io 0.0.1 beta++: dreams of the future

Curiosity Rover

At the io 0.0.1 beta++ website, I’ve just posted some thoughts and questions from the Scientific American / American Museum of Natural History Beyond Planet Earth Tweetup on January 18, 2012.

I’m moved by the planetarium: I travel to the stars I cannot see, struggle with the scale of what I cannot fathom. Modern planetariums demonstrate the grandeur of God’s creation, but in a secular scientific context. They bring the distant close; make the visible the imperceptible; make manifest the abstract.

[Read the rest…]

CD update: Numbers: Richard Barrett + Han-earl Park

CD cover of ‘Numbers’ (CS 201 cd) with Richard Barrett and Han-earl Park (copyright 2011, Creative Sources Recordings)
CD cover preview (© 2011 Creative Sources Recordings)

The release of ‘Numbers’ (CS 201 cd), after a delay, is back on track! The recording with Richard Barrett and Han-earl Park [about this duo…] will be released by Creative Sources Recordings. I’ll update y’all with a release date when I know more…

thanks: McMullen-Park (DMG) and Park-Sikora (Brecht Forum), New York

Han-earl Park and Catherine Sikora (Brecht Forum, NYC, 01-08-12) photo copyright 2012 Melanie L. Marshall
Han-earl Park and Catherine Sikora (Brecht Forum, NYC, 01-08-12) photo © 2012 Melanie L. Marshall

A quick note of thanks to all involved in the first two performances of 2012. Thanks to Bruce Lee Gallanter and Manny ‘Lunch’ Maris at the Downtown Music Gallery for the open invite, for hosting the performance, and for their support over the years. Seriously, go to the DMG and get yourself a record (maybe one of mine 😉 Thanks to Ras Moshe for organizing the performance at The Brecht Forum and for welcoming this newcomer to NYC. Thanks also to the other performers of the evening including G. L. Diana and Kyoko Kitamura [Kyoko’s take on the gig…] who brought Cardew to life in a way different from all the Cardews I’ve heard in the past—I’m very interested to hear how this project might continue to evolve—and Ras’ powerful and playful quartet (sorry, don’t have the full lineup details of the quartet—contact me, and I will update).

A big, big, big thanks to the two saxophonists who generously shared the stage with me: Tracy McMullen for her wit and imagination, pushing the music to unexpected places, and to Catherine Sikora for her big, beautiful sound and sense of space and drama.

And, as always, thanks to all who came to listen and watch.

tonight: McMullen-Park (DMG) and Park-Sikora (Brecht Forum), New York

Tracy McMullen, Han-earl Park, Catherine Sikora

Tonight (January 8, 2012) in New York City, performances with Tracy McMullen and with Catherine Sikora:

See the performance diary for up-to-date info.

performance: Han-earl Park and Catherine Sikora at The Brecht Forum, New York

Tracy McMullen, Han-earl Park, Catherine Sikora

Sunday, January 8, 2012, at 9:00pm: performances by Han-earl Park (guitar) and Catherine Sikora (saxophones), plus others, takes place at The Brecht Forum (451 West Street, New York, NY 10014) [map and directions…]. Admission: $10. See the performance diary for up-to-date info.

…And, no, the date is not a typo: this performance is in addition to the earlier performance on the same evening with Tracy McMullen at the Downtown Music Gallery [details…].

performance diary 01-04-12 (New York)

upcoming performances
date venue time details
January 8, 2012 Downtown Music Gallery
13 Monroe Street
New York, NY 10002-7351
6:00pm First of two guitar-saxophone duets of the evening.
6:00pm: G. L. Diana (electronics) and Kyoko Kitamura (voice).
7:00pm: Tracy McMullen (saxophone) and Han-earl Park (guitar).
Free admission.
[Details…]
[DMG page…]
January 8, 2012 The Brecht Forum
451 West Street
New York, NY 10014
9:00pm Second guitar-saxophone duet of the evening.
Han-earl Park (guitar) and Catherine Sikora (saxophones), plus others.
Admission: $10.
[Details…]
December 2011 New York As of December 2011, Han-earl Park is based in New York, and is seeking formal or ad-hoc playing opportunities. Interested musicians, promoters, venues, please get in touch!
April–May 2012 Europe Mathilde 253 (Charles Hayward: drums, percussion and melodica; Han-earl Park: guitar; and Ian Smith: trumpet and flugelhorn), plus Numbers (Richard Barrett: electronics; and Han-earl Park: guitar) are seeking performance opportunities in Europe, April to May 2012.
In addition, Han-earl Park (guitar) is available for formal or ad-hoc performances.
Interested promoters, venues and sponsors, please get in touch!

