Elliott Sharp

• projects as a leader •

Sharp and Mingus are enraged but it doesn't stop them from having some fun and generating some funk. This uncompromisingly futuristic beat-heavy music is full of references to James Brown, Funkadelic, Sly and the Family Stone, Miles Davis, but still and always E# & Mingus.

Fourth Blood Moon is a free-rock power trio featuring the vocals of Eric Mingus, folk songs for these post-factual times.
"E# and Mingus are enraged but it doesn't stop them from having some fun and funk. This uncompromisingly futuristic beat-heavy music is full of references to James Brown, Funkadelic, Sly and the Family Stone and Miles Davis but still and always E#".
Besides Mingus' vocal talents and the tsunami force of Sharp's guitars and electronics, Fourth Blood Moon features the "gold-medal" UK rhythm section of John Edwards on bass and Mark Sanders on drums whose wide-ranging talents allow the to lay down a vicious groove but also venture into cosmic realms of pure sound.

A phonon is the elementary excitation in the quantum mechanical treatment of vibrations in a crystal lattice and one may consider a phonon to be a basic particle of sound.
The Phonon album is titled Alloy. Alloy is the perfect description for the music of Phonon as an alloy is a metal made by combining two or more metallic elements, especially to give greater strength or resistance to corrosion. In the case of the band Phonon, our particular type of cross-pollinated metals are steeped in improvisation and electronic processing, all the better to increase the corrosion factor. And Phonon improvises like they mean it with a visceral psychic rhythm section supporting frothing dual guitar textural streams. This is 21st century brutalist hypnosis for a hypocritically repressed world.

To observe his 70th year, composer, multi-instrumentalist, producer, author, and artist Elliott Sharp will present a number of concerts and recordings under the rubric E#@70.
It's a systems orchestra performing four new works by his very open-ended ensemble SysOrk.
It incorporates a core Quintet from NY with European musicians including String Quartet, Brass, Electronics, Percussionists etc.
The pieces include Oksusgenos (for bass clarinet and electronics performed by E#), two algorithmic scores: Feedback 21 and Viridia, and a long-form animated graphic score ReGenerate. Finally, Over Water, a work from 2019 for video projection and guitar by Janene Higgins and E#.
Sharp's work with graphic notation and algorithmic systemic approaches dates back to 1972.

• video •

Video of Elliott Sharp on YouTube

Elliott Sharp's Fourth Blood Moon ft. Eric Mingus "Back In The Days Blues" live @Argo16

Clinamen on YouTube

Aggregat Trio on YouTube

Momentum Anomaly Solo on YouTube

Elliott Sharp Plays Monk on YouTube

• audio •

Elliott Sharp & Eric Mingus: Songs From A Rogue State on Bandcamp

Elliott Sharp & Eric Mingus: Fourth Blood Moon on Bandcamp

Elliott Sharp's Terraplane: Century on Bandcamp

Complete String Quartets: 1986-2014 on Bandcamp

The Clinamen Trio "Swervitude" on Bandcamp

Steppe on Bandcamp

Die Grösste Fuge opera on Bandcamp

• discography •

Discography on Wikipedia

Elliott Sharp's Life at the Avant-Garde Edge on Bandcamp

• interviews •

Elliott Sharp "Blues is a Feeling" - NPR (22-9-2012)

Other links of interviews by Elliott Sharp on Wikipedia

• short biography •

Sharp is an American multi-instrumentalist, composer, and performer.
His compositions include works for opera, orchestra, string quartet, computer and electronics, and solo instruments and he has been a dedicated practitioner of improvisation.
A central figure in the avant-garde and experimental music scene in New York City for over 30 years, Elliott Sharp has released over eighty-five recordings ranging from orchestral music to blues, jazz, noise, no wave rock, and techno music. He leads the projects Carbon and Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics, and Terraplane and has pioneered ways of applying fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetic metaphors to musical composition and interaction.
His collaborators have included Radio-Sinfonie Frankfurt; pop singer Deborah Harry; Ensemble Modern; Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; Kronos String Quartet; Ensemble Resonanz; cello innovator Frances Marie Uitti; blues legends Hubert Sumlin and Pops Staples; pipa virtuoso Min-Xiao Feng; jazz greats Jack deJohnette, Oliver Lake, and Sonny Sharrock; multimedia artists Christian Marclay and Pierre Huyghe; and Bachir Attar, leader of the Master Musicians Of Jajouka.
Sharp is a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow, and a 2014 Fellow at Parson's Center for Transformative Media. He received the 2015 Berlin Prize in Musical Composition from the American Academy in Berlin. He has composed scores for feature films and documentaries; created sound-design for interstitials on The Sundance Channel, MTV and Bravo networks; and has presented numerous sound installations in art galleries and museums. He is the subject of a new documentary "Doing The Don't" by filmmaker Bert Shapiro.