Latest improvisation part of the ‘#onetakestudy’ series. Enjoy! (I honestly couldn’t tell you if that’s an ironic title.)
Of Life, Recombinant (NEWJAiM9) [details…]
Personnel: Han-earl Park (guitar) with Anne Wellmer (voice on track 4).
Track listing: Game: Mutation (5:38); Naught Opportune (≥ 10:42); Are Variant (≥ 8:06); Of Life, Recombinant (≥ 29:22). Total duration ≥ 53:48.
© 2021 NEWJAiM Recordings.
℗ 2021 Han-earl Park.
A quick, ‘no-prep’ improvisation as part of the ‘#onetakestudy’ series: here’s what my guitar sounds like, straight out-of-the-case, the day after a gig. (Guitar tuning thanks to Aidan Baker and Katharina Schmidt, plus lighting design courtesy of the Berlin sky.) Enjoy!
Of Life, Recombinant (NEWJAiM9) [details…]
Personnel: Han-earl Park (guitar) with Anne Wellmer (voice on track 4).
Track listing: Game: Mutation (5:38); Naught Opportune (≥ 10:42); Are Variant (≥ 8:06); Of Life, Recombinant (≥ 29:22). Total duration ≥ 53:48.
© 2021 NEWJAiM Recordings.
℗ 2021 Han-earl Park.
A quick one-take made before heading out. A simple, take-a-line-for-a-walk improvisation as part of the ‘#onetakestudy’ series. Enjoy!
Of Life, Recombinant (NEWJAiM9) [details…]
Personnel: Han-earl Park (guitar) with Anne Wellmer (voice on track 4).
Track listing: Game: Mutation (5:38); Naught Opportune (≥ 10:42); Are Variant (≥ 8:06); Of Life, Recombinant (≥ 29:22). Total duration ≥ 53:48.
© 2021 NEWJAiM Recordings.
℗ 2021 Han-earl Park.
A ‘first-take’ made on a rainy day. First in a new series of studies (‘#onetakestudy’) that folows on from the #lockdownminiature series, and on parallel tracks to #spliceimprov.
I’m not 100% sure this improvisation holds focus entirely for its duration, and it could do, for my taste as a listener, with more contrast, but it meanders in a pleasing way. A kind of reverie on an overcast day. Enjoy.
As the looper becomes more a part of my sound, I begin to again question the disconnect between gesture—visible, weighty—and the auditory. As I watch myself in play (in video playback), I find myself alienated from the experience. [Read the rest…]
See the pinned comment to read my thoughts about this piece, and what I think doesn’t work about it.
Of Life, Recombinant (NEWJAiM9) [details…]
Personnel: Han-earl Park (guitar) with Anne Wellmer (voice on track 4).
Track listing: Game: Mutation (5:38); Naught Opportune (≥ 10:42); Are Variant (≥ 8:06); Of Life, Recombinant (≥ 29:22). Total duration ≥ 53:48.
© 2021 NEWJAiM Recordings.
℗ 2021 Han-earl Park.
10-29-23: added quote, and link to the pinned comment.
A ‘first-take’ ditty (it’s been a while since I posted a straightforward improvisation without any videographic or compositional concerns). I think maybe the first thirty seconds or so is a bit shaky, but I’m pretty happy with my playing here overall. I think it shows what I’ve been interested in, and working on, in regards to my approach to the guitar in the context of improvisation.
And a big, big thanks again to Musikfonds / Neustart Kultur for enabling me to continue, and build-on, these studies.
Of Life, Recombinant (NEWJAiM9) [details…]
Personnel: Han-earl Park (guitar) with Anne Wellmer (voice on track 4).
Track listing: Game: Mutation (5:38); Naught Opportune (≥ 10:42); Are Variant (≥ 8:06); Of Life, Recombinant (≥ 29:22). Total duration ≥ 53:48.
© 2021 NEWJAiM Recordings.
℗ 2021 Han-earl Park.
Big thanks to Musikfonds / Neustart Kultur for enabling me to continue, and build-on, these studies.
Of Life, Recombinant (NEWJAiM9) [details…]
Personnel: Han-earl Park (guitar) with Anne Wellmer (voice on track 4).
Track listing: Game: Mutation (5:38); Naught Opportune (≥ 10:42); Are Variant (≥ 8:06); Of Life, Recombinant (≥ 29:22). Total duration ≥ 53:48.
© 2021 NEWJAiM Recordings.
℗ 2021 Han-earl Park.
What is distance?
What is perspective?
What is that gaze?
What is that absence? [Read the rest…]
If you’ve missed them, the previous fourteen miniatures in the series were posted on Facebook and on Twitter.
Of Life, Recombinant (NEWJAiM9) [details…]
Personnel: Han-earl Park (guitar) with Anne Wellmer (voice on track 4).
Track listing: Game: Mutation (5:38); Naught Opportune (≥ 10:42); Are Variant (≥ 8:06); Of Life, Recombinant (≥ 29:22). Total duration ≥ 53:48.
© 2021 NEWJAiM Recordings.
