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.
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.
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.
Over the last several months I’ve been busy behind-the-scenes working on a solo guitar project. In a few months I hope to announce some exciting developments. In the meantime, you can catch up with some short videos of solo guitar improvisations by following #lockdownminiature both on Twitter and on Facebook.
This project is funded by the Arts Council of Ireland.
I am very proud and very grateful to find Peculiar Velocities, the latest album from Eris 136199, in the best-of lists of a Jazz Noise (which, elsewhere, described the music as “serenity on the edge of a breakdown”), and of Avant Music News. And no one is more surprised than I that a Kickstarter-only limited edition live album got on to a best-of-year list!
Elsewhere Corey Mwamba (Freeness, BBC Radio 3) describes “exquisite music-making” with musicians that “fuse and create this gorgeous glitchy stew together”, and, writing in Vital Weekly, Nick Roseblade describes Peculiar Velocities as an album in which “everything feels pushed as far is it can go”:
Like what rock music could, and possibly should, have sounded like it if musicians like Ornette Coleman became the norm. There is a freeness to the playing that is astounding, but there is also organisation. During sections, the guitars work together to give Sikora something tangible to stand on. When this happens ‘Eris 136199: Peculiar Velocities’ becomes something very special indeed. ‘Polytely I’ sees the guitars constantly churning to create vortex-esque soundscapes why Sikora’s light and airy saxophone wafts above it. Like stream on a freshly brewed tea. This is an album that reminds you of how good it is when musicians don’t care about the rules and just play. [Read the rest…]
And while Brady Gerber’s ‘7 For Seven’ finds a space in which “a nervous guitar fills an orange sky and empty beach”, and Takeshi Goda in JazzTokyo writes of velocities, perception, collisions, fusions, joy and brain-reforming experiences:
相手のプレイを意識して、コール&レスポンスで反応しながら音楽の流れを作るのは即興演奏のひとつのスタイルである。しかし彼らのアンサンブルの方法論は異なる。その場で適切と各自が判断する奏法・旋律・リズムを個人の責任で奏でることに専念して、3人のプレイが衝突と融合を繰り返すことで、結果的に予測不能なサウンドを生み出すことを信条としている。3つの異なる平行した自然のプロセスが同時に起こることで知覚される集団即興演奏は…
それはあたかも地球外の異境から到来した明滅する運動エネルギーによって脳外科手術を施されるような驚喜の頭脳改革体験である。 [Read the rest…]
And finally, Ken Shimamoto/The Stash Dauber writes about sounds that “slither and spatter like radio interference, shimmer like molten silver, or ring like a cymbal’s decay” music in which “the spirit of electricity becomes a living thing”:
The best type of musical conversation, abstract and oblique as it might be at times…. I’ve listened to this thing a half dozen times since I started writing yesterday, and am happy to have its company to help me get through what looks like it’s going to be a very tough winter… and the hopeful spring to follow. [Read the rest…]
[About this album…] [Get the CD/download (Bandcamp)…] [All reviews…]
CD: €11 minimum (‘name your price’) plus shipping.*†
Download: €8 minimum (‘name your price’).†
* Limited edition glass-mastered CD. CD includes additional material (liner notes, 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.
And one more thing: In his survey of solo guitar recordings, Paul Acquaro at Free Jazz reviews my recording released by, and in support of, The Vortex Jazz Club:
[Han-earl Park’s] playing was unusually expressive…. On Two+ Bagatelles, this same musical spirit that has stuck with me for so long, has been captured…. Melodies becoming almost like the sounds of an 8-bit shower. [Read the rest…]
[About this EP…] [Download (Bandcamp)…]
Available from The Vortex’s Bandcamp page, all purchases of Two+ Bagatelles go towards helping their continued work presenting the very best jazz, improvised, and experimental musics.
Awesome news! I am excited to announce that I am a recipient of the Arts Council of Ireland Music Bursary Award, and that I will be creating a suite of improvisative, obliquely narrative, pieces for solo guitar, working with mentors Richard Barrett and Annette Krebs, and consultant Han-Ter Park to build a new compositional approach, and create companion pieces to my teaching work. As wrote in my proposal:
I will create a suite of new improvisative, obliquely narrative, experimental pieces for the solo guitarist. The bursary award will grant me time to research ways in which to effectively incorporate elements transposed from narrative forms (e.g. the manipulation of genre expectations) into my solo practice with its physical techniques and interactive tactics that I have developed systematically over twenty years. In addition, I will explore the ways in which studio-based techniques (editing, montage, etc.) may be used as a fluid compositional strategy in the context of improvisative work….
My solo practice was built on my studies with improviser-composers such as Wadada Leo Smith, and periods of independent study in 2003 during which I transposed to the guitar improvisative techniques of pianists such as Marilyn Crispell and Keith Tippett, and in 2008 during which I incorporated techniques from drummers such as Rashied Ali and Tony Oxley. I aim to expand on this practice by transposing to the musical domain, elements of genre manipulation found in works by writers such as Jeff VanderMeer and film-makers such as Bong Joon-ho. In addition, I aim to amplify these possibilities via the interactions between improvisation and studio-based compositional strategies.
To this end, in addition to my independent studies, I will consult with film-maker Han-Ter Park to explore aspects of cinematic techniques relevant to this project, and work closely with mentors improviser and composer Richard Barrett, and composer and sound artist Annette Krebs. Barrett and Krebs have unique insights into the intersection of improvisation and composition, the incorporation of programmatic and/or narrative elements, and studio-based techniques.
I am very, very grateful for the support of the Arts Council, and my collaborators. I feel privileged to be given the opportunity to work on this project, and I am very much looking forward to sharing this work with you. Please stay tuned: I will be announcing soon ways you can follow this work-in-progress.
This project is funded by the Arts Council of Ireland.