Continue reading “performance diary 01-04-12 (New York)”

Happy New Year from io 0.0.1 beta++… kind of…

If io 0.0.1 beta++ could want, or express a desire, I imagine that it would want to wish all of you a happy arbitrary demarcation of time:

4G alt. (audio salutations from Han-earl Park and io 0.0.1 beta++) [mp3 audio]

io, however, cannot want, or express, anything…
io, however, cannot want, or express, anything…but Happy New Year from me!

about the audio recording:

Alternate take of track ‘4G’ from ‘io 0.0.1 beta++’ (SLAMCD 531). See below for actual excerpts from the CD.

io 0.0.1 beta++ (itself) and Han-earl Park (guitar).

Recorded on recorded August 19 2010 at C-ALTO Labs, Cork. Recorded and mixed by Han-earl Park. (Note that the track above is taken from an earlier, rough mix than the final CD tracks.)

//www.io001b.com/

Above recording (4G alt. (alternate take: “io 0.0.1 beta++” (SLAMCD 531))) released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. Please attribute the recordings to Han-earl Park.

audio excerpts from SLAMCD 531:

Baroque and Renaissance (audio clip: io 0.0.1 beta++)
impressive synergy (audio clip: io 0.0.1 beta++)
standing alone (audio clip: io 0.0.1 beta++)

‘io 0.0.1 beta++ (SLAMCD 531) CD cover (copyright 2011, Han-earl Park)

‘io 0.0.1 beta++’ (SLAMCD 531) is available from SLAM Productions. [Details…]

personnel: 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.

arts council logo

The construction of io 0.0.1 beta++ has been made possible by the generous support of the Arts Council of Ireland.

performance: Tracy McMullen and Han-earl Park at the Downtown Music Gallery, New York

Tracy McMullen and Han-earl Park

Sunday, January 8, 2012, at 6:00pm: performances by, starting at 7:00pm, Tracy McMullen (saxophone) and Han-earl Park (guitar), plus, at 6:00pm, G. L. Diana (electronics) and Kyoko Kitamura (voice) takes place at the Downtown Music Gallery (13 Monroe Street, New York, NY 10002-7351) [map…]. Free admission.

See the performance diary for up-to-date info. [DMG page…]

about the performers

Beginning in Fall 2011, Tracy McMullen has been a Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar in the Humanities at the University of Southern California. In 2007–2008 she was a Postdoctoral Fellow with the seven-year “Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice” (ICASP) research initiative at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. She received her Ph.D. in Music from UC San Diego in 2007 and was a faculty member in the Music and the Gender & Women’s Studies departments at UC Berkeley from 2009 to 2011. Her articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Current Musicology; Critical Studies in Improvisation; Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies; People Get Ready: The Future of Jazz is Now; Sounding the Body: Improvisation, Representation and Subjectivity; The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies; The Dictionary of African American Music; and The Grove Dictionary of American Music. As a saxophonist in the jazz and improvised music traditions she has recorded on Cadence Jazz and numerous other independent labels and maintains an active performance schedule.

McMullen received an M.A. in Music Composition and an M.M. in Jazz Studies (with an emphasis on saxophone performance) from the University of North Texas. As a jazz/experimentalist saxophonist, she has performed or recorded with George Lewis, Anthony Davis, Dana Reason, Mark Dresser, Pauline Oliveros, and many others.

Improviser, guitarist and constructor Han-earl Park has been working within/from/around traditions of fuzzily idiomatic, on occasion experimental, mostly open improvised musics for over fifteen years, sometimes engineering theater, sometimes inventing ritual. He feels the gravitational pull of collaborative, multi-authored contexts, and 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.

