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GG 349CD
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"Klanggalerie are happy to continue a series of outstanding guitar music that was started by Clean Feed. ...and there are five! Here we are with a fifth volume of this on-going compilation covering 'the parallel realities of contemporary guitarism'. This latest collection of guitar pieces reflects once again the never-ending joy of hearing fabulous sonic visions with the guitar or its derivatives as the main subject. You may not already know every chosen guitarist, but you will now thanks to this series of recordings. Some don't need presentations thanks to their very visible contributions to various musical ventures: Jerome Harris, Norman Westberg, Will Bernard, Mike Baggetta. They, and all the others, are «players with one foot in the future and one in the past, a formula that puts one's ass directly in THE NOW. Once having gotten a taste, the listener will want to check out everyone's output. Is any other instrument capable of such a multitude of creative musical expressions?"
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NW 80778CD
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"'Mathematics and the various sciences are just ordered ways of looking at and analyzing all of the raw data supplied by the universe. It's all about mappings and correspondences. At the same time, my work often takes a speculative and irrational/intuitive approach. It includes both the ordered and rational, the intuitive and irrational, and the acoustics of the ear.' -- Elliott Sharp. For nearly 40 years, Elliott Sharp (b. 1951) has created a body of work that is exemplary in both its breadth and its depth. Sharp's discography, which numbers more than 300 separate items, includes works for orchestra, string quartet, rock band, blues band, solo guitar, multiple guitars. He is constantly in search of new sounds, processes, ways to create narrative arcs, ways to find music in unexpected places. His work is fed by acoustics, mathematics, philosophy, visual arts, and history. Central sonic concerns are melodies and grooves both micro- and macro-, harmonic saturation, density and texture, the vocalistic, the hyper-real. The goal is psycho-acoustic chemical change. He consistently tries to create structures with the spontaneity and energy of an improvisation. These four works exemplify the wide variety of approaches to the manifestation of his core concepts over a period of nearly twenty years. They reference influences and philosophies and, in addition, the diversity of their sound-worlds present sonic strategies that are unique to his compositional approach, including personalized extended techniques that extend the range of the instruments beyond notes. All are receiving their premiere recordings, stunningly realized by an array of stalwarts of the contemporary-music scene."
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NEOS 40704CD
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"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, pantars and doubleneck guitarbass, as well as rhythmic material for the ensemble." Performers: Samm Bennett (drums & percussion); Lesli Dalaba (trumpet & slab); David Fulton (trombone, slab, pantar); Ken Heer (trombone, slab, pantar); David Linton (drums); Charles K. Noyes (drums); Bobby Previte (drums); Jim Staley (trombone); Soldier String Quartet: Saura Seaton (violin), David Soldier (violin), Ron Lawrence (viola), Mary Wooten (cello); Elliott Sharp (doubleneck guitarbass, soprano sax, tenor sax, bass clarinet and sampler). Recorded and mixed at BC Studio, Brooklyn, New York, June-October 1987.
