I love, love, love this recording, and the camaraderie of the artists (and helpers and supporters behind-the-scenes) involved in its making. If the trio’s first performance in the spring of 2022, caught between lockdowns and post-pandemic ‘normality,’ was about that strange sense of cautious relief and optimism, then this later performance was something altogether more strident, brash, at times harsh and ugly, confrontational and combative. What I hear is Lara punching you unremittingly in the mid-rage gut; Pat throwing down beats of glitchy robotic wasps, and of impossible danceability; and my struggles with an unfamiliar guitar (a silver rocker) that wants to make it all a little too easy.
During the mix, 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. Listen to it, and think of us. Enjoy. [Read the rest…]
Download the album, and revel in those buzzing, ugly fusions, microsurround pops and spikes, and queasily in tune warbles and waves.
Download: €8.
Cassette tape* plus download: €12 plus shipping.
Note on the cassette tape
* The cassette tape release does not duplicate the digital album, but offers a complement to it. In contrast to the digital download album, the cassette album is the room mic recording of the second set only (corresponding to ‘Proxemics I–VI’). The cassette presents a vérité, ‘bootleg’-vibe documentation of the performance as heard by the audience on the night.
Track listing: Orbital Dusk I (6:04), Orbital Dusk II (4:20), Orbital Dusk III (2:29), Orbital Dusk IV (6:03), Diel Vertical Migration I (6:31), Diel Vertical Migration II (4:38), Diel Vertical Migration III (4:33), Diel Vertical Migration IV (7:36), Metastability (7:24). Total duration: 49:36.
Proxemics (BAF003), Juno 3’s latest album is out now! with the digital download available today and the companion cassette tape* to begin shipping in February. Masterminded by Berlin-based Korean-American improviser and guitarist Han-earl Park, Juno 3 is his trio with London-based experimental producer, saxophonist, and sound artist Lara Jones, and boundless experimentalist and pioneer of electroacoustics in free improvisation, Pat Thomas. Recorded at Cafe OTO, Proxemics (BAF003) captures the trio’s performance as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival’s outer left field.
I love, love, love this recording, and the camaraderie of the artists (and helpers and supporters behind-the-scenes) involved in its making. If the trio’s first performance in the spring of 2022, caught between lockdowns and post-pandemic ‘normality,’ was about that strange sense of cautious relief and optimism, then this later performance was something altogether more strident, brash, at times harsh and ugly, confrontational and combative. What I hear is Lara punching you unremittingly in the mid-rage gut; Pat throwing down beats of glitchy robotic wasps, and of impossible danceability; and my struggles with an unfamiliar guitar (a silver rocker) that wants to make it all a little too easy.
During the mix, 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. Listen to it, and think of us. Enjoy.
These spiky yet nuanced confrontations have their own profound logic, relying on messy, punchy, and unsettling conversational interplay that avoid comforting veins and familiar dynamics and transform it into compelling interplay that offers a subversive, resistant kind of empathy and compassion.
Elastic, doxastic collisions—
hold two thoughts, both true.
Masterminded by Berlin-based Korean-American improviser and guitarist Han-earl Park, Juno 3 is his trio with London-based experimental producer, saxophonist, and sound artist Lara Jones, and boundless experimentalist and pioneer of electroacoustics in free improvisation, Pat Thomas. Recorded at Cafe OTO, Proxemics (BAF003) captures the trio’s performance as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival’s outer left field. Proxemics is the follow-up to the eponymous Juno 3 (RAM-163CD, 2023) described as having “wonderful energy, constant motion, and roiling in noise. And immense amount of grit and power” (Corey Mwamba, Freeness, BBC Radio 3).
The music was recorded with efficiency (and with a boldly creative live-mix) by Kevin Shoemaker, and mixed and mastered for release by Han-earl Park. If the trio’s previous album was an expansive and joyous flow of intergalactic urban transit, then Proxemics is altogether something more prickly, difficult, and at peace with its confrontational nature.
Recommended reading: N. K. Jemisin. The City We Became (Orbit, 2020).
Derealization I (4:07), Derealization II (4:57), Derealization III (3:52), Derealization IV (6:19), Derealization V (5:55), Derealization VI (3:47), Proxemics I (5:05), Proxemics II (3:54), Proxemics III (6:10), Proxemics IV (7:15), Proxemics V (6:10), Proxemics VI: Rumble (5:13). Total duration: 62:44.
Cassette tape: Proxemics A (18:11), Proxemics B (17:27). Total duration: 35:37.*
Recorded live November 13, 2023, Cafe OTO, London.
Recorded/live mix by Kevin Shoemaker. Mixed and mastered by Han-earl Park.