℗ 2021 Han-earl Park.
A new galaxy in Park’s universe? David Lynch vs. Andrei Tarkovsky? And what’s hidden that will be unearthed? Lee Rice Epstein reviews Of Life, Recombinant (NEWJAiM9) in Free Jazz:
Of Life, Recombinant tells multiple stories at once, opening up a wide aperture and displaying stunningly drawn vistas. The four-song suite makes for a fantastic headphone album, as small details invite your attention ever more deeply throughout…. The fugue-like state is but one-layer of Park’s suite. As they progress, ‘Game: Mutation,’ ‘Naught Opportune,’ ‘Are Variant,’ and the 30-minute ‘Of Life, Recombinant’ continually pitch one direction, pivot on multiple axes, and branch out in new directions. That’s true as much for the sonics—with pre-recorded material mixed and matched over itself—as it is for the emotional throughlines, in some cases leading listeners down long corridors of chilly anticipation, in others playing up the subtle intimacy of quiet tones…. And unmistakably, Park’s guitar is itself a treasure chest of delights—long, thrilling sections of beauty fold into chilly, dread-inducing dreamscapes, each of which will enchant and delight in equal measure. [Read the rest…]
[About this album…] [Get the CD/download from NEWJAiM (Bandcamp)…] [All reviews…]
Elsewhere, J. Vognsen, writing in Perfect Sound Forever, asked composers and performers (including myself) for our thoughts on failure in the context of creative work: “Why does some music end up not in the ears of listeners but in the dustbin, or perhaps never leaving the mind of the creator in the first place?”
Every piece I do leaves behind detritus of a creative life: abandoned exercises, studies, mockups, etcetera. A lot of my time and energy as a performer, specifically as an improviser, is spent in preparation; off-stage, in practice and in study. Testing things out, sometimes speculatively, sometimes with a particular goal in mind, sometimes creating studies to more clearly define a problem or problematic; these exercises and studies can help me hone in on a particular technique or strategy, they can help me discover better ways of getting from A-to-B….
But sometimes the creative detritus can be unplanned and have a greater impact—a greater impact on energy expended, on time and effort. [Read the rest…]
The piece is very much worth reading. In particular, I enjoyed reading, and really related to, Carla Kihlstedt’s take (“my creative failures… fall into three basic categories: The Hollow, The Half-baked and The Missed Marks”), and Nick Didkovsky’s telling of The CHORD Origin Story is a total blast.
If you enjoyed that piece, please also check out some of my recent written work including ‘Broken Families: Collectivism, Violence, Imagined Utopias and Improvisation,’ and my reflections on working through times of uncertainty, anxiety, and of doubt.
As part of the ‘New Work’ series, Jazz Right Now has published my piece on work(ing) during these pandemic times; times of “uncertainty, anxiety, and of doubt.” In the article, I reflect on the perverse desire for artistic ‘productivity’; the breaches between public and private spaces; the artistic commemoration this time, this condition; and the need for creative work that frustrates:
The rogue strand of RNA danced its dance with humanity. It’s beautiful in its own way. Poetic—messy, terrifying, mesmerizing—in its own way.
R-nought.
New words and expressions entered the vernacular. Old words came to denote less—more specific things—but encapsulate and carry more meaning: of fear, uncertainty, yes, but also fascination. We’re being transformed, across porous borders, through language. Soon, those of us who lived through this, might share these as shorthands. ‘Variant’ means something. It has a texture and resonance and feel and vibe that can’t be captured by a Merriam-Webster.
I reflect on how pre-pandemic cultures (and culture-industrial complexes), with its obsession with authority and coherence and narrative, ill prepared us for the complexity and discord and messiness of the present. That maybe if we had held closer these prickly, uncomfortable, inconvenient, noisy heterophonies we, as societies, may have been more capable of facing the chaos, or dancing the dance of humanity v. RNA. [Read the rest…]
Thanks to Cisco Bradley for inviting me to contribute to this series, and thanks so much to Cristina Marx for the photography.
Watch the rest of the #lockdownminiature series on Twitter and Facebook.
Of Life, Recombinant (NEWJAiM9) [details…]
Personnel: Han-earl Park (guitar) with Anne Wellmer (voice on track 4).
Track listing: Game: Mutation (5:38); Naught Opportune (≥ 10:42); Are Variant (≥ 8:06); Of Life, Recombinant (≥ 29:22). Total duration ≥ 53:48.
© 2021 NEWJAiM Recordings.
℗ 2021 Han-earl Park.
