American, Downtown New York-based innovative, experimental composer-guitarist-multi-instrumentalist-improviser Elliott Sharp has been composing and performing for over fifty years now. The Hudson River Compositions were penned in 1973-74 when Sharp was living in Germantown, New York, overlooking the and walking along the river. Sharp found secluded places to practice soprano sax and was inspired by watching the river flow, birds taking off simultaneously, and the thick air that its foreground and background were reversed, like a living Escher drawing. These images were superimposed on graphic scores with a few conceptual instructions.
The album offers a new recording of 12 short compositions, made from July until October 2024, with Sharp playing Bb clarinet, bass clarinet, soprano saxophone, alto saxophone, mandolin, electric guitar, baritone guitar, and electronics, and hosting an eight-musician acoustic ensemble, including pianist Anthony Coleman and trumpeter Nate Wooley. It is a collage of overdub sessions, some with synchronized listening, some autonomous, as «an attempt to manifest the sound I was hearing in my Inner Ear at the time of the conception of these compositions». Sharp, already in the early seventies, has introduced an uncompromising and complex, idiosyncratic musical universe of his own. These compositions are genre-defying, urgent, intense, and provocative, and blend the funky, fragmented, disorienting, and sublime with subversive studio effects, suggestive sonic images, and a clear, stubborn logic and vision of his own. The meditative drone «River» is the most impressive piece here.
Looppool is Sharp’s generous compilation of archival recordings from the albums Virtual Stance and Looppool, remastered in 24-bit audio. These albums were created when Sharp was passionate about science fiction, especially William Gibson’s noir tale Neuromancer (1984),and just began using computers and software, the Atari 1040 ST and software M with a built-in MIDI interface (that sometimes demanded to drop this robust machine to reseat its chips in their sockets) as a platform for real-time improvisation and composition. Sharp created with these vintage, computers, mutated and random loops, samples (of various instruments radically processed by time-stretching, transposition, and filtering, Sharp’s voice and alien voices, micro melodies, and unexpected textures), and grooves. He interfaced his guitars and horns to the computer to trigger complex yet confusing chains of sounds, demanding him to be «in the moment». The final, longest, and best-realized piece, the 21-minute «Virtual Stance» still sounds fresh and provocative. This piece was a score for choreographer Nina Wiener and was collaged from several fragments created in the studio using the M/Atari ST, drum machines, and keyboard sampler.
These loud, atonal, and discordant pieces suggested a twisted kind of dance music, that demanded highly acrobatic flexibility. Sharp used to play this music after a set of his Bootstrappers trio (with Mike Watt of Minutemen and George Hurley of Firehose) before confused audiences. Forty years later, these intrepid, nervous, and often noisy pieces did not lose their exploratory, experimental edge. The pieces sound even more logical now. Still not a typical dance music but I can imagine some resourceful DJ’s who may incorporate – or remix – one or more pieces into their sets.
Sharp and drummer-composer Bobby Previte have been collaborating since 1974. Poppo – Eternal Performance is another archival recording from June 1985, a live set of a score to a butoh dance performance by Poppo & The GoGo Boys in the vacant lot outside of 8BC, an underground club in the East Villag. Poppy is the Japanese, New York-baed butoh dancer Poppo Shiraishi, and The GoGo Boys were an all-women, shifting cast of NYC dancers and performance artists. Sharp plays here on his double neck guitarbass and an adapted zither and Previte on a stripped-down drum kit with two bass drums. The four pieces suggest a brief ritualist spirit but more powerful and intense, rhythmic collisions ornamented with exotic, Eastern tones by two young and adventurous improvisers who were eager to explore the extreme, the dissonant, and the unpredictable, with no sign of slowing down.
Eyal Hareuveni
Anthony Coleman (piano), Shayna Dulberger (bass), Terry L. Greene II (trombone), Judith Insell (viola), Hao Jiang (cello), Don McKenzie (drums), Sara Salomon (violin), Nate Wooley (trumpet), Elliott Sharp (Bb clarinet, bass clarinet, soprano saxophone, alto saxophone, mandolin, electric guitar, baritone guitar, lap steel, electronics, double neck guitarbass, zither, Atari ST using M software, sampler, drum machine, digital processors), Bobby Previte (drums)