Design and artwork by Han-earl Park.
Funded by Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Community.
Note on the cassette tape
* The cassette tape release does not duplicate the digital album, but offers a complement to it. In contrast to the digital download album, the cassette album is the room mic recording of the second set only (corresponding to ‘Proxemics I–VI’). The cassette presents a vérité, ‘bootleg’-vibe documentation of the performance as heard by the audience on the night.
Track listing: Orbital Dusk I (6:04), Orbital Dusk II (4:20), Orbital Dusk III (2:29), Orbital Dusk IV (6:03), Diel Vertical Migration I (6:31), Diel Vertical Migration II (4:38), Diel Vertical Migration III (4:33), Diel Vertical Migration IV (7:36), Metastability (7:24). Total duration: 49:36.
01-15-25: released! 01-06-25: add video playlist. 02-06-25: added reviews. 02-15-25: cassette delivery delayed. If you’ve already ordered the tape, you should have got an email from me about the delay. If not, please drop me a message.
Coming soon! Proxemics (BAF003), the new album by Juno 3 (Han-earl Park, Lara Jones and Pat Thomas). Proxemics (BAF003) will be available as a full-length, digital download album, and a limited edition companion cassette tape.
The music is strident, brash, at times harsh and ugly, confrontational and combative—it’s unlike anything else I’ve been a part of—and I’m very excited to share it with you, and very, very curious to know what you make of it. More soon!
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Thanks to On Yee Lo, Fielding Hope and everyone at Cafe OTO, Wesley Stephenson of Jazz North East, Corey Mwamba of Out Front! and a very special thanks to Alex Ward for the loan of his guitar. The performance was presented as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival, and with funding from the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Community.
Funded by Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Community.
Track listing: Orbital Dusk I (6:04), Orbital Dusk II (4:20), Orbital Dusk III (2:29), Orbital Dusk IV (6:03), Diel Vertical Migration I (6:31), Diel Vertical Migration II (4:38), Diel Vertical Migration III (4:33), Diel Vertical Migration IV (7:36), Metastability (7:24). Total duration: 49:36.
This was one of those videos that I almost decided against posting. I think this one really highlights the discrepancy, or dissonance, between the visual and the auditory. I felt like maybe uploading the video might take away from the magic of the listening experience (if that makes sense). Reveal[ing] too much of the nuts’n’bolts and pulleys’n’curtains’n’backdrops behind the sounding processes. Anyway, I love the pace—tides ebb’n’flow—that Yorgos and Camila created here. [More…]
What became ‘Niche Shift I’ was, for me, the key transitional passage from the album—the part of the performance that really caught the entire trio by surprise on the evening. Enjoy.
Track listing: Autopoiesis I (≥ 10:14), Autopoiesis II (≥ 4:29), Niche Shift I (16:09), Niche Shift II (≥ 4:45), Niche Shift III (4:35), Niche Shift IV (≥ 12:52), Autopoiesis III (3:26), Autopoiesis IV (≥ 5:03), Autopoiesis V (≥ 3:17), Autopoiesis VI (3:37). Total duration ≥ 70:14.
I love what’s recorded (and sculpted) here as sound. There are behind-the-scenes stories about an impossible group emerging from the debris of lockdown and the tangles of inter-border bureaucracy (stories for another time). But also, to my ears as a listener, there’s something tricky and oblique about our music—an origami of fire music and improvisative mischief—knotted, folded-on-itself, and, at time, joyously vexed.
Yet, the feeling on-stage, it’s all near effortless ‘and then’s and ‘therefore’s; of effects and reactions, but also reframings and reflections and retroactions. We went, I think, to a lot of unexpected places in that one session.
So sit-back in your favorite sofa or beanbag, or, headphones ready, go for a wander and a walk, or maybe sit at the table with a good book, and enjoy the journey. [Read the rest…]
I’m very, very happy with the music on this album, and feel very privileged to have shared this journey with the creative people on-stage, and behind-the-scenes. Please enjoy the noise!
I love what’s recorded (and sculpted) here as sound. There are behind-the-scenes stories about an impossible group emerging from the debris of lockdown and the tangles of inter-border bureaucracy (stories for another time). But also, to my ears as a listener, there’s something tricky and oblique about our music—an origami of fire music and improvisative mischief—knotted, folded-on-itself, and, at time, joyously vexed.
Yet, the feeling on-stage, it’s all near effortless ‘and then’s and ‘therefore’s; of effects and reactions, but also reframings and reflections and retroactions. We went, I think, to a lot of unexpected places in that one session.
