performance: Mette Rasmussen with Michael Foster, Pascal Niggenkemper and Han-earl Park, Brooklyn

Stop Press: New venue!
‘Alias Ra’ with Michael Foster, Pascal Niggenkemper and Han-earl Park
Friday, June 6, 2014, at 7:00pm: a performance by the mystery saxophonist, ‘Alias Ra’ Mette Rasmussen with Michael Foster (saxophones), Pascal Niggenkemper (doubles bass) and Han-earl Park (guitar) as part of Soup and Sound House Concert. Also performing are Chris Stover (trombone), Russ Johnson (trumpet), Niels Praestholm (bass) and Andrew Drury (drums). The event takes place at Andrew Drury’s home in Lefferts Gardens, Brooklyn (contact him for the location). Recommended donation: $15. Also performing are Gianni Mimmo (saxophone) and Alison Blunt (violin) at 6:00pm. The event takes place at Downtown Music Gallery (13 Monroe Street, New York, NY 10002-7351) [map…]. Free admission.

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

updates

06–02–14: cancelation.
06–02–14: new venue.

performance diary 05-22-14 (Brooklyn, New York)

upcoming performances
date venue time details
June 6, 2014 The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music
55 West 13th Street
New York, NY 10011
3:00pm Performance by Eris 136199 (Nick Didkovsky: guitar; Han-earl Park: guitar; and Catherine Sikora: saxophones) as part of ISIM: Cross-Cultural Improvisation III.
Conference fees from $25 (single event) to $200 (entire conference [more info and get tickets…]. [Details…]
June 6, 2014 Downtown Music Gallery
13 Monroe Street
New York, NY 10002
7:00pm New venue! Performance by ‘Alias Ra’ Mette Rasmussen (saxophones) with Michael Foster (saxophones), Pascal Niggenkemper (doubles bass) and Han-earl Park (guitar). Also performing (6:00pm): Gianni Mimmo (saxophone) and Alison Blunt (violin). Admission free.
[Details…]
June 8, 2014 Why Not Jazz Room
14 Christopher Street
New York, NY 10014
7:30pm Performance by Han-earl Park (guitar) and Tom Rainey (drums) as part of Andrea Wolper’s Why Not Experiment? Series. Also performing: TransAtlantico (Lamy Istrefi: drums, percussion, sound efx; Lawrence Leathers: drums, sound efx; Brahim Fribgane: percussion, goumbri, oud, sound efx). Recommended donation: $10 per set.
[Details…]
2014– Europe I am based in Europe as of 2014, and I am seeking performance opportunities for, in particular, my Europe-based projects including Numbers (with Richard Barrett), Mathilde 253 (with Charles Hayward and Ian Smith). Interested promoters, venues and sponsors, please get in touch!
September–October 2014 Europe Eris 136199 (Nick Didkovsky, Han-earl Park and Catherine Sikora) is seeking performance opportunities late-September and October 2014. Interested promoters, venues and sponsors, please get in touch!

Continue reading “performance diary 05-22-14 (Brooklyn, New York)”

reminder: Han-earl Park, Kevin Terry and Dan Walsh at CIMC, Cork

Han-earl Park, Kevin Terry and Dan Walsh
This Sunday (May 18, 2014), at 9:30pm: Han-earl Park (guitar), Kevin Terry (guitar) and Dan Walsh (drums), presented as part of CIMC, perform at the Gulpd Café (Triskel Arts Centre, Tobin Street, Cork, Ireland) [map…]. Admission free.

updates

05–17–14: event starts at 9:30pm.

performance: Han-earl Park and Tom Rainey at Why Not Jazz Room, New York

Sunday, June 8, 2014, at 7:30pm: Han-earl Park (guitar) and Tom Rainey (drums) performs as part of Andrea Wolper’s Why Not Experiment? Series. Also performing are TransAtlantico (Lamy Istrefi, Lawrence Leathers and Brahim Fribgane). The event takes place at Why Not Jazz Room (14 Christopher Street, New York, NY 10014) [map…]. Recommended donation: $10 per set.

See the performance diary for up-to-date info. [Why Not Experiment? page…] [Why Not Jazz Room program…] [Facebook event…]

Above video: last time I performed with Tom Rainey. The set with Ken Filiano and Ingrid Laubrock took place as part of Gowanus Company at Douglass Street Music Collective, Brooklyn. Video by Scott Friedlander. [Watch the rest…]

short blurb

“Guitarist Han-earl Park is a musical philosopher…. Expect unexpected things from Park, who is a delightful shape-shifter….”