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NEOS 40706CD
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"'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/transformation of the composed material designed to gradually translate the horizontal -- notes and lines -- into vertical simultaneities. The overall sound design of the composition is an important structural element with the two keyboardists playing samples constructed by me and derived from my own extended techniques on soprano saxophone and bass clarinet as well as an array of sounds produced on the slabs, sounds then layered with their 'live' manifestations." --Elliott Sharp
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NEOS 40905CD
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Original soundtrack to the film Spectropia, performed by Elliott Sharp with The '31 Band; Sirius Sting Quartet & Debbie Harry (Blondie). "Spectropia is both a full-length feature film and an interactive media event set in a possible England in 2099, and in New York City in 1931 after the stock market crash. Directed by Toni Dove, it tells a story of time travel and supernatural possession to explore the disorders brought on by consumer culture. For the score, I endeavored to create two different noir soundworlds: for the future, one of distressed computers and tortured guitars -- for New York 1931, one based on an imagined meeting of the musics of Duke Ellington and Edgar Varèse. The song 'This Time That Place' appears in various versions heard throughout the film: as a tango, as a feedbacked guitar solo, as a swing tune, a classical piano etude, and as a rock ballad sung by the great Debbie Harry of Blondie. To perform Spectropia Suite, I assembled an ensemble of musicians, The '31 Band, all of whom have extensive experience in many realms of music. All have worked with me on many projects, from the various Western traditions of jazz and classical music to the farthest reaches of contemporary music, free jazz, and improvisation. We recorded the music in the traditional manner of a film orchestra, cue by cue (though not working to picture as most of the timings were not that precise.) Overdubbing, editing, and processing all took place at my Studio zOaR including the tender yet sardonic vocals of Ms. Harry. This music has evolved from a set of cues into a suite for performance with The '31 Band expanding on the written material with solos and other interpretive actions by the players." -- Eliot Sharp, 2009
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NEOS 40708CD
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"'Spring & Neap' -- a central event during Carbon's 1996 Japanese tour was the Music Merge Festival taking place over 3 days at Tokyo's Shinjuku Pit Inn and bringing together a diverse and international collection of wonderful musicians including Michiyo Yagi, Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko M, Jim O'Rourke, Yumiko Tanaka, David Grubbs and more. In addition to sets from Carbon and my solo Tectonics project, I was asked to create an algorithmic structure that I would conduct, composed for a small orchestra made up of players from the festival. Re:Iterations -- it was a happy coincidence that Paul Dunkel (Associate Conductor of the American Composers Orchestra) contacted me in January 1986 about a commissioned piece for the orchestra at the same time that I had been thinking about applying my Fibonacci-series work to an ensemble of strings, essentially re-orchestrating ideas evolved on the guitar. As I was completing Re:Iterations, another useful coincidence: David Soldier had formed the Soldier String Quartet and asked me for a composition for their debut concert at the Miller Theater in NYC. I decided to re-orchestrate Re:Iterations for quartet -- 'Tessalation Row' was the result. Both pieces use the Fibonacci series to generate tunings, rhythms, and forms. All pitches are played on open strings (tuned to 1/1, 3/2, 5/3, 8/5) or overtones of those open strings. The score uses graphic modules which contain information on the various operations to be performed and give exact rhythmic, timing and pitch information. There are times when the players can vary the overtone melodies and timbres in a section but strictly within the parameters indicated in the score, not improvising. I was very concerned with identity -- the ability of sonic flux and internal detail to vary greatly in each performance without destroying the essence and exact proportions of the piece."
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NEOS 40703CD
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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 of biological metaphors to create an ever-shifting rhythmic and timbral matrix. Improvisatory and algorithmic but not improvisation, SyndaKit's essence is a transformative organism consisting of 144 composed cores on 12 sheets divided among the 12 players with a set of simple rules for their use through processes of imitation, addition, recombination, transposition, and mutation. These actions are based on the activities of flocking birds, African drum choirs, cellular automata, hunting packs, and recombinant amino acids."
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NEOS 40702CD
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First in a series of archival recordings from the Elliott Sharp vaults. Performed and composed by Elliott Sharp. Recorded at Studio zOaR New York, 1998. "The roots of my Tectonics project may be found in my early fascination with all things futuristic and electronic. I read science-fiction from my youngest days and planned to become a scientist... At Bard College and in graduate studies at the University of Buffalo, I worked with EML and Moog synthesizers and the Music IV programming language and began developing projects that would incorporate analog sequencers and synthesized percussion mixed with improvised guitars and reeds using extended techniques and processed with modulators, filters, and tape delay. This approach extended into instrument building and design including the slabs, pantars, violinoids, as well as fretless guitars plus doubleneck and 8-string guitarbasses with extended range. Conceptually, the music drew upon chaos theory and fractal geometry, algorithmic approaches, and acoustic phenomena... The third Tectonics CD, Errata (first released by the Knitting Factory in 1998) delved deeply into chaos and glitches, saturated timbres and hyper-pixillated rhythms."
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