So sit-back in your favorite sofa or beanbag, or, headphones ready, go for a wander and a walk, or maybe sit at the table with a good book, and enjoy the journey.
Fluid, pliable motion…. The synergy between them is electrifying….
— Corey Mwamba (Freeness, BBC Radio 3)
Blue-green iridescence
(Crunch and more scatter)
A vacuum of warning
The latest project from Korean-American guitarist, improviser and composer Han-earl Park, Gonggong 225088 is his trio with Argentinian saxophonist, composer and visual artist Camila Nebbia, and Greek drummer, improviser and sound artist Yorgos Dimitriadis. Based in Berlin, the group emerged, piece-by-piece, from the darkly hazy, collective dream of masks, remote work, and social distancing.
By turns light-as-a-feather, and heavy and prickly as a bucket of rusty nails, the music is of contradiction and ambiguity. Leaps into ’90s HatHut pastiche are followed by truckers-in-space-engine-rumbles; slow-crawls-from-the-swap of irony-free ‘bells’n’smells’ sound art followed by turns-turns-turns-on-a-dime mutant Free Funk. Gonggong 225088 find overlapping-through-time, All-You-Zombies guitar gestures; stompbox-assisted saxophone punk ventriloquisms; and hive-mind metallophone creatures that migrate across the stereo field.
Here be dragons.
It’s music that is simultaneously earnest and full of ironic glee; a spaghetti junction of noise held together by a deep love of connection, and a constantly shifting center of balance found only in ensemble play.
Recorded with skill and sensitivity by Rabih Beaini, mixed by Han-earl Park to place the listener within the ensemble, and mastered for presence’n’punch by Andrew Weathers, this eponymous debut album captures Park, Dimitriadis and Nebbia in live performance at Morphine Raum.
Autopoiesis I (≥ 10:14), Autopoiesis II (≥ 4:29), Niche Shift I (16:09), Niche Shift II (≥ 4:45), Niche Shift III (4:35), Niche Shift IV (≥ 12:52), Autopoiesis III (3:26), Autopoiesis IV (≥ 5:03), Autopoiesis V (≥ 3:17), Autopoiesis VI (3:37). Total duration ≥ 70:14.
The music on this album transports me to scenes from retro-scifi stories to those of present-day mass transit. It is, to my ears, the sounds of junction crossings, signals from space, and mysterious telegraphy; sometimes evoking impressions of walking by streams under footbridges, at others, of rushing through Manhattan Chinatown. Recorded live at Cafe OTO during the trio’s first meeting, we knew then that we had something special.
I think the sounds and the performances on this disc are all ’round captivating, gripping and fascinating, and the production work, exceptional. Take the journey with us: I’m super proud of the music, and I am thrilled to finally share this with you!
Get ready for the latest release of challenging and imaginative music from Ramble Records with Juno 3, the debut album from the trio of Han-earl Park, Lara Jones and Pat Thomas. Recorded by Shaun Crook live at Cafe OTO, London, and mixed (refracted and rephrased) by Han-earl Park, the album is a particle sim of sounds which spelunks from derelict urban ravines to cybernetic rainforests, while catching auditory glimpses of crashing robotic waves, and strange telegraphic messages from space.
Nautiloid capsule tumbles
across field lines.
An impracticably agile,
graceful derailment.
Juno 3 is Han-earl Park (guitar), Lara Jones (saxophone and electronics) and Pat Thomas (electronics). The eponymous album document the first meeting—interactive, relational—by this trio as it takes a journey: launching from the familiar of the Hackney club space into future imagined By Others. We coax it into our space.
Motion and motifs. (Switching gears, shedding engines.) Modes of transport change from first principles: future-past transit networks give way to bioengineered surfboards.
Bodies collide, unwind, and we’re up again. Reaching crossings; navigating junctions.
Intermodal is the only game we know. Networks (and bodies and vessels) weave, twist, cross then interweave, intertwist and intercross. (We, nocturnal monstrous shapes, turn and return to the deep.)
And, as the album comes to a close (thump’n’snap—bodies unwind), we find ourselves awakened back in the familiar club space. Or: half familiar. The same chairs, the same tables, the same staff. But not the same chair, not the same table, not the same staff.
Orbital Dusk I (6:04), Orbital Dusk II (4:20), Orbital Dusk III (2:29), Orbital Dusk IV (6:03), Diel Vertical Migration I (6:31), Diel Vertical Migration II (4:38), Diel Vertical Migration III (4:33), Diel Vertical Migration IV (7:36), Metastability (7:24). Total duration: 49:36.
Recorded live March 20, 2022, Cafe OTO, London.
Recorded by Shaun Crook.
Mixed by Han-earl Park. Mastered by Chris Sharkey.
Art by Han-earl Park. Design by Atharwa Deshingkar.
Thanks to Richard Barrett, Heather Frasch and Richard Scott; to Fielding Hope and everyone at Cafe OTO, Laura Cole and everyone at Fusebox, Wesley Stephenson of Jazz North East, and Peter O’Doherty of Northern Lights Project. Shoutouts to Corey Mwamba, Graeme Wilson, rit. and Una Lee. The performance was presented with funding from the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe.
Here are two recent releases from two very, very different projects. Let’s start with some sweetly queasy, and queasily sweet avant-pop love from QLH (Quentin Tolimieri: synthesizers; Luca Marini: drums; and Han-earl Park: guitar). It’s music that is simultaneously too much, and not enough: there are voids that need filled, but it’s impossible to figure out where they are for the kitchen sink.
Music by Quentin Tolimieri, Luca Marini and Han-earl Park.
Track 1 recorded by Luca Marini, Berlin, October 11, 2022.
Additional recording by Han-earl Park, Berlin, October 22, 2022.
Track 2 recorded by Marini, September 27, 2022.
Additional recording by Park, September 29, 2022.
Mixed by Han-earl Park.
Update: download no longer available. Thank you so much for your support, and thank you so very much for listening.
If you missed the rereleases of these limited edition recordings, and would like to catch them next time they become available, please sign-up to my newsletter to stay up-to-date. I’d also like to invite you to listen to Eris 136199, Peculiar Velocities, and 𝑿: Eris 136199 Decennial which are all still available.
Recorded live at The Vortex Jazz Club at the start of Eris’ 2020 tour, this digital-only album was originally made available exclusively to our 2020 Kickstarter-backers. We’re now making this available for a short time for everyone who missed out the first time.
Download: €6.00 minimum (‘name your price’).
Album available to stream via the free Bandcamp app, and to download in multiple formats including lossless.
And please remember that 𝑿: Eris 136199 Decennial is still available, and that you have only a couple of more weeks to download Problematica before that goes back to where all the good limited editions go.
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.
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.
This digital-only album was originally made available exclusively to our Kickstarter-backers in 2018. We’re now making this available for a short time for everyone who missed out the first time.
Download: €5.00 minimum (‘name your price’).
Album available to stream via the free Bandcamp app, and to download in multiple formats including lossless.
And please remember that 𝑿: Eris 136199 Decennial is still available, and that you have only a couple of more weeks to download Cryptogenic Animals before that goes back to where all the good limited editions go.
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.
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.
Folk (including many new listeners who’d missed out on the crowdfunders) have, over the last few years, been asking about the availability of Eris 136199’s limited-edition recordings. For the trio’s decennial we’ll be rolling a few of these out again. The digital-only albums Problematica (recorded at Out Front, Derby), and Parabiosis (The Vortex Jazz Club, London) will be rereleased in the following months, but available from today is Cryptogenic Animals recorded at Xposed Club, Cheltenham, November 2017.
Download: €5.00 minimum (‘name your price’).
Album available to stream via the free Bandcamp app, and to download in multiple formats including lossless.
Description
Repurposing melodic atoms? Dueling amplifiers? By turns riding and submerging into reverberant spaces? Here’s how I described the recording on its release in 2018:
While the Copenhagen and Newcastle performances are documented in an upcoming album by the trio Eris 136199, Cryptogenic Animals, recorded in Cheltenham between those dates, offers a unique opportunity to track the evolution of this improvising trio during the 2017 European tour.
Take for example the synchronized, collective jump-cuts and smash-cuts that populates the Copenhagen improvisations. These are all but absent by the time the trio perform three night later in Newcastle where, in their place, you find the group breathing together; moving and transitioning in larger scales. On Cryptogenic Animals, recorded the night after Copenhagen, and two before Newcastle, you can hear both these improvisative tactics operating in fascinating, contrasting ways.
You can also hear saxophonist Catherine Sikora revisit and rework some of the melodic atoms played in Copenhagen; trying them against the contrasting acoustic environments. And, adapting to the disparate amplification available in Cheltenham (a diminutive solid-state amp against a 112 Fender), Nick Didkovsky and Han-earl Park reexamine the freedoms and restraints of the two-guitar context; an experience that would inform into their approach in Newcastle in significant ways.
With the rich acoustics of the Francis Close Hall Chapel, the Cheltenham performance is, in contrast to the frenetic and biting Copenhagen and Newcastle performances, unhurried and lush. Cryptogenic Animals documents a fascinating transitional point in the group’s behavior, showcasing the trio’s adaptability to context, and creativity born from the contingent.
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.
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.