Brian Morton (Point of Departure)

“Tom Rainey is a player who swerves between avant-garde notions and a mainstream sensibility and when he plays the smell of invention is in the air”

Joseph Woodard (L.A Times)

Six strings, numerous membranes and metal discs.
One potentiometer plus twenty-two frets; chains, sticks and beaters.
Four arms, four legs; two bodies coupled to artifacts.

Crafty, resourceful, imaginative and virtuosic improvisative collision/dialog between drummer Tom Rainey and guitarist Han-earl Park.

performance: Eris 136199 (Nick Didkovsky, Han-earl Park and Catherine Sikora) at ISIM, New York

Friday, June 6, 2014, at 3:00pm: a performance by Eris 136199 (Nick Didkovsky: guitar; Han-earl Park: guitar; and Catherine Sikora: saxophones) as part of ISIM: Cross-Cultural Improvisation III takes place at The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music (55 West 13th Street, New York, NY 10011). Conference fees from $25 for single event to $200 for entire conference [more info and get tickets…].

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

about Eris 136199

Eris 136199 plays on the crossroads of noise, melody, rhythm, space, density, contrast, synchronicity, asymmetry, serendipity and contradiction. Eris 136199 is the noisy, unruly complexity of composer, computer artist and guitarist Nick Didkovsky, the corporeal, cyborg virtuosity of constructor and guitarist Han-earl Park, and the no-nonsense melodic logic of composer and saxophonist Catherine Sikora.

A composer who enjoys blurry boundaries, Nick Didkovsky founded the avant-rock big band Doctor Nerve, and is a member of Swim This with Gerry Hemingway and Michael Lytle. He is a pioneer of small-systems computer music, and has composed music for ensemble including Bang On A Can All-Stars and the California EAR Unit.

Described by Brian Morton as “a musical philosopher… a delightful shape-shifter”, Han-earl Park is drawn to real-time cyborg configurations in which artifacts and bodies collide. He has performed with some of the finest practitioners of improvised music, is part of Mathilde 253 with Charles Hayward and Ian Smith, and Numbers with Richard Barrett.

Catherine Sikora is “a free-blowing player’s player with a spectacular harmonic imagination and an evolved understanding of the tonal palette of the saxophone” (Chris Elliot, Seacoast Online). She has a long-standing duo project with Eric Mingus, and performs as part of ensembles led by Elliott Sharp, François Grillot and Matt Lavelle.

Together, Didkovsky, Park and Sikora forges an improvisative space where melody can be melody, noise can be noise, meter can be meter, metal becomes metal, bluegrass turns to bluegrass, jazz transforms into jazz, all there, all necessary without imploding under idiomatic pressures.

about the International Society for Improvised Music

ISIM’s purpose is to promote performance, education, and research in improvised music, and illuminate connections between musical improvisation and creativity across fields.

Melding diverse cultures, ethnicities, disciplines, and ideas that shape society at large, today’s musical world is rich with creative expressions that transcend conventional styles and categories. Improvisation is a core aspect of this global confluence.

In addition to other projects, and networking among improvisers, ISIM has held six festival/conferences since 2006, with a full schedule of talks, panel discussions, workshops, and performances during the day, and headliner per- formances in the evenings. Participants, including presenters, headliners, and audience, have been a mixture of academ- ics and people from the wider musical and artistic communities. Reflecting its commitment to diversity in its many forms, ISIM welcomes participants from the widest possible variety of ethnic, racial, cultural, and geographic back- grounds, strongly promotes gender balance, and celebrates work that is rooted in the many styles, genres, ethnic and historical traditions, methodologies and technologies both old and new, that are linked by the central practice of im- provisation. ISIM encourages collaboration with improvisatory practitioners from areas beyond music, such as dance, theater, visual music, and film, and also seeks to make its events open to a wider audience. This includes public school teachers, students, children, individuals from under-served communities, and others from the general cross section of people interested in the arts.

performance: Han-earl Park, Kevin Terry and Dan Walsh at CIMC, Cork

Han-earl Park, Kevin Terry and Dan Walsh
Sunday, May 18, 2014, at 9:30pm: a performance by Han-earl Park (guitar), Kevin Terry (guitar) and Dan Walsh (drums) as part of CIMC. The event takes place at the Gulpd Café (Triskel Arts Centre, Tobin Street, Cork, Ireland) [map…]. Admission free.

