you get to hear it first!
Dom Lash’s assured, steady-handed control of his technique and sound-making; Mark Sanders’ range, seemingly boundless imagination, ability anticipate anything and everything, and ability to make sense musically regardless of what surrounds him; and Caroline Pugh’s handle and knowledge of genre, and how she seemingly can just jump in regardless of context. I think the various ways we move—our bodies and their relationship with the instruments, say—complement each other. [Read the rest…]
A very special group, and I’m honored to find myself in its company.
By Han-earl Park, Dominic Lash, Mark Sanders and Caroline Pugh
CD: €11 minimum (‘name your price’) plus shipping.*†
Download: €8 minimum (‘name your price’).†
* Limited edition glass-mastered CD. CD includes additional material (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.
Update: download no longer available (“limited availability…until January 30, 2017”). For those who got it, big thanks for your support; wishing you good listening!
An exquisite exploration of space, time, nightmares, and dreamscapes.
A friendly reminder that you have about seven days to download the live recording by Han-earl Park, Dominic Lash and Caroline Pugh. Limited availability, you can get the album free only with pre-orders of the CD/digital album ‘Sirene 1009’.
Kuramoto Synchronization is the kind of recording that, had I not had another album scheduled, would have been its own release. I think the performance really shows off Dom’s steady-handed, assured skills as an improviser. And if you don’t know Caroline’s work, I think this might be an excellent place to start—she sounds phenomenal here. (Oh, yes, and because the weather conspired to cancel Mark’s flight, you get to hear three non-drummers alternately playing the role of the percussionist.)
But don’t take my word for it, please listen for yourself:
Want to know what and who I’ve been listening to? or what I’ve got planned (hint: see video above)? read my take on the late-capitalist (spotified, airbnbified, uberized) bootleg economy? or how about my non-musical influences:
Politics.
Even in these so-called cynical times I find politics (in, for example, the interactions between basement-level activism, and the, to quote Zappa, ‘entertainment division of the military-industrial complex’; in the friction between good, sometimes great, journalism, and the for-profit-lubricated popularity-contest we call publishing) inspiring.
Other things…?
Animators whose subject matter are things like movement, weight, physics, physiology, intent, volition, presence, personality, empathy, when their materials, in many respects, are working against those expressions. It helps to remind those of us who work in practices where it is too easy to take those same things—movement, weight, physics, physiology, etc.—for granted because they are so effortlessly part of the form. [Read the rest…]
Over at a Jazz Noise, you can read my answers to Dave Foxall’s 7 Questions such as my take on collaboration or what I seek in collaborators:
Imagination, skill and reliability. In that order.
Probably.
Someone who has a levelheaded understanding (consciously or not) of their niche within the transnational improvised music ecology….
I gravitate towards improvisers who are always prepared for that which is, in a way, unforeseeable.
Also people who can patch the holes and weaknesses in my musical skill-set. So, thinking about those three-quarters of Sirene 1009, I think: Dom Lash’s assured, steady-handed control of his technique and sound-making; Mark Sanders’ range, seemingly boundless imagination, ability anticipate anything and everything, and ability to make sense musically regardless of what surrounds him; and Caroline Pugh’s handle and knowledge of genre, and how she seemingly can just jump in regardless of context. I think the various ways we move—our bodies and their relationship with the instruments, say—complement each other.
(I’ve said this before, but getting a group together is a kind of composition.) [Read the rest…]
Plus, the “opening track [from ‘Sirene 1009’ (BAF000)]—Psychohistory III (very Asimov!)—[is] exclusively available to a Jazz Noise readers (hear it here and nowhere else, folks) for this interview.” [Listen/read the rest…].
