CWNM Write-up

The following is quoted from Jesse Goin's write-up of our upcoming show in the CWNM 2013 concert series.

crow with no mouth is pleased to announce its inaugural concert of the 2013 season – Hong Chulki (Seoul), in his first visit to the U.S., and the return of Jason Zeh (Kansas City, Missouri), who performed in the cwnm 2011 series.

I first became aware of Hong’s music in 2008, when a generous package of Seoul-based noise and improvised music, documented mainly on the Balloon & Needle, Manual and Celdon labels (also Seoul-based) arrived in the mail from my friend William Ashline, a professor at Yonsei University, and long-time listener of improvised music. A small crew of collaborative musicians, performing in an improbably tiny venue, Dotolim, were beginning to generate some positive chatter among experimental music listeners  around the world. This core collective – Choi Joonyong, Ryu Hankil. Jin Sangtae, Lee Hangjun, Park Seung Jun, two U.S. ex-pats who adopted Seoul as their home town, Joe Foster and Kevin Parks, and our special guest Hong Chulki – were making authentically risky music, often boisterous, subversive, even compellingly ugly.

Serving as a sonic antithesis to much of the reduced, micro-minimal sounds issuing from the Seoul group’s occasional collaborators from Tokyo, Vienna, and elsewhere, e.g., Sachiko  M, Klaus Filip, and Jason Kahn, Hong and his compatriots create a sui generis ruckus by means of hacked, gutted and otherwise repurposed junk. Typewriters, clockworks, cartridge-less turntables, CD player entrails – all are investigated for their sound possibilities. I have written twice about this music coming out of Seoul over the past several years, saying in June 2011 …[this music] is made of nearly every ugly sonic byproduct you can imagine issuing from the mechanized, throw-away toys of our time, with meticulous attention to the piece’s overall shape, sound placement and the player’s conjoining of elements.

This is Hong Chulki’s first visit to the United States, and a rare opportunity to hear a musician engaged in an area of improvisation I hear as … neither simply going for your throat, nor studied and airless enough to be regarded as academic; they love that ugly produce, so much so they set aside the lap-tops and guitars they’ve all been associated with to bring the roughness, the rudeness and the ruckus.

I first heard Jason Zeh in 2006, at a poorly-attended show in a record store in Minneapolis slated for foreclosure. On an evening consisting of 5 or 6 sets played to largely listless attendees seated on forensically-stained shag carpeting between rows of rock & roll vinyl bins, Zeh delivered a brief improvised collage, manically manipulating at least seven cassette players of varying vintages; it was brilliant, and I returned home to search the internet for pointers to his music. Finding nothing, I was excited, five years hence, when Zeh agreed to come to Minneapolis to perform on a mini-tour with Jason Kahn and Mike Shiflet. In his second appearance in a crow with no mouth concert, Zeh will offer a solo set, and a duo with Hong, whom he will meet for the first time when he arrives.

In November 2011, I wrote: I want to get after you all a little to look into the music of a tape composer from Bowling Green, Ohio; Jason Zeh has been focused for some years on making intimate, meticulously crafted sound works by every means possible within the medium of cassettes. Zeh shares aspects of an overlapping sensibility with Jason Lescalleet and, specifically in his predilection for nearly entombing rich sonic details in tape-murk, Graham Lambkin.
It is my great pleasure to present Hong Chulki and Jason Zeh together on February 15,  an auspicious opening for the 2013 series.

The three-year anniversary of my blog, crow with no mouth, is also in that week of February, so we will celebrate this music with a few special treats.

studio z
8:00 p.m.
$10
byob