RICHARD BARRETT / HAN-EARL PARK – Numbers

Creative Sources

The benevolent people trusting my beliefs know that I am quite fond of Richard Barrett’s work, developed across a wide orbit of settings (with particular emphasis on FURT – the time-tested duo with Paul Obermayer – and the collaboration with his equally awesome partner, vocalist Ute Wassermann). In this brilliantly garbled affair, on the other side of the stage sits a musician whose acoustic indicant was previously unknown here, if memory is not failing. Korean guitarist Han-Earl Park has worked with several names of the “intelligent noise” scene, not to mention his membership in the Mathilde 253 trio with Charles Hayward and Ian Smith. Having this chronicling wannabe done the necessary homework while remaining doomed to permanent ignorance, it is in any case impractical to verbally interpret the bazillions of events that this CD warrants, for the joy of individuals who take pleasure in getting their brain zapped and scrambled by the rivalry between transonic beauty and extreme structural atomization. This is in fact a full hour of frantically jagged live improvisation that will definitely expose, in a good number of subjects, the inability of receiving and synthesizing a large quantity of data, given the inborn impossibility of switching to multi-channel mode in their neural constitution. These persons will end describing this barely imaginable tit-for-tat as unendurably non-brooding, or just “out of fashion”. Indeed the methods through which the (mostly) clean sounds of the electric guitar get stretched, warped, mangled and thrown back at the source demolish any propensity to rumination. As if a premix of Fred Frith, Hans Reichel and – why not – Christopher Willits had been subjected to a journey inside the circuits of a billboard. Mere seconds before its explosion, that is.