Photographs of (top to bottom) Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith, Marian Murray, and Mathilde 253 (Han-earl Park, Charles Hayward and Ian Smith) taken at the Half Moon Theatre (Cork Opera House, Emmet Place, Cork, Ireland), March 30, 2011 [Details…]. All photographs by, and copyright 2011, Julia Healy.
The performance was presented with funding from the Music Network Performance and Touring Award, and support from UCC School of Music and the Cork Opera House.
At the io 0.0.1 beta++ ’site, I’m posting short excerpts from the liner notes to ‘io 0.0.1 beta++’ (SLAMCD 531). Written by the California-based interactive media artist Sara Roberts, here’s the second excerpt:
io 0.0.1 beta++ is rather special in being both an instrument and a player. And given the two attributes it has a very particular sound, ‘sound’ here referring to both timbral quality and the broader sense of having an indelible identity, a style, having its own sound. [2]
io has an extravagant range of sounds made with superhuman amounts of air, and superhuman articulations of air resistance: a hummingbird trill that can go on without the limit of breath, bleats, blats, a grainy slur, shifts between piping and sandy sounds, elephant-like trumpeting, a faint spitty-sounding purr, slushy trills, a hoarse blast of full-spectrum noise, scumbling, whispery hisses ramping up to loud razzing. It can make delicate birdlike chirpings then abruptly sound like a power tool under duress, or render sounds reminiscent of emergency vehicles. [Original post at io 0.0.1 beta++…]
[2] George E. Lewis, ‘Interacting with Latter-Day Musical Automata’, Contemporary Music Review, Vol.18, No.3, 99–112 (1999).
© 2011 Sara Roberts.
Read the first excerpt: ‘a curious situation (liner notes: io 0.0.1 beta++)’. [All excerpts…]
‘io 0.0.1 beta++’ (SLAMCD 531) will be released by SLAM Productions in fall August 2011.
Performers: io 0.0.1 beta++ (itself), Han-earl Park (guitar), Bruce Coates (alto and sopranino saxophones) and Franziska Schroeder (soprano saxophone).
© 2011 Han-earl Park.
℗ 2011 SLAM Productions.
06–11–11: change release date to August 2011.
I’ve shut the CD store because of the move back to the United States. I plan to reinstate the purchase option, but I can’t say when at the moment. Some of these CDs are available from other sources, and these are indicated below.
Mathilde 253 [details…]
Performers: Charles Hayward (drums, percussion and melodica), Han-earl Park (guitar) and Ian Smith (trumpet and flugelhorn) plus Lol Coxhill (saxophone).
[Get it from Slam Productions…]
[Get it from distributors/shops…] [Downtown Music Gallery…] [Jazzcds…] [Squidco…] [Wayside Music…]
[iTunes…] [eMusic…]
Boolean Transforms [details…]
Performers: Paul Dunmall (saxophone and bagpipes) and Han-earl Park (guitar).
[Get it from Mind Your Own Music…]
[Get it from Downtown Music Gallery…]
Live at the Glucksman gallery, Cork [details…]
Performers: Han-earl Park (guitar), Paul Dunmall (saxophone), Mark Sanders (drums) and Jamie Smith (guitar).
A couple of more reviews of Mathilde 253 (SLAMCD 528) including Ken Waxman at JazzWord who says that it’s a “textbook example of high-class improvising” (and I’m a “sharp-witted” guitarist):
Riveting in its scope and cohesion, this seven-track slice of Free Improv captures the sounds made one night at a London club by an ad-hoc assemblage of players, who ordinarily may not have been expected to jell so effectively….