He is part of Mathilde 253 with Charles Hayward and Ian Smith, is involved in collaborations with Bruce Coates, Franziska Schroeder, Alex Fiennes and Murray Campbell. Recent performances include Mathilde 253 with Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith; duo concerts with Paul Dunmall, and with Richard Barrett; trios with Matana Roberts and Mark Sanders, with Catherine Sikora and Ian Smith, and with Jin Sangtae and Jeffrey Weeter; as part of the Evan Parker-led 20-piece improvising ensemble; and the performance of Pauline Oliveros’ ‘Droniphonia’ alongside the composer. Park has also recently performed with Lol Coxhill, Pat Thomas, Corey Mwamba, Mark Trayle, Pedro Rebelo, Alexander Hawkins, Mike Hurley, Chick Lyall, Thomas Buckner and Kato Hideki. Festival appearances include Sonorities (Belfast), Sonic Acts (Amsterdam), dialogues festival (Edinburgh), VAIN Live Art (Oxford), and the Center for Experiments in Art, Information and Technology Festival (California). His recordings have been released by labels including Slam Productions and DUNS Limited Edition.

Park founded Stet Lab, a monthly improvised music space in Cork, Ireland, and taught improvisation at the UCC Department of Music.

CD: io 0.0.1 beta++: audio clip #3

Bruce Coates, Franziska Schroeder and io 0.0.1 beta++, Ó Riada Hall, Cork, 05-25-2010  (photo copyright 2010, Han-earl Park)
Bruce Coates, Franziska Schroeder and io 0.0.1 beta++ (Ó Riada Hall, Cork, May 25, 2010)

As previously noted, I’ve been posting short audio clips from ‘io 0.0.1 beta++’ (SLAMCD 531) at the io 0.0.1 beta++ ’site. The third and final clip in the series, taken from the track ‘Discovery: Decay’, features an improvised counterpoint between the interactive musical automaton io 0.0.1 beta++, and the human musicians, Franziska Schroeder and Han-earl Park. [More…]

‘io 0.0.1 beta++ (SLAMCD 531) CD cover (copyright 2011, Han-earl Park)

‘io 0.0.1 beta++’ (SLAMCD 531) is available from SLAM Productions. [Details…]

personnel: 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.

arts council logo

The construction of io 0.0.1 beta++ has been made possible by the generous support of the Arts Council of Ireland.

thanks: Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith’s Silver Orchestra at the Roulette, Brooklyn

Happy 70th Birthday, Wadada

I feel honored to have been part of an orchestra of performers of that caliber. As best I can make out, the final lineup of the Silver Orchestra on the night was:

Silver Orchestra lineup 12-16-11

Thomas Buckner (voice), Jennifer Choi, Wendy Law (strings), Casey Anderson, Casey Butler, Jamie Baum, Marty Ehrlich, Sara Schoenbeck, J. D. Parran, Jason Mears (winds), Ted Daniel, Taylor Ho Bynum, Mark Taylor (brass), Yuko Fujiyama (piano), John Lindberg (bass), Han-earl Park (guitar), and Bobby Naughton, Susie Ibarra, Martin Obeng, Harris Eisenstadt (percussion).

Was great to catch up with some old acquaintances, and meet many new people. Some things to take away: the trio of drummers to my right (Susie, Martin and Harris) always sounded fantastic; Mark’s fluttering, playful solo was a highlight; Angelica Sanchez for her sense of humor; musing with Jason about the possibilities (and practicalities) of large ensemble creative music; and Yuko and Taylor making the sections breaks clearer for the rest of us.

