Juno 3 is the experimental, free improvising trio of Berlin-based Korean-American improviser-guitarist (and coach) Han-earl Park with London-based experimental producer-sax player-sound artist (and lyricist) Lara Jones and pioneer of electroacoustics in free improvisation (and master pianist) Pat Thomas. Proxemics is the sophomore of this trio, following its self-titled debut album (Ramble, 2023), and recorded live at the same location, London’s Cafe OTO in November 2023 during the EFG London Jazz Festival. Han-earl’s guitar (a borrowed silver rocker as his own guitar was sent to the wrong airport) was recorded on the left channel. Jones’ sax and electronics are on the center and Thomas’ electronics are on the right channel. The album is released as a limited edition cassette and digital album.
The trio’s debut album was recorded between lockdowns and post-pandemic ‘normality, and captured a strange sense of cautious relief and optimism that transformed into an expansive and joyous flow of «intergalactic urban transit». Proxemics tells a completely different story. It takes this adventurous trio into its next evolutionary phase, a more extreme, dissonant, and apocalyptic confrontational, offering «elastic, doxastic collisions», as Han-earl calls it.
The album is divided into six «Derealization» pieces and six «Proxemics» pieces, but all suggest a series of dense, tense, and intense sonic collisions as if three improvisers sought that kind of combative, fierce dynamics where their sonic palettes morph into a nervous, noisy sonic entity. Han-earl describes the music as a raw and immediate response to the frustrations and micro-aggressions this Asian-Queer-Black trio encountered on the past few days on its way to Cafe OTO (and perhaps months, maybe years) or from some «jazz tourists» during the performance itself.
But this trio channeled – literally – the bullying and frustrations to its own unapologetic, and unrefined benefit. You can listen to the music as a direct, angry, and volatile comment on today’s politics of simple solutions, seductive stories of salvation and redemption, racism and oppressive gender politics, But these spiky yet nuanced confrontations have their own profound logic, relying on messy, punchy, and unsettling conversational interplay that avoid comforting veins and familiar dynamics and transform it into compelling interplay that offers a subversive, resistant kind of empathy and compassion. There are brief, delicate, and even lyrical segments and arresting beats (check «Derealization V», «Proxemics III» and «Proxemics III») on the trio’s journey to the cathartic, last piece «Proxemics VI- Rumble». But as Han-Earl concludes, these segments are «being delicate as a slab of granite».
Eyal Hareuveni
Han-earl Park (guitar), Lara Jones (saxophone, electronics), Pat Thomas (electronics)