Blowsy pedal-point from the trumpeter; shuffles and drags from [Charles] Hayward; and 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. Half-valve plunger work from [Ian] Smith includes bent note flutters; while the drummer’s railway signal-crossing-like bell ringing and repetitive cymbal slams provide perfect matches for the guitarist’s flattened string patterns and note extensions…. [Read the rest…]
— Ken Waxman (JazzWord)
How’s your Italian? Romualdo Del Noce apprently compares us to the four musketeers:
Ronzante, provocatorio, mai davvero eccessivo ma comunque sfuggente, il contributo di questi quattro moschettieri non è eccepibile sul piano del coinvolgimento, testimoniando un action-playing contemporaneamente colto, “palestrato” e pregno di flussi idiosincrasici. [Read the rest…]
— Romualdo Del Noce (Jazz Convention)
Mathilde 253’s eponymous debut CD (SLAMCD 528) available on SLAM Productions. [More info…] [All reviews…] [Get the CD…]
An exclusive audio clip of Mathilde 253 (Charles Hayward: drums, percussion and melodica; Han-earl Park: guitar; and Ian Smith: trumpet) with Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith (trumpet) was broadcast on Arena, RTÉ Radio 1, 30 March 2011. You can catch the two minute twenty-seven second improvisation recorded by Alex Fiennes during the soundcheck prior the performance at the Half Moon Theatre (Cork Opera House, Emmet Place, Cork, Ireland) via Arena’s listen again feature (it appears at around the 39–40 minute mark). [Listen again…]
Presented with funding from the Music Network Performance and Touring Award, and support from UCC School of Music and the Cork Opera House.
Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith, transformation, ankhrasmation, teaching improvisation, Charles Hayward’s backbeats and Mathilde 253? You can listen again to the interview with me originally broadcast on March 27, 2011 on Nova on RTÉ lyric fm. [Listen again…]
Update: now available, newly remixed and remastered by Richard Scott, as a download release from Vicmod Records! [More info…] [Get it from Vicmod Records…]
The complete recording A track from the October 23, 2010 session by Han-earl Park and Richard Scott is now available for download below.
| 11:20 mp3 file. Currently unavailable for download. Han-earl Park (guitar) and Richard Scott (electronics). License: by-nc-nd. |
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| 13:27 mp3 file. Currently unavailable for download. Han-earl Park (guitar) and Richard Scott (electronics). License: by-nc-nd. |
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| Carrier | 10:45 mp3 file. Han-earl Park (guitar) and Richard Scott (electronics). License: by-nc-nd. |
| 13:16 mp3 file. Currently unavailable for download. Han-earl Park (guitar) and Richard Scott (electronics). License: by-nc-nd. |
Han-earl Park (guitar) and Richard Scott (electronics).
Recorded on October 23, 2010 at Richard Scott’s studio, Berlin. Recorded and mixed by Richard Scott.
//www.busterandfriends.com/
http://richard-scott.net/
Above recordings (Cell, Catch | Pitch, Carrier, and Artillery) released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. Please attribute the recordings to Han-earl Park and Richard Scott.
The complete recording of the July 29, 2010 performance by Han-earl Park plus Marian Murray. [More…]
The complete recording of the March 26, 2009 performance by Franziska Schroeder and Han-earl Park. [More…]
06–25–11: withdraw three tracks (Cell, Catch | Pitch, and Artillery).
12–06–11: add Vicmod Records release details.
Ed Pinsent at The Sound Projector gives his take on Mathilde 253 (SLAMCD 528):
The real strength of the work is when the individual voices begin to shine, as they do on ‘Aachen’ for example—some savourable moments of interlining lines from Coxhill’s liquid fruit-juice sax and Smith’s horn. Park manages some imaginatively dissonant barbedly-wire phrases and false-harmonic scatterings from his detuned axe on ‘Similkameen,’ placing him very much in the Bailey mould, but that’s not a bad thing. Hayward puts in tons of hard work on his drum kit to keep up with the changing dynamics, and executes almost every paradiddle in the drummer’s manual on the long track ‘Kalimantan’ in his efforts to derail the collective train and steer the ship’s company over stony ground. Aye, the ingenuity and invention of these combined performances is impressive…. [Read the rest…]
— Ed Pinsent (The Sound Projector)
Mathilde 253’s eponymous debut CD (SLAMCD 528) available on SLAM Productions. [More info…] [All reviews…] [Get the CD…]
Recording this week at the Institute of Sonology (Den Haag, The Netherlands): Richard Barrett (electronics) and Han-earl Park (guitar). Should be fun.
