Han-earl Park, Yorgos Dimitriadis and Camila Nebbia – Gonggong 225088 (Waveform Alphabet, 2024)

By Fotis Nikolakopoulos

What is absolutely inspiring with improvised or semi-improvised musics, is that you may be aware of the sounds the players have produced in the past, but you can never easily guess what this new interaction will bring. Probably this is where this great divide between many rock and pop music’s fans, who expect the “best” and most technically perfect version of same pieces, while the much smaller audience of improvised musics is happy to be puzzled by what will come next.

This is certainly the case when it comes to the trio of Han-earl Park in electric guitar, Camila Nebbia on the saxophone and Yorgos Dimitriadis on the drums and electronics. Their music never ceases to create new questions; their audio palette broadens with every new listen. Park’s use of –in extended passages throughout this recording- electronics creates atmospheres that tend to overpass the more natural and organic sounds coming from acoustic instruments, the drums and the sax this time. Within this electronic sound field, Nebbia and Dimitriadis never fail to join and create a parallel, more jazzy (but what is jazz, anyway, nowadays) audio world.

Once the guitar joins in the fragmental, percussion nature (from the Topography of the Lungs “tradition”) of it, makes Park a decisive addition to Dimitriadis playing, whose polyrhythmic, emotional give and take approach, creates small snippets of percussion sounds. Nebbia’s sax never tries to saturate the others (as such an instrument can do) but, willingly, follows and goes along in a -sometimes threefold, other times a duo- dialogue between the players.

Short, low energy passages from the sax are followed by energetic playing on the drums, while Park is taking advantage on the ambivalent nature of his amplified instrument to create, all of them together, a sound world that incorporates, at the same time, the electronic nature of the guitar with the more fluid and down to earth sounds of the sax and the drums.

On Gonggong 225088’s Bandcamp page the trio is noted as producing, a threesome entity, the music. I cannot find a better, more laconic way, in describing this fine recording of collective playing.

Listen here:

@koultouranafigo