Kudos to Ras Moshe and everyone at The Brecht Forum, and to Bruce Gallanter (hey, it was good to talk and catch up, Bruce!) and Manny Maris of Downtown Music Gallery for hosting and curating the events. (And apologies to Ras and the other performers at The Brecht Forum for not being able to stick around for the other sets.) Thanks again to Kevin Reilly for the video documentation of the DMG performance, and thanks, as always, to all who came to listen and witness music in interaction and in real-time.
Le gargarisme est convaincant. D’un côté les electronics de Richard Barrett, de l’autre la guitare d’Han-Earl Park. Tous deux grouillent et cisaillent les volumes, réactivent la matière folle, rendent la télégraphie à sa fonction première : transmettre (Tolur). Leur improvisation en miroir engorge leur transe succube, fait déborder le vase, bouche la robinetterie (Tricav).
Parfois, au milieu des monstres soniques qu’ils viennent de créer, émerge une guitare façon Bailey (Ankpla). Mais rarement rassasiés (Uettet pour me faire mentir), les voici rassurant leur nervosité naturelle en un final aux brûlures fatales (II……). Le gargarisme est convaincant. Le vertige, tout autant.
And, by the way, on Tuesday (December 18, 2012) François Couture (Monsieur Délire) will be playing selections from his 2012 Demanding Music Top 30 at Délire Actuel (CFLX 95.5 FM, Sherbrooke, Quebec). Along with some other great music from this year, it might be an opportunity to hear a little of ‘Numbers’. [More info…]
The demanding music radio show Délire Actuel (CFLX-FM 95.5, Sherbrooke, Quebec) unveiled today its top 30 experimental music albums you shouldn’t have missed in 2012. This list culls 30 titles, the 2012 crème de la crème in demanding music, i.e. the avant-gardist or experimental fringe in every music genre (contemporary, avant-garde jazz, free improvisation, avant-rock, electronica, etc.)….
Two special editions of Délire Actuel will be broadcasted tonight (December 11) and next Tuesday (December 18), from 8 pm to 10 pm (EST), on CFLX 95.5 FM in the Sherbrooke area and live on the web at www.cflx.qc.ca/en-direct/. The show is broadcasted in French, but the music is universal. A track from each selected CD will be featured. The Top 30 was posted this morning on Mr. Couture’s blog Monsieur Délire…. Shows are available to stream or download from CFLX’s website for a week after their broadcast date. [Read the rest…]
I’m honored to find our record in such distinguished company.
Westerhus, Stian: ‘The Matriarch and the Wrong Kind of Flowers’ (Rune Grammofon)
Drake, Bob: ‘Bob’s Drive-In’ (ReR Megacorp)
Bishop, Jeb/Blonk, Jaap/Mallozzi, Lou/Rosaly, Frank: ‘At the Hideout’ (Kontrans)
Perkin, Miles Quartet: ‘Objects in Mirror are Closer Than They Appear’ (ind.)
Seeking performance opportunities; particularly in Europe 2014: the cyborg ensemble of interactive, semi-autonomous, technological artifact and machine musician and improviser io 0.0.1 beta++ with human musicians Han-earl Park, Bruce Coates and Franziska Schroeder.
This quartet (or faux-quartet, if you prefer) performs demanding free improvisation calling on a range of extended techniques. Pieces of dismantled gestures, destabilizing timbres, and impressive synergy.
François Couture (Monsieur Délire)
An idea that would be pleasing to the Futurists of a century ago, a total hymn to modernity…. The completely improvised session requires a lot of attention from the listener, to be fully repaid by that which is a successful experiment.
Vittorio (MusicZoom)
We watch and listen carefully because we know we’re seeing a kind of manifesto in action. What is an automaton? A sketch, a material characterization of the ideas the inventor and the inventor’s culture have about some aspect of life, and how it could be. io and its kind are alternate beings born of ideas, decisions and choices. It is because io stands alone, an automaton, that the performance recorded on this CD not only is music, but is about music.