Daniel Spicer gives Mathilde 253 (SLAMCD 528) a thumbs up in the current issue of Jazzwise (issue 150, March 2011):
This new improvising group… draws disparate personalities into one eccentric orbit. Han-Earl Park, a guitarist of Korean descent, residing in Ireland, is as at home in underground Noise as he is dueting with free jazz heroes like Paul Dunmall. Trumpeter Ian Smith is a stalwart of the London improv scene and drummer Charles Hayward is best known for his work with seminal post-Punk experimenters This Heat. On these live recordings they generate a surprising amount of heat. Park uses pedals to smudge and smear chords or rolls out strange robotic grumblings, a technician playing electricity as much as the guitar. Smith has a high, taut attach, like a more tuneful version of Donald Ayler’s pure energy. And Hayward… makes a good fist of playing freely…. Veteran saxophonist Coxhill rounds it out to a quartet for two tunes, making this a very satisfying debut.
Mathilde 253’s eponymous debut CD (SLAMCD 528) available on SLAM Productions. [More info…] [All reviews…] [Get the CD…]
After some glowing reviews (including one from Brian Morton in Signal to Noise [read it…] and another from Guillaume Belhomme in Le son du grisli [read it…]), Mathilde 253 has got a couple of more careful, measured responses:
…A bustling, talkative seventy-four minutes made up of angular, Baileyesque electric guitar, some fantastic drum splashes mixed with occasional bursts of less traditional percussive sounds such as the small metallic chimes heard in the opening seconds of the album, and the chattery, conversational style of the trumpet and horn. …The playing here is very fine, a tightly woven mass of sounds with no one real dominating voice but each musician expressive and energetic. The music is all about the conversation, but a real heart-on-the-sleeve collision course of a conversation, but nevertheless the result of the musicians listening to one another and responding. The addition of Coxhill’s softer soprano on the last two pieces do slow the music a little, but the jazz credentials remain. If the music’s progression is a little less choppy then melody and hints at standardised rhythm creep in, but the improvised discussion carries on, perhaps the words are less heated but the debate remains of interest. [Read the rest…]
My favorite tracks are the last two, in which the group is joined by saxophone legend Lol Coxhill. The four minute guitar/sax duet at the beginning of Track 6 is inspired; the two really seem to be conversing with one another. [Read the rest…]
— Max Level (KFJC 89.7 FM)
Mathilde 253’s eponymous debut CD (SLAMCD 528) available on SLAM Productions. [More info…] [All reviews…] [Get the CD…]
A very nice review of Mathilde 253 (SLAMCD 528) by Brian Morton in the current issue of Point of Departure:
Mathilde 253 is one of those ‘name’ groups that sprang fully-formed from a single playing moment… but seems to have been around for much longer…. Ian Smith is a formidable technician and a profoundly intuitive music maker, with the ability to deliver exactly the right sound, or very often the right sonic texture, at the psychological moment….
Guitarist Han-earl Park is a musical philosopher…. One of the delights of this live session is that one very frequently can’t distinguish who is making particular sounds. There’s not much idiomatic guitar-playing, though Park is very much in the Derek Bailey rather than the Keith Rowe line; he uses relatively orthodox technique to unorthodox ends.
It’s fascinating to find [Charles] Hayward in this setting, taking up the mantle—different as they were—of the late Steve Harris. Mathilde 253 has something of the guttural authority and generosity of gesture one associates with Zaum…. They also make a specific virtue of building other musicians into the group language.
It’s a long set, but has sufficient underlying momentum to pass with deceptive speed. It takes an alert listener to distinguish occasional quietuses in the process with track endings, and there is a moment between ‘Ishikari’ and ‘Jixi’ when it sounds almost as if one aspect of the previous piece has been filleted out for more sustained attention. Smith favors long mongrelly growls and scales that ascend and descend in illogical ways, like the stairs in an M C Escher print. Hayward has a very distinct sense of time underneath the freedom….
This is an exciting new venture for him and for the others. One can reasonably expect unexpected things from Park, who is a delightful shape-shifter and Smith always repays the closest attention, and claims it with sudden open-horn breakouts if the fabric of the music gets too smooth and uninflected. [Read the rest…]
— Brian Morton (Point of Departure)
Mathilde 253’s eponymous debut CD (SLAMCD 528) available on SLAM Productions. [More reviews…] [More info…] [Get the CD…]
