Elliott Sharp, Solo – Center for New Music

Solo electroacoustic music performed on 8-string guitarbass with electronics plus readings from his upcoming book Feedback: Translations From The IrRational which will be published by Wesleyan University Press, Nov. 2025

Bio:

ELLIOTT SHARP leads SysOrk, Orchestra Carbon, Terraplane, and Tectonics and pioneered use of fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetics in musical composition and interaction.

His opera Port Bou premiered October 2014 at Issue Project Room and his suite Tribute:MLK Berlin ’64 opened the 2014 Berlin Jazz Festival. Storm Of the Eye appears on violinist Hilary Hahn’s Grammy-winning album In 27 Pieces and Turing Test for the Neue Vocalsölisten Stuttgart premiered at the Venice Biennale in 2012. Sharp has been featured at festivals New Music Stockholm, Darmstadt, Donaueschingen, and Au Printemps and is the subject of the documentary film Doing The Don’t.

Sharp was awarded the Berlin Prize for Music Composition for 2015; a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014; a Fellowship from the Center for Transformative Media in 2014. In 2003, he received a Fellowship from the Foundation For Contemporary Art.

Sharp’s collaborators have included Radio-Sinfonie Frankfurt; singer Debbie Harry; Ensemble Modern; Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; blues legends Hubert Sumlin and Pops Staples; pianist Cecil Taylor; multimedia artists Christian Marclay and Pierre Huyghe; and Bachir Attar, leader of the Master Musicians Of Jajouka.

From The Publisher: 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, Sharp found his passion for music as a teen, and it has never abated. His philosophy is informed not just 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.

Marc Ribot: Elliott Sharp is among the most important musicians to come out of NYC’s Downtown Scene. His work is original and conceptually rigorous. Feedback illuminates the deep thought behind Elliott’s work and documents a key part of the NY scene. | hope the intellectual/artistic/emotional feedbacks these pages describe will continue to loop and build… into a howling resistance to the brutal homogenizing corporate technologies of our time.

Links:

Elliott Sharp Bandcamp:

https://elliottsharp1.bandcamp.com/

https://elliottsharpsterraplane.bandcamp.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/elliott_sharp/

Substack:

https://elliottsharp.substack.com/