Elliott Sharp
Shamballa
Shamballa is the 1993 collaboration from jazz drummer William Hooker, Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth), and composer Elliott Sharp. The release features Hooker performing duets with each musician. Hooker and Moore’s performance is littered with bursts of feedback and distortion, while the collaboration with Sharp is characterized by a more electronic sound, building a sense of technology. The pieces were released on vinyl for the first time as a double LP for Record Store Day 2023, limited to 1,500 …
Snowplow
*2023 stock* "hi Andrea - here it's just cold - I'd love to have some real snow here like we used to have in my childhood, even up to the 1980's! My children have never been in snow up to their knees and their knees are not that tall!"
I wrote these words to Andrea as we discussed our upcoming performances and recording during his visit to NYC in February 2009. As they say,"Be careful what you wish for..." So it snowed. Not a blizzard, but it was snow and it came down relentlessly. We play…
Afiadacampos
"Our emphasis on composition, and specifically composition for the relatively narrow dynamic range and timbral pallet of paired steel-string, acoustic guitars, directs us away from dependence on muscle memory and set phrases. These structures focus us on interactions that grow out of our immediate reactions to how each of us is, in the moment, interpreting the material." -- Scott Fields. "With Afiadacampos, I feel that Scott and I have deepened our ability to improvise together and to orchestrat…
Spectropia Suite
This film is a time travel/supernatural drama. The soundtrack is one part big band jazz, one part electronica and one part rock. The “Spectropia Suite” features a guest appearance from Blondiechanteuse Debbie Harry singing the future-noir ballad “This Time That Place”. No stranger to the Downtown avant-garde, Debbie has long had a connection to such artists as The Lounge Lizards.
Donaueschinger Musiktage 2007 - War Zones
Featured works: "Ripples From The Bang" (2007) composed by Elliott Sharp. "Paranoia" (2007) composed by Bernhard Lang. Performed by: LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, text & vocals; mixmastertodd, electronics & vocals; Philip Jeck, turntables; Hans Koch, reeds; Bernhard Lang, keyboard/electronics; Elliott Sharp, 8-string guitarbass/electronics; Fredy Studer, drums/percussion. Bernhard Lang on "Paranoia": "'Paranoia' is a sequence of eight semi-improvised blocks that were extracted from the sketches to Ac…
Spring & Neap
In 1996 I went on a tour of Japan with Orchestra Carbon; a highlight was the Music Merge Festival in Tokyo. A colorful selection of wonderful musicians from the international scene met there for three days at the Shinjuku Pit Inn: Michiyo Yagi, Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko M, Jim O'Rourke, Yumiko Tanaka, David Grubbs and others. In addition to performing with Orchestra Carbon and my solo Tectonics, I was allowed to develop a new algorithmic template for a small orchestra of festival soloists under m…
Rheo~Umbra
"'Flow of shadows' is how I would translate the composite neolog title of this 1997 work for Orchestra Carbon and how I might describe the musical gestures therein. In seven sections, 'Rheo~Umbra' layers through composed materials, algorithmic strategies for the ensemble, and improvisations by various soloists. The algorithmic approaches include the 'transient additive pulse' where a percussive hit and its reverberations morph into a pulsing groove. There are also hockets and phased looping/tran…
Larynx
"Larynx is an analogy; the orchestra as a throat. It follows as corollary to the throat as orchestra: throat singing as practiced by the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic and the hoomii singing of Mongolia, as well as by related jawharp techniques found throughout the world. The natural overtone series is the melodic core of much of these musics and of much of Larynx. Ratios derived from the Fibonacci Series are used to generate tunings and melodic/harmonic material for the strings, brass, slabs, pan…
SyndaKit
Performed by: Orchestra Carbon: Judith Insell (viola); Rea Mochiach (percussion); Zeena Parkins (electric harp); Jim Pugliese (percussion); Ted Reichman (accordion); Marc Sloan (electric bass); Tim Smith (bass clarinet); David Soldier (violin); Evan Spritzer (bass clarinet); Joseph Trump (drums & percussion); David Weinstein (synthesizer and sampler); Elliott Sharp (electroacoustic guitar). Recorded December 1998. "Composed in 1998 for my ensemble Orchestra Carbon, SyndaKit utilizes a collection…
