Harth, Alfred

NUN

Label: Mother of Pearl Country: Korea

Studio constructions of acoustic & electronic musics in an eclectic set of pieces. Each are complex compositions with many unexpected twists and turns and a great attention to detail; journeys in sound that are active, interesting, and occassionally irascible, but powerful discourses on the themes that Harth presents. You'll have to listen closely to hear the saxophonist Harth within, but his compositions are mature works worthy of a close listen.

"With a respectful distance, I want to touch on Corean poetry on my album NUN. Corean poetry is especially hard to translate adequately. So I chose only two short poems to point out my respect (in English) at least. Corea altogether in its entire present reality seems to be elusive to western categories of understanding. Hanguk - the country of the unfullfilled wish! The album`s title NUN is in itself a one word poem with multiple meanings. NUN means "eye" and "snow" in Corean. Alone, this combination led me to choose this title in addition to its many other significances in other languages.

In autumn 2005, the singer Andreas Scheufler (ATA) visited me from Frankfurt. From a trip to the Corean east coast, he brought the NUN cover image for my "mother-of-pearl-CD-series" and played some violin parts which are embedded in "DOG" and "108". 108 grievous and troubled thoughts are counted by the Buddhists in order to become aware of and finally get over them. In November 2005, the "Laughing String Quartet" performed my composition, "iGnorance," , which contains my ever first composition "Simulator" from 1967, in honour of Yun Isang. The camouflaged "Simulator," samples of my composition "Frankfurter Stadtoper" performed in front of the town hall in 1984, and my last Frankfurt based group "TATTOO" (Ernst Seitz/Manuel Lohnes/Guenter Bozem/A23H) from 2000 also decorate the ending of "DOG."

At the beginning of 2006, Taran Singh, who runs a free jazz program broadcast in France, and Frank Gratkowski, who visited Seoul in April 2006, indirectly encouraged me to put a bass clarinet solo on to my new album. Also, Noda Shigenori had invited me for a solo performance in February 06 at the Pitt Inn Tokyo although I told him that I do not see myself as a solist: "TEST FOR TOKYO" is accordingly an etude. I had played a similar performance with the combination of contrabassclarinet, contact mics and Kaoss Pad in January 06 at the Seoul "Relay" concerts series - a collective of electroacoustic improvisation, which I had helped to build since its foundation by Ryu Hankil in 2005.

"BREF" is out of the "underground" from Frankfurt nine years ago - a duo with Micha Daniels, with whom I had worked on many occasions during the 90s in the local collective FIM (Frankfurts Indeterminables Musiqwesen). In March 06 this recording swept back to me during a concert trip to Berlin and after all the musical development of the last years I thought that it fit the NUN album concept very well.

Together with pianist Kae Soojung and bassist Chang U Choi I had worked for two years in a group, "The Jeep Quintet/mode 0," which also has the very honourable trumpetist Choi Sun Bae as a member. I invited Kae Soojung and Chang U Choi to play some improvisations for my project, which can be heard on "LEASING A STRAW HUT," along with one of the 100 most beautiful sounds from Corea - as it was written on a poster here - from the unbelievably poetic pebble-beach-bay at Hakdong on the island Namhae in the south of Corea."-Alfred Harth