There was a period in the late '80s when I was studiously ignoring the Second Summer of Love and Madchester scenes, while my ears were focused on the, ahem, avant-rock and post-hardcore scenes around New York (Sonic Youth, Glenn Branca, John Zorn) and labels like SST in the US and Blast First in the UK.
This is an example of what I call a foraging strategy in The Book: finding a patch of ground that seems to have lots of good food in it, and then exploring different parts of it until the proportion of good nosh you find falls unacceptably low. Elliott Sharp just about defined that point for me. The signs were promising: a long-term member of the NYC scene, putting out records on SST. I bought a couple of his records, on the same day I think, and they're superficially quite different — but neither really clicked with me.
Of the pair, this is the one that's closer to contemporary classical music. Yeah, well, it has a string quartet; I guess that's a bit of a giveaway. It's also based on heavy maths, in a way that appears superfiically similar to many Xenakis compositions. Sharp's Wikipedia profile declares him to be a science geek, and his sleeve notes descibe how two of the pieces use Fibonacci Series to generate tunings, rhythms and forms. (These notes also show how printing technology evolved through the '80s: whereas the Recommended Records Sampler was still using a typewriter in 1982, five years later Sharp is using a dot-matrix printer with its trademark rough rasterisation and the odd line that gets all scrunched up.)
Digital is my favourite piece on the album. The instruments no longer sound like violins, viola and cello, as apparently they have all had spring steel woven into the strings. Overall the effect is similar to a Balinese gamelan performance.
Sharp very rarely performs in this country, so when he paid a visit to the Luminaire in January, I went along to see if I shouild revise my luke warm reaction of two decades ago. Answer: probably not; though my impressions of the music that night were badly affected by the appalling organisation of the gig by the Society for Promotion of New Music, which smacked of the worst kind of croneyism at every stage. I've never seen a queue to get into the Luminaire before (and neither, the bouncer said, had he). But at the time the gig was scheduled to start, everyone who'd bought their ticket in advance had to wait outside while the organisers gave priority to those on a very long guest list. Then the running order, which inevitably started late, was padded out with SPNM members so that it ran later and later. One guy got on stage and said he was "just going to make some noise for ten minutes". He was the type that thinks its clever to play a guitar with a hair dryer or a lawn strimmer — anything but a plectrum. The comedy interest of this wore off inside five minutes, the sound he made was shit, and he was still going after 25 minutes. But no one pulled the plug on him or politely invited to leave the stage NOW. The result of all this was that the show was so far behind schedule that by the time Christian Marclay joined Sharp for the final set of the evening, I had only five minutes before I had to leave to get my last train home. Sorry, had to get that off my chest. Sharp was OK — actually he was a big hit with some in the audience — but not really my thing and I doubt I'll buy any more of his records.
 MusicBrainz entry for this albