Realism brinעs together two visionary American guitar heroes – Guilford, Connecticut-based Joe Morris and New York-based Elliott Sharp for their first duo album, recorded at Park West Studios in Brooklyn in July 2023. This album faithfully captures the old ESP-Disk slogan: «You never heard such sounds in your life», as Morris – on the left channel – playing his acoustic guitar with effects, and Sharp – on the right channel – with his acoustic guitar augmented by electronics, so this duo played – and improvised – not only with each other but also with themselves.
The music flows organically with restless, intense energy, even on a quiet piece like «Soft Version». The thoughtful interplay is enriched by unpredictable, nuanced sonic ideas, an urgent need to search and experiment with uncharted sonic territories, and is totally possessed in the moment. Morris and Sharp act as sonic magicians, who constantly sculpt and manipulate the effects and electronics-enhanced guitars’ timbres as powerful, mind-bending vibrations, and create complex, elastic-shaped sonic storms.
Esp-Disk producer Steve Holtje notes that he and engineer Jim Clouse could barely believe what they were hearing and seeing on the monitors. There were wave forms on the monitor they had never witnessed before: «instead of the usual spiky soundwaves of peaks and valleys, there were squiggles that looked like alien scripts imagined for a science-fiction movie!… It is the most far-out album in ESP’s storied history—and that’s saying something when the label brought you Albert Ayler and Sun Ra».
réimsí géara (sharp areas in Gaelic) is the fourth guitar duo album of Sharp with American, Cologne-based guitarist Scott Fields, since their debut duo album Scharfefelder (Clean Feed, 2008. Sharp also played with Fields Ensemble, Frail Lumber, Not Two, 2011). It was recorded at Sharp’s Studio zOaR in New York in August 2023. Sharp’s son, Kai, did the cover artwork, which references the album’s ironic wordplay and imagines these guitar heroes as friendly monsters.
This duo, like the duo of Morris and Sharp, has its own compact history of modern composition and free improvisation. But réimsí géara focuses on composed music, four pieces by Sharp and another four by Fields, all informed by the extensive experience of Fields and Sharp in playing contemporary music, minimalism, free jazz, and blues. Fields and Sharp play electric guitars and dance around each other with imaginative usage of effects. They sound like good old friends, with particular culinary tastes, who catch up with each other’s free-associative stories, some are thought-provoking and insightful stories, after a long hiatus, and enjoy such intuitive yet dense guitar chats. The last 14-minute piece, Fields’ «Squid and Meatballs» shifts the course to a sparse, emotional, bluesy ballad.
Eyal Hareuveni
Joe Morris (guitars, effects), Elliott Sharp (guitars, electronics), Scott Fields (electric guitar)