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

updates

05–17–14: event starts at 9:30pm.

Stet Lab: on hiatus

Stet Lab logo
In case you hadn’t guessed, Stet Lab—at one time, Cork’s monthly space for improvised music—is, and has been for some time, on indefinite hiatus:

As previously stated, this site [www.busterandfriends.com/stet] exists as an archive of Lab activities between November 2007 and April 2011: you can listen to the recordings, and read the reports.

If you are an improviser looking for performance opportunities in and around Cork, please contact the former curator Han-earl Park who may be able to help.

[original article…]

about Stet Lab

Between November 2007 and April 2012, Stet Lab successfully brought together improvising musicians with varied experiences and from far afield. Over forty Stet Lab events featured more than eighty performers including twenty-four visiting artists. Cork’s monthly improvised music event, Stet Lab was a space in which improvisers (novice, veteran; student, teacher; part- or full-time; amateur, professional; local or visitor) could meet, play and learn from one another.

Prepared Guitar: 13 Questions

13 Questions (Han-earl Park. Harvestworks, NYC, October 29, 2013. Photo copyright 2013 Emilio Vavarella.)
Han-earl Park (Harvestworks, NYC, October 29, 2013). Original photo © 2013 Emilio Vavarella.

For Miguel Copón, Prepared Guitar is a “metaphor about metamorphosis” and a “place to support independent artists”. Prepared Guitar recently published my response to Copón’s 13 Questions, so you can now read, among other things, about my first guitar, my musical roots (as contradictory as they may be), and what I’m currently working on:

A CD with Catherine Sikora, Nick Didkovsky and Josh Sinton in the works. Looking to fire up a couple of European projects after a hiatus: the duo with Richard [Barrett], and Mathilde 253 with Charles Hayward and Ian Smith.

But the thing that’s tugging at me right now is the possibilities of the score in the context of improvisative performance. Ideas, some specific, some nebulous, all as yet untested about what might be possible…

I’m not sure at all where this is leading, but having through some combination of ideology and necessity (ain’t it always the way?) found myself somewhat involuntarily in the ‘Total Improvisation’ camp, I’m beginning to look on the other side of the fence. Let me be clear, the, to borrow Lewis’ term, Eurological conception of the score and the practice that surrounds it (theorized in detail by Small, Cusick, Nicholas Cook and others), with its limited models of control and dogma of reproducibility, and naive notions of aesthetics, does not interest me at all.

However, I’m feeling a gravitational tug. Maybe it’s due to coming into close contact with musicians who have a much more sophisticated (if often, from an non-practitioners POV, misunderstood and under theorized) relationship with the score and the possibilities of notation. But it’s a distinct pull. Still working—struggling—through some ideas, and studies, and have far, far more questions than answers about the possible role notation and the score might have in an improvisative context, but that’s the new thing that’s exciting me at the moment. [Read the rest…]

You can also read my struggle with a question about the necessity of music, my take on the current digital music scene, and the politics of ‘extended technique’:

So what’s being ‘extended’ by ‘extended technique’? Is it akin to, say, a colonial explorer extending their influence and territory; ‘discovering’ a land (regardless of whether some other people were there first)?

Had an interested online exchange with Hans Tammen on the subject, and it struck me how much the term ‘extended technique’ is a way to distinguish pioneers from the rest of us. Where you draw those lines (between common practice and extended technique) says much more about your own history and prejudices than some essential quality of the technique in question.

Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith once pointed out how Stockhausen claimed the invention of certain ‘extended techniques’ for the trumpet that were patently false if you had even a passing knowledge of practices outside of West European traditions. Did Stockhausen, and his supporters, claim these techniques because of a kind of ignorance, or as a deliberate erasure of other traditions? Either way, it requires a heavy dose of privilege to ignore, to justify your ignorance, or to mark peoples and cultures as irrelevant. [Read the rest…]

Looking through the list of respondents to the 13 Questions, I’m honored to find my name among those guitarists whose work I admire. I’m grateful that Miguel Copón asked me to participate.

performance diary 04-20-14 (Cork, New York)

upcoming performances
date venue time details
May 3, 2014 St Anne’s Church
Shandon
Cork, Ireland
2:00pm Han-earl Park (guitar) performs as part of Sonic Vigil 8. Also performing: Natalia Beylis, Tore Boe, Andrea Bonino, Danny McCarthy, Cave, The Quiet Club, Massimo Davi, Áine O’Dwyer, Derek Foott, John Godfrey, Claire Guerin, Paul Hegarty, Iride Project, Anthony Kelly, Fergus Kelly, Vicky Langan, Tony Langlois, Iarla O Lionard, Laney Mannion, Monica Miuccio, MiXile, Irene Murphy, Olesya Zdorovetska, Robin Parmar, Karen Power, David Stalling, Queef, Nick Roth, Softday, Mick O’Shea, Antje Vowinckel and Jeffrey Weeter. Admission free.
[Details…]
May 18, 2014 Gulpd Café
Triskel Arts Centre
Tobin Street
Cork, Ireland
9:30pm Performance by Han-earl Park (guitar), Kevin Terry (guitar) and Dan Walsh (drums) as part of CIMC.
Admission free.
[Details…]
June 6, 2014 The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music
55 West 13th Street
New York, NY 10011
3:00pm Performance by Eris 136199 (Nick Didkovsky: guitar; Han-earl Park: guitar; and Catherine Sikora: saxophones) as part of ISIM: Cross-Cultural Improvisation III.
Conference fees from $25 (single event) to $200 (entire conference [more info and get tickets…]. [Details…]
June 8, 2014 Why Not Jazz Room
14 Christopher Street
New York, NY 10014
7:30pm Performance by Han-earl Park (guitar) and Tom Rainey (drums) as part of Andrea Wolper’s Why Not Experiment? Series. Also performing: TransAtlantico (Lamy Istrefi: drums, percussion, sound efx; Lawrence Leathers: drums, sound efx; Brahim Fribgane: percussion, goumbri, oud, sound efx). Recommended donation: $10 per set.
[Details…]
2014– Europe I am based in Europe as of 2014, and I am seeking performance opportunities for, in particular, my Europe-based projects including Numbers (with Richard Barrett), Mathilde 253 (with Charles Hayward and Ian Smith). Interested promoters, venues and sponsors, please get in touch!
September–October 2014 Europe Eris 136199 (Nick Didkovsky, Han-earl Park and Catherine Sikora) is seeking performance opportunities late-September and October 2014. Interested promoters, venues and sponsors, please get in touch!

Continue reading “performance diary 04-20-14 (Cork, New York)”

performance: Sonic Vigil 8, Cork

Sonic Vigil 8 poster (copyright 2014 Mick O’Shea)
Poster © 2014 Mick O’Shea.

Saturday, May 3, 2014: Han-earl Park (guitar) performs as part of Sonic Vigil 8. Also performing are Natalia Beylis, Tore Boe, Andrea Bonino, Danny McCarthy, Cave, The Quiet Club, Massimo Davi, Áine O’Dwyer, Derek Foott, John Godfrey, Claire Guerin, Paul Hegarty, Iride Project, Anthony Kelly, Fergus Kelly, Vicky Langan, Tony Langlois, Iarla O Lionard, Laney Mannion, Monica Miuccio, MiXile, Irene Murphy, Olesya Zdorovetska, Robin Parmar, Karen Power, David Stalling, Queef, Nick Roth, Softday, Mick O’Shea, Antje Vowinckel and Jeffrey Weeter.

The event takes place between 2:00pm and 8:00pm, at St Anne’s Church (Shandon, Cork, Ireland). Admission is free.

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

tonight: Javier Areal Velez, Jack Wright, Andrew Drury and Han-earl Park, Brooklyn

Tonight (Thursday, April 3, 2014), at 7:00pm: a performance by Javier Areal Velez (guitar), Jack Wright (saxophones), Andrew Drury (percussion) and Han-earl Park (guitar) as part of Soup and Sound House Concert takes place at Andrew Drury’s home in Lefferts Gardens, Brooklyn (contact him for the location). Recommended donation: $10.

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

Above video: first time I performed with Jack Wright. With Jonathan Moritz at one of Andrew’s events. Video by Kevin Reilly. [Watch the rest…]