It was about four years ago that—totally by chance: I found the CD in my mailbox—I listened to guitarist Han-earl Park for the very first time. While at first I believed that the only featured musicians on the album besides Park were Bruce Coates and Franziska Schroeder, a closer examination revealed that, besides being the name of the album, the tag ‘io 0.0.1 beta++’ was also the name of the fourth member of the line-up: a “musical automata” that was fully engaged in an improvising role, in deep dialogue with those three “humans”. Something that, though not totally unprecedented—I’ll only mention trombonist George Lewis and his software program called Voyager—involved a lot of interesting issues. I have to add that the work appeared interesting and stimulating anyway, a feeling of quality staying with the listener well after all those intellectual preoccupations had been thoroughly investigated. [Read the rest…] [In Italian…]

[More info on the recording…] [All reviews…]

‘io 0.0.1 beta++’ (SLAMCD 531) [details…]

personnel: io 0.0.1 beta++ (itself), Han-earl Park (guitar), Bruce Coates (alto and sopranino saxophones) and Franziska Schroeder (soprano saxophone).

© 2011 Han-earl Park.
℗ 2011 SLAM Productions.

Anomic Aphasia (SLAMCD 559) [details…]

personnel: Han-earl Park (guitar), Catherine Sikora (tenor and soprano saxophones), Nick Didkovsky (guitar), and Josh Sinton (baritone saxophone and bass clarinet).

© 2015 Han-earl Park.
℗ 2015 SLAM Productions.

Bruce Coates, Franziska Schroeder and io 0.0.1 beta++ (Ó Riada Hall, Cork, May 25, 2010)

Third audio clip (and final in the series) from ‘io 0.0.1 beta++’ (SLAMCD 531) below:

Excerpted from the track ‘Discovery: Decay’, the clip is taken from what is, for me, an uncharacteristic track on the CD, with its serene, careful and economical counterpoint between saxophonist Franziska Schroeder, me on guitar, and the interactive automaton io 0.0.1 beta++. Beppe Colli described this track as “‘Baroque’ and ‘Renaissance-like’, the whole sounding quite consonant, and so offering the most listener-friendly moment on the album” [read the review…] [in Italian…]. [More info on the recording…]

Thanks to George Haslam for his support. Audio clip courtesy of SLAM Productions.
Music by Han-earl Park, Bruce Coates and Franziska Schroeder.
Audio ℗ 2011 SLAM Productions. Please do not distribute audio file (you may share the link to this page).

Cannot play audio?

Try loading the original post, and playing back from there. Please contact me if you have further problems.

previous audio excerpts:

impressive synergy (audio clip: io 0.0.1 beta++)
standing alone (audio clip: io 0.0.1 beta++)

‘io 0.0.1 beta++’ (SLAMCD 531) is available from SLAM Productions. [Details…]

personnel: io 0.0.1 beta++ (itself), Han-earl Park (guitar), Bruce Coates (alto and sopranino saxophones) and Franziska Schroeder (soprano saxophone).

© 2011 Han-earl Park.
℗ 2011 SLAM Productions.

updates

11–06–12: change web audio player widget. [More info…]

08–07–13: another change of audio player.

The guitarist [Han-earl] Park, sometime member of Mathilde 253 whose fine CD impressed us in March this year, is joined by two improvising saxophonists, Bruce Coates (from the Birmingham Improvisers’ Orchestra) and Franziska Schroeder (member of the trio FAINT), and the record documents the meeting of this trio with the “machine musician” io 0.0.1 beta++. This device is an automaton, a musical robot if you will, built by Mr Park; it’s not just another computer programme that plays random sounds or builds an “interactive” space for other laptop musicians, but actually occupies physical space and performs on the stage alongside its human counterparts. Shades of Pierre Bastien…. The multi-media artist Sara Roberts from California writes the liner notes and she does a much better job than I possibly could in articulating the cultural resonances of this man-meets-automaton event. [Read the rest…]

— Ed Pinsent (The Sound Projector)

Meanwhile, what to me is ‘playful’ may be ‘uncompromising’ to someone else. After some very positive reviews (including those by Beppe Colli, François Couture and Bruce Lee Gallanter), Alberto Bazzurro at All About Jazz Italia writes a more reserved take the recoding:

Fra segmenti più atmosferico-minimali, e altri invece più frammentati e nervosi, si procede così, talora arrestandosi a una sorta di limbo emozionale, di quieta truculenza, peraltro sempre ammirevole per coerenza e rigore. [Read the rest…]

— Alberto Bazzurro (All About Jazz Italia)

[More info on the recording…] [All reviews…]

‘io 0.0.1 beta++’ (SLAMCD 531) is available from SLAM Productions. [Details…]

personnel: io 0.0.1 beta++ (itself), Han-earl Park (guitar), Bruce Coates (alto and sopranino saxophones) and Franziska Schroeder (soprano saxophone).

© 2011 Han-earl Park.
℗ 2011 SLAM Productions.

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…]

— Beppe Colli (CloudsandClocks)

[More info on the recording…] [All reviews…]

‘io 0.0.1 beta++’ (SLAMCD 531) is available from SLAM Productions. [Details…]

personnel: io 0.0.1 beta++ (itself), Han-earl Park (guitar), Bruce Coates (alto and sopranino saxophones) and Franziska Schroeder (soprano saxophone).

© 2011 Han-earl Park.
℗ 2011 SLAM Productions.