September 25:
Elliott Sharp will present two new projects. The first is his new book Feedback: Translations From The IrRational published by Wesleyan University press and the second is Livin’ Hear, the new album by Sharp’s band Terraplane featuring vocalist Eric Mingus and released by Munich label Yellowbird. Sharp will read selections from Feedback and perform live electroacoustic music as well as playing the album Livin’ Hear.
September 26:
Sharp will perform solo compositions and improvisations on his 8-string guitarbass with electronics.
Elliott Sharps new Book Feedback is a wide-ranging meditation on music, sound, artificial intelligence, consciousness, contemporary culture and politics, and the life of the touring musician. Author Elliott Sharp is considered one of the central figures in NYC’s Downtown Scene and is a composer, producer, multi-instrumentalist, visual artist, and educator. Starting from a background in the sciences, his philosophy is informed not only by music and its creation but by continuing studies in physics and genetics and a visceral interest in our modern world and its joys and horrors. In Feedback, Sharp engages in speculative thought about how consciousness might have arisen and what the future holds for humanity with the advent of an Artificial Intelligence that is certainly artificial but might not exactly be intelligent. The “Improviser’s Mind” is discussed in the context of post-quantum physics, probability, socio-acoustics, and Butoh dance. Sharp loves to digress into unpredictable areas but ties it all together in an overarching narrative that is both personal and conceptual.
Notes on Livin’ Hear:
This is not a travelog or a collection of fictional tales, neither political screed nor those same old blues laments. These latest Terraplane songs are sounds that have come to us “live”, not through a phone or a television or some other entity designed to suck out your soul as it sells you another shiny and useless object but through total immersion in what’s called “life.” We feel it, we smell and taste it, but it’s in the hearing that it truly becomes actualized, becomes a force to be harnessed or battled. There’s enough horror and anger for everyone provided by the forces of evil but with a little extractive logic, some laughs too. Terraplane can sing the transcendent as well by taking in a variety of exotic elixirs, whether created by sleep deprivation, shamanic herbs, or ghostly visitations. It all adds up to a somewhat surreal life in this place that we call America. All we can do is hear the here and then make it sound.