An extraordinary meeting between human and machine improvisers. Featuring the machine musician io 0.0.1 beta++ with guitarist Han-earl Park and saxophonists Bruce Coates and Franziska Schroeder, the performance is part critique and part playful exploration, both a boundary-breaking demonstration of socio-musical technologies and an ironic sci-fi parody.
Constructed by Han-earl Park, io 0.0.1 beta++ is a modern-day musical automaton. It is not an instrument to be played but a non-human artificial musician that performs alongside its human counterparts. io 0.0.1 beta++ representing a personal-political investigation of technology, interaction, improvisation and musicality. It whimsically evokes a 1950s B-movie robot—seemingly jerry-rigged, constructed from ad-hoc components including plumbing, kitchenware, speakers and missile switches—celebrating the material and corporeal.
The performances with this artificial musician highlights society’s entanglement with technology, demonstrates alternative modes of interfacing the musical and the technological, and illuminates the creative and improvisative processes in music. The performance is a radical and playful engagement with powerful and problematic dreams (and nightmares) of the artificial; a dream as old as the anthropology of robots.
The construction of io 0.0.1 beta++ has been made possible by the generous support of the Arts Council of Ireland.
Electronician Richard Barrett (of Furt) and guitarist Han-earl Park are working together to create music both spontaneous and premeditated, music that launches into several directions at a time (that’s Furt’s trademark). The guitar is wildly spatialized, and the electronics intermingle with it, manipulating in real-time, adding pointillistic fluries of sounds that make it impossible de isolate a single contribution. The result is lively, relevant, dizzying electroacoustic music; music that seems to be daring us to try and catch it.
Seeking performance opportunities; particularly in Europe 2014: the cyborg ensemble of interactive, semi-autonomous, technological artifact and machine musician and improviser io 0.0.1 beta++ with human musicians Han-earl Park, Bruce Coates and Franziska Schroeder.
This quartet (or faux-quartet, if you prefer) performs demanding free improvisation calling on a range of extended techniques. Pieces of dismantled gestures, destabilizing timbres, and impressive synergy.
François Couture (Monsieur Délire)
An idea that would be pleasing to the Futurists of a century ago, a total hymn to modernity…. The completely improvised session requires a lot of attention from the listener, to be fully repaid by that which is a successful experiment.
Vittorio (MusicZoom)
We watch and listen carefully because we know we’re seeing a kind of manifesto in action. What is an automaton? A sketch, a material characterization of the ideas the inventor and the inventor’s culture have about some aspect of life, and how it could be. io and its kind are alternate beings born of ideas, decisions and choices. It is because io stands alone, an automaton, that the performance recorded on this CD not only is music, but is about music.
An extraordinary meeting between human and machine improvisers. Featuring the machine musician io 0.0.1 beta++ with guitarist Han-earl Park and saxophonists Bruce Coates and Franziska Schroeder, the performance is part critique and part playful exploration, both a boundary-breaking demonstration of socio-musical technologies and an ironic sci-fi parody.
Constructed by Han-earl Park, io 0.0.1 beta++ is a modern-day musical automaton. It is not an instrument to be played but a non-human artificial musician that performs alongside its human counterparts. io 0.0.1 beta++ representing a personal-political investigation of technology, interaction, improvisation and musicality. It whimsically evokes a 1950s B-movie robot—seemingly jerry-rigged, constructed from ad-hoc components including plumbing, kitchenware, speakers and missile switches—celebrating the material and corporeal.
The performances with this artificial musician highlights society’s entanglement with technology, demonstrates alternative modes of interfacing the musical and the technological, and illuminates the creative and improvisative processes in music. The performance is a radical and playful engagement with powerful and problematic dreams (and nightmares) of the artificial; a dream as old as the anthropology of robots.
The construction of io 0.0.1 beta++ has been made possible by the generous support of the Arts Council of Ireland.