And of course, thanks to Wadada for taking time to guide us through his compositions; always a pleasure. Happy Birthday, Wadada!

tonight: Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith’s Silver Orchestra at the Roulette, Brooklyn

Silver Orchestra

Tonight (December 16, 2011), at 8:00pm: My first gig in NY! I will be performing as part of Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith’s Silver Orchestra, plus the Golden Quintet (Golden Quartet +1) and Organic. The event takes place at the Roulette (509 Atlantic Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11217). Tickets: $15 ($10) [get tickets…]. [Details…]

more CD reviews: io 0.0.1 beta++

io 0.0.1 beta++ (SLAMCD 531) CD cover (copyright 2011, Han-earl Park)
io 0.0.1 beta++ (SLAMCD 531) © 2011 Han-earl Park

More reviews of ‘io 0.0.1 beta++’ (SLAMCD 531) including Vittorio’s big thumbs-up at MusicZoom where he hails the recordings as a “total hymn to modernity”, in which the human musicians “throw themselves with passion on the ideas from the inanimate object”, and the listener will be “fully repaid by that which is a successful experiment”:

Il titolo da romanzo o di sigla di messaggio segreto è il nome della macchina sparamusica/rumori che fa bella mostra di sè sul palco e che senza alcun intervento dei musicisti intorno tira giù il suo catalogo di suoni con cui gli altri si trovano a confrontarsi. Un´idea che sarebbe piaciuta ai futuristi di omai un secolo fa, un inno totale alla modernità. Altro che strumenti acustici!

I tre musicisti coinvolti insieme alla macchina sono Han-earl Park alla chitarra, Bruce Coates al sax alto e sopranino e Franziska Schroeder al sax soprano. Non hanno nessuna paura per il confronto e così si avventano con passione sulla proposta dell´oggetto inanimato.

La session completamente improvvisata richiede molta attenzione da parte dell´ascoltatore, ripagata completamente da quello che è un esperimento riuscito. [Read the rest…] [English translation…]

Vittorio (MusicZoom)

Meanwhile, what to me is ‘playful’ may be ‘uncompromising’ to someone else:

Fra segmenti più atmosferico-minimali, e altri invece più frammentati e nervosi, si procede così, talora arrestandosi a una sorta di limbo emozionale, di quieta truculenza, peraltro sempre ammirevole per coerenza e rigore. [Read the rest…]

Alberto Bazzurro (All About Jazz Italia)

On the other hand, Ed Pinsent of The Sound Projector highlights the (fun, playful) material and interactive dimensions in the meeting between human and machine musicians:

The guitarist Park, sometime member of Mathilde 253 whose fine CD impressed us in March this year, is joined by two improvising saxophonists, Bruce Coates (from the Birmingham Improvisers’ Orchestra) and Franziska Schroeder (member of the trio FAINT), and the record documents the meeting of this trio with the “machine musician” io 0.0.1 beta++. This device is an automaton, a musical robot if you will, built by Mr Park; it’s not just another computer programme that plays random sounds or builds an “interactive” space for other laptop musicians, but actually occupies physical space and performs on the stage alongside its human counterparts. Shades of Pierre Bastien…. The multi-media artist Sara Roberts from California writes the liner notes and she does a much better job than I possibly could in articulating the cultural resonances of this man-meets-automaton event. [Read the rest…]

— Ed Pinsent (The Sound Projector)

And Rui Eduardo Paes hears a meeting in which the human musicians bring their varied experience, in avant-jazz and in the space between electroacoustics and contemporary music, and in which the automaton “interactively reacting to what they do and even giving them cues”:

Os músicos de carbono envolvidos ora trabalham na área do ‘avant-jazz’, ora na da electroacústica de fronteira com a música contemporânea: Park com Charles Hayward, Wadada Leo Smith e Paul Dunmall, Coates com Tony Oxley, Lol Coxhill e o compositor indeterminista Christian Wolff, e Schroeder ao lado do pianista português Pedro Rebelo e em colaborações com Pauline Oliveros e Evan Parker. Todas essas experiências se reflectem em temas como ‘Ground-Based Telemetry’ e ‘Laplace: Instability’, sempre com o io a reagir interactivamente ao que fazem e até a dar-lhes deixas. [Read the rest…] [English translation…]

Rui Eduardo Paes (jazz.pt)

‘io 0.0.1 beta++’ (SLAMCD 531) with Han-earl Park, Bruce Coates and Franziska Schroeder is available from SLAM Productions. [More info…] [All reviews…] [Get the CD…]

arts council logo

The construction of io 0.0.1 beta++ has been made possible by the generous support of the Arts Council of Ireland.