This Sunday (April 8, 2012) at 8:30pm: Han-earl Park will be performing as part of Gowanus Company IV with Michael Bates, Matt Bauder, Ken Filiano, Brad Henkel, Ingrid Laubrock, Weston Minissali, Josh Sinton, Vinnie Sperrazza, Jesse Stacken, Booker Stardrum and “secret, special guests”:
In the spirit of Derek Bailey’s Company week, a once-in-a-lifetime chance to catch several creative musicians playing together who have never played together. [Read the rest…]
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.
Two more reviews of ‘io 0.0.1 beta++’ (SLAMCD 531) with two contrasting takes on the meeting between human and machine musicians. Ken Waxman, on the one hand, juxtaposes the “unobtrusive and egoless” machine with the human improvisers who display, for example, “thoughtful pauses”:
…Han-earl Park personifying Dr. Frankenstein, has created a non-human artificial musician from ad-hoc components including speakers, kitchenware and missile switches. This CD is a literal record of how the non-human, prosaically named io 0. 0. 1 beta++, sounds in concert with flesh-and-blood counterparts….
io 0. 0. 1 beta++ is unobtrusive and egoless enough… to warble its staccato particle contributions without trying to engulf or show up the humans. Its contributions are unique enough on their own.
For instance on the initial ‘Pioneer: Variance’ and ‘Pioneer: Dance’ contrasting alto and soprano saxophone trills and squeaks are put into bolder relief as the otherworldly flutters, oscillated tones and flanged rotations of the machine are kept in a straight line by Park’s legato picking. The thoughtful pauses audible in the guitar playing confirms Park’s human-ness, especially when compared to the grainy whistles and juddering vibrations that arise from io 0. 0. 1 beta++….
Nonetheless the machine further demonstrates its versatility on the 59-second ‘4G’, with metallic muted trombone-like snores and even raises the question as to whether io 0. 0. 1 beta++ or extended saxophone techniques are creating the air pops and abrasive tongue flutters on subsequent tracks. In the main crackling reductionist resonations are attributed to its properties, while any legato or lyrical intermezzos are, more likely than not, propelled from the instruments and imaginations of full-fledged Homo sapiens.
Succinctly as the three demonstrate on ‘Return Trajectory’, during which io 0. 0. 1 beta++ appears to have taken five, an additional voice—human or otherwise—is necessary to create a pleasing sound picture. The guitarist’s connective down strokes plus the swelling layers of contrapuntal reed timbres are distinctive and solipsistic enough on their own. [Read the rest…]
Romualdo Del Noce at Jazz Convention, on the other hand, hears a “charmingly imperfect interplay” between human and machine musicians becomes a drama of the ‘human,’ the ‘other,’ and of cyborgs. An interplay in which Han-earl Park improvises a “rugged plateau” and “hyperacid notes”, and Franziska Schroeder enriches “the other half of the sax… with a naked and experimental voice, together in harmony and dissonance with parallel and converging streams of the thoroughbred free-player Bruce Coates”.
Le corde tese di Park imbastiscono un plateau scabro ma di lungo e persistente respiro, vivente nelle articolazioni e nella tessitura della sua fisica elettroacustica; mentre sul versante “meccanico” dell’instrumentarium i modi performanti di Franziska Schroeder arricchiscono l’altra metà del sax (a fianco delle Matana Roberts, Alexandra Grimal, Ingrid Laubrock etc.) di una voce sperimentante e nuda, in sintonia e insieme dissonanza con i flussi paralleli e convergenti del free-player purosangue Bruce Coates, e il tutto si dipana entro uno svolgimento a canovaccio libero e istantaneo, lungo il suo deviante svolgimento interrogandosi (senza eccessivo paradosso) se l’autentica “alienità” sia rispettivamente appannaggio della cosa o, piuttosto e viceversa, dell’ “umano”….
Insomma, l’avanguardia è tornata: non che fosse mai stata davvero latitante, ma gli interrogativi sonori, lacerati e critici, del trio pongono come oggetto radicale la disumanizzazione progressiva e le implicazioni del sempre più preponderante avvento della macchina, forse retrodatando le intenzioni alle prime decadi del secolo scorso e alle relative allarmistiche dottrine, ma riprendendole lungo le forme acutamente nervose e l’attenzione creativa dei medianici e cyborghiani performers e del loro interplay attrattivamente imperfetto. [Read the rest…] [English translation…]
Some dates confirmed, some TBC, but some dates still open: I am seeking performances in Europe, between April 26 to May 11, 2012. In addition to solo or (ad-hoc) ensemble contexts, pending logistics and dates, the following ensembles may be available:
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.
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.)
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.