First set of reviews of the CD ‘io 0.0.1 beta++’ (SLAMCD 531) including Beppe Colli’s take in which the “flesh-and-blood musicians” (Han-earl Park, Bruce Coates and Franziska Schroeder) demonstrate “excellent rapport” and “a good dose of telepathy”, while the machine musician (io 0.0.1 beta++) “works as a valuable stimulus for its fellow musicians”:
Closing track here, Return Trajectory is a good for instance of the excellent rapport existing among the aforementioned [“flesh-and-blood”] players, whose parallel traveling seems to suggest a good dose of telepathy—check the final moments, the two winds going towards a note in teleological mode. This is the track that, in my opinion, clearly shows more than a trace of these musicians’ formative influences, with Schroeder’s soprano reminding me of Evan Parker (elsewhere on the album she sounds quite more personal), while Coates’ alto is clearly reminiscent of the zig-zag wondering of Anthony Braxton (an influence that is also quite apparent elsewhere on the album, both on alto and sopranino). Han-earl Park’s guitar sits somewhere halfway between Joe Pass and Derek Bailey, being quite aware of the jazz vocabulary and the art of comping, though of course filtered through a modern sensibility, starting with timbre, but not as ‘indifferent’ to the surrounding as Bailey’s sometimes could be.
Were the album as good as its closing track, well… we’d only have a good album, nothing more. But—surprise!—as per its title, we have an ‘unknown quantity’ called io 0.0.1 beta++: a ‘musical automaton’ created by Han-earl Park whose improvising—so rich when it comes to timbres (which are sometimes more than a bit old-fashioned, a fact that goes well with its bizarre physical aspect, so reminiscent of 50s sci-fi movies), so mysterious when it comes to its decision-making—works as a valuable stimulus for its fellow musicians.
If on an aesthetic plane the main parallel that I can trace (one that I hope can be useful to readers) is with mid-80s Company, here the work as it’s offered to the listener appears to highlight the issue of the decisional process which is at the basis of improvisation when seen as a conscious ‘discipline of choices’. And in the CD liner notes penned by Sara Roberts I seemed to detect more than an echo of those debates which flourish about the famous (?) Turing Test. [Read the rest…] [In Italian…]
François Couture’s review of the “faux-quartet” with the “créature mécanique”io 0.0.1 beta++ which is “physically present on stage… and it interacts and improvises with the human improvisers”:
Ce quatuor (ou faux-quatuor, à la limite) propose des improvisations libres exigeantes faisant appel à de nombreuses techniques étendues, des pièces aux gestes décomposés, aux timbres déstabilisants, mais à la synergie impressionnante.
This quartet (or faux-quartet, if you prefer) performs demanding free improvisation calling on a range of extended techniques. Pieces of dismantled gestures, destabilizing timbres, and impressive synergy. [Read the rest…]
And Bruce Lee Gallanter who teases a Turing test around io 0.0.1 beta++:
…More rare is that these three human musicians are improvising with a machine called io 0.0.1 beta…. Io was constructed by Han-earl Park and is an integral part of this quartet…. Io… adds its own diverse yet fractured sounds to the blend. On “Pioneer: Dance” Mr. Coates plays slightly twisted alto sax while io adds similar textural sounds. If I didn’t know better, I would think that this was a successful session of European improv by a quartet of gifted yet thoughtful [human] players who take their time to explore similar textures and terrain together. I am not so sure that machines will ever take the place of human improvisers in the future, however this disc shows that someone is working in the right direction. [Read the rest…]
La mise en place inquiète (Hayward au mélodica) donnait quelques indices sur la teneur de l’entière improvisation : réfléchie, et dans laquelle les intervenants rivalisent de subtilités (Park érodant les reliefs de plaintes aux volumes variés, Smith au bugle saisissant). Passée la période de flottement ravissant—de vacance, presque, pour Hayward—,il faudra bien revenir aux turbulences afin de s’y montrer autrement convaincant. Alors, Coxhill peut apparaître : le soprano élabore des parallèles aux phrases du cuivre dublinois ; ourdit et trame, enfin tisse, sur le métier remonté crescendo par Hayward, une tapisserie de choix : celle d’une autre Mathilde, à la beauté tout roturière. [Read the rest…]
The tentative opening (Hayward on melodica) gives some indication of the tenor of the entire improvisation: reflective, in which the stakeholders compete in subtilities (Park eroding reliefs of wailing in varied volumes, Smith with a seizing bugle). Passing through a section of ravishing suspension—of near absence for Hayward—,it becomes necessary to return to turbulence to remain convincing. Alas, Coxhill can appear: the soprano elaborates parallell reflections in phrases of Dublin brass; ordered and entwining, weaves on the crescendo where Hayward restablishes his presence, a tapestry of choice: that of another Mathilde, of a complete beauty.