Tectonics: Errata
Tectonics is a solo program performed on saxophones, guitars, an Apple Powerbook running MAX/MSP as well as various DSP applications, plus a variety of external hardware DSP devices. Sharp's work with electronics dates back to the late 60's and has included extended techniques on a variety of instruments, both "traditional" and invented, as well as use of analog synthesizers and processors, and, later, experiments with Music 4 running on a PDP. When the Atari ST first appeared, it was utilized t…
I Never Metaguitar 6
*In process of stocking* Klanggalerie are happy to contionue a series of outstanding guitar music that was started by Clean Feed. "In these sick times, there must be a 6th volume of this on-going compilation covering "the parallel realities of contemporary guitarism". Our latest collection runs from A to Z with guitar pieces reflecting the sheer inventiveness and fabulous sonic visions inspired by this instrument of myriad manifestations. The cast of characters ranges from the "legendary" to the…
In New York
Moroccan Jajouka master Bachir Attar meets American experimental musician Elliot Shrap for a live jam of drum machines and traditional Moroccan instruments in 1990. Bachir Attar's career spans five decades and represents the transcendental sounds of Jajouka, a small Moroccan village situated between Fes and Tangier, known for its unique mystical sound. Fans include William Burroughs and The Rolling Stones with which Bachir recorded with in 1989. A year later Attar collaborated with the prolific …
Phlogiston
Elliott Sharps's release on Erototox Decodings is no different in terms of his ongoing homage to science, entitled 'Phlogiston', aptly named after a substance supposed by 18th-century chemists to exist in all combustible bodies, and to be released in combustion. It’s also his first purely electronic and synthesized record to date.
Foliage
* Edition of 300 * Foliage by Elliott Sharp is a long-form graphic music score that offers abstract instructions allowing for infinite possible interpretations by performing musicians. Featuring a series of 80 risograph prints, Foliage is, in Sharp’s words, “a graphic score open to interpretation and realization by any instrumentalist or ensemble of any size… [it] is a piece of retinal art as much as it is an instruction set for sound, form and function interlocked.” Graphic notation, which evol…
Dispersion
"Working with forces unknown to me has always been an exciting challenge,” says Elliott Sharp, “especially when those forces are in the form of younger musicians, highly skilled and enthusiastic.” For his work with the musicians of the Veni Academy, he chose three previously composed works that would be easily adaptable to a large ensemble whose instrumentation was not the result of prior design plus one newly composed for the occasion. The chosen pieces were based on well-defined processes that…
Spillà
“Spillá” (meaning "to play" in the secret language of the Neapolitan musicians) is a meeting between two masters of the guitar: Elliott Sharp's continuous innovation meet Sergio Sorrentino’s mastery of interpretation. Recorded live in 2018 in Vercelli (Italy) here we have the surprising and effervescent rendition of two Sharp’s graphic scores: "Hudson River Nr. 6" (1974) is an early experiment and is part of a series of scores derived from topographical maps superimposed to musical staff and the…
Live at White Cube
In collaboration between Christian Marclay and the London Sinfonietta, some of the world’s most renowned contemporary musicians have been invited to stage performances, including new compositions and live improvisation sessions inside the White Cube. Each performance over the course of the exhibition will be recorded, pressed and screen-printed live inside the gallery. Side A: Elliott Sharp, 'The Hidden Variable'.Side B: Elliott Sharp and London Sinfonietta, 'Glass Call'
Pi:k
'Two musicians from very different backgrounds finding common ground. The first half consists of studio duets on guitar and viola recorded in New York City without any electronics, but they are not what one would expect from these two instruments. The second half is very different - recorded in concert in Geneva with a liberal amount of electronics.'