Guitarist Elliott Sharp is known primarily to listeners as a quintessentially Downtown NYC eclectic: a Metal-plated yet agile note-shredder who has spray-painted his own unique fractal graffiti across the walls of free improvisation, minimalism, funk, punk rock, and blues.
For all the variety in his music, however, Sharp is not necessarily the sort of artist you'd expect to find in the campfire settings suggested by the music on his latest release, and first for the Emanem label, The Velocity Of Hue. On these mostly brisk, succinct improvisations, Sharps spin tales on his "modified Godin Duel Multiac" (an acoustic guitar with solid-state analog and digital electronics integrated into the body of the instrument, largely for the purposes of amplification) recounting travels across foreign lands. Limned by flickerings of heat and gloom, our narrator also plays the many characters encountered on these journeys, becoming, as the story demands, a Chinese pipa, an Arabic oud, a National Steel guitar, a hammered dulcimer, a Mexican tiple, an African kora, a Hindustani vina, an ancient psaltery. More restless than the artists to whom he can be most profitably compared in this context -- John Fahey, Hans Reichel, Loren MazzaCane Connors, and the beatifically flaky Incredible String Band -- Sharp's point-of-view is also slicker and, consequently, strikes less friction from taking it's passage through so many traditions, so many technologies -- from the basic (language, if one pays close attention to the neologistic titles of these pieces; woodworking) to the relatively advanced (the gauge of steel strings; the plastic of a guitar plectrum; integrated circuitry) -- and so many droning, hocketing, melismatic, epic sounds.
The personal and the universal, the estranging and the inviting, are present in abundance if not quite in proportion on The Velocity Of Hue. But this is the danger of eclecticism, I suppose: it establishes just another, ostensibly richer equivalence. The most beautiful and memorable improvisations here are those which really do feel like they break through the tumult of the guitarist's imagination, not to some new synthesis, but to some nigh-primordial principle: "Anamesia"; "Euwrecka"; "Polytope"; "Recognition". Although there is a clear antecedent for much of this music in Sharp's String Quartet works, now happily available on a single Tzadik disc, it will be most interesting to reassess this recording once, as I hope eventually occurs, it is no longer a one-off or an isolated experiment.
.................................................. © 2003 - 2006 bagatellen ..................................................