More reviews…
Une session très sympa d’un trio relevé: Charles Hayward, Han-Earl Park et Ian Smith, plus Lol Coxhill comme invité sur deux des sept pièces. De l’improvisation libre soutenue, vive comme c’est souvent le cas avec Hayward à la batterie. [Read the rest…]
La genialità non è qualcosa che si trova per strada, ma a quanto pare in qualche studio di registrazione qualcosa di positivo si riesce a raggiungere. Il batterista avant rock Charles Hayward (fondatore del gruppoThis Heatha deciso di confrontarsi con musicisti provenienti da tutt´altre aree musicali, Han-earl Park, anche lui abituato al geneere noise e il trombettista Ian Smith, una delle icone dell´improvvisazione radicale inglese e parte della London Improvisers´ Orchestra. Insieme a loro sugli ultimi due brani si aggiunge un´altro famoso personaggio dell´avanguardia, il sassofonista soprano Lol Coxhill.
L´interazione fra i tre (e poi in quartetto) procede perfettamente buttando nel calderone un pò di tutto, in situazioni che avevamo ascoltate da unFred Frith, ma qui procede tutto in modo più logico, forse per la forza propulsiva del trombettista che si ritaglia degli spazi precisi, evitando che si scivoli troppo verso il genere noise.
Lol Coxhillnei brani finali (più di venti minuti di improvvisazione a tutto spiano) contribuisce ad animare la compagnia, evitando che scenda la tensione. Sono nell´insieme quasi settantacinque minuti di musica che scorrono veloci, in cui le idee arrivano subito ed di musicisti si divertono a metterle in pratica.
Album così non si producono certo in serie, per cui ben venga l´intuizione diGeorge Haslamdi pubblicarli: un altra cosa notevole nel suo catalogo.
— Cosimo Parisi (MusicBoom.it)
Как можно догадаться, музыка Mathilde 253 — свободная импровизация, в которой джазовая идиома превалирует, но которая до собственно джаза, даже в самом свободном его понимании, не доходит. …Хейуорд же своими барабанами, тяжелыми, находящимися будто в стороне от самой музыки, не пытающимися ни поспеть за ней, ни задать ей ход, дает импровизациям Mathilde 253 третье измерение. Он поразительно точно для человека, который большую часть жизни играл музыку неимпровизированную, слышит своих коллег, дает им пространство для жизни и никогда не перетягивает одеяло на себя — но именно его-то слушать отдельное удовольствие. [Read the rest…]
As one might guess, Mathilde 253’s music is free improvisation, in which the jazz idiom predominates, but which does not attain to jazz proper even in the freest understanding of the term. …It is Hayward with his drums, heavy and as it were standing aside from the music itself, not attempting either to keep up with it or to set its pace, who gives Mathilde 253’s improvisations a third dimension. With an accuracy remarkable in one who for much of his life played non-improvised music, he listens to his colleagues, gives them space to live and never steals the limelight—but he it is whom it is a particular pleasure to hear.
— Opium Mass, translation by Leofranc Holford-Strevens.