Fractions of stillness close to being shattered? warped halos of reverberating pitches? a very seducing utopia? Massimo Ricci of Touching Extremes describes the experience of listening to Of Life, Recombinant (NEWJAiM9):
We listen, we wait. Breathing deeply, relaxed enough yet ready to be sucked in by some vortex of illusion. We absorb the blows of sudden mutations connected by threads of metallic (in)coherence. Twisted harmonics, miscellanies of tones whose fluidity belongs more to states of exhausted drowsiness than labyrinths of analytical overspill. Superimposed images gradually losing the distinctness we had laboriously achieved in our mind. Bursts of paroxysm that, in the long run, disclose unexpectedly appeasing qualities. Each spin adds further layers of interpretation, not to mention the sheer aural thrill. As per Park’s words, “I’d like to think that listeners might find their way into their own space, and find their world refracted through it.” There will be no problem with that, if that audience is awake and profoundly receptive. [Read the rest…]
I really appreciate that Massimo Ricci embraced the subjective and poetic. It’s the kind of approach that I’d hoped that reviewers would take when writing about this work.
Elsewhere, Ken Waxman of JazzWord describes a bullet-train journey of ‘sound mutations’ between moments of ‘guitar-ness’ and the guitar as ‘sourced textures’:
Sometimes bell-ringing strums, power crunches or mechanized drones are emphasized to the extent that expected guitar sounds are at a premium and arise unexpectedly…. The concept is evolved at its greatest length during the almost 29½-minute title track. With whispered sibilant vocalized noises sometimes snarling in the ether, muted rumbles inflate to voltage buzzes that include oscillated hisses with silent interludes before hardening into a wavering horizontal line. As over-amplified knob twisting tones and shaking bullet-train-like rumbles become aurally prominent besides the electronic impulses, by midpoint is appears that a psychedelic-era freak-out may be in the offing. Although the narrative echoes from harsh to harsher, yet following an elephantine-like chord variation fragmented parts blend into nearly opaque solid matter and abruptly stop. Like a notable train trip, gratification come from sights glimpsed… not the final destination. [Read the rest…]
And, writing in salt peanuts*, Jan Granlie finds “a kind of meditative music for sophisticated souls”, a music that is “consistently melancholic while simultaneously arch-modern and exciting”:
Og selv om dette er musikk som krever en del av lytteren, skal man gi gitaristen tid. Man skal lytte gjennom hans lydverden flere ganger og etter hvert plukke opp detaljer og, kanskje også, forstå hva den godeste gitaristen vil fortelle oss. For selv om dette ikke er det enkleste historiene, så er det fascinerende å følge med i hva han skaper av lydbilder med gitaren. Og i sistesporet, «Of Life. Recombinant», hvor han har «damer på rommet», og er platas hovedspor som varer i nesten en halv time, skjer det utrolig mange spennende ting man skal følge med på. [Read the rest…]
[About this album…] [Get the CD/download from NEWJAiM (Bandcamp)…] [All reviews…]
I think where Nº 8, for me, fell short is how it was unable to engage with the vernacular of wah-wah guitar. I mean, if you wanted to strip the wah of all its funk, that was how to do it. So Nº 11, I hope, goes some way toward redressing that. [Read the rest…]
Watch more miniatures in the series on Twitter and Facebook.
Of Life, Recombinant (NEWJAiM9) [details…]
Personnel: Han-earl Park (guitar) with Anne Wellmer (voice on track 4).
Track listing: Game: Mutation (5:38); Naught Opportune (≥ 10:42); Are Variant (≥ 8:06); Of Life, Recombinant (≥ 29:22). Total duration ≥ 53:48.
© 2021 NEWJAiM Recordings.
℗ 2021 Han-earl Park.
I feel blessed and enormously privileged to find Of Life, Recombinant (NEWJAiM9) among the year’s end ‘best of’ lists. Selecting my album for aJazzNoise’s picks-of-2021, Dave Foxall writes:
Han-earl Park digs deep into techniques and sounds and presents a fresh palette for the guitar. Pyrotechnics abound, but not in any kind of traditional sense. [Read the rest…]
Plus, with the inclusion of Catherine Sikora’s corners (“absorbing, pushing against and playing off the natural reverb”), and Nick Didkovsky’s CHORD IV, aJazzNoise’s selection almost like an informal Eris 136199 reunion!
Keith Prosk also chooses Of Life… for his Top 10 at Free Jazz, and in his review at harmonic series, Prosk writes of a music that “explores and rearranges material, or things whose characters seem similar though never the same, through its durations”:
Along with what’s kept there is always something left and something new. The country twang tune with popping harmonics from ‘Naught Opportune.’ The unsettling mandolinesque trill or quivering sustain in hazy delay from ‘Are Variant.’ The distorted suck, psychedelic and ecstatic, in slow crescendo from ‘Of Life, Recombinant.’ In its representation of real-time activity that ruminates on its material, it is as if it provides a glimpse into the improvising process, whose hushed reality of painstaking practice might often be misinterpreted as something closer to strokes of inspiration out of the ether. In between chaos and composure, it is something closer to the complexity of life. [Read the rest…]
And I’m super proud to find my album on Avant Music News’ Best of 2021. As Mike Borella previously wrote:
Park’s approach changes, from jangling notes, to ambient passages, to twangy folk themes, to long-held chords. In doing so, he incorporates extended techniques into more conventional practices to the point where the former guide and direct the latter. [Read the rest…]
[About this album…] [Get the CD/download from NEWJAiM (Bandcamp)…] [All reviews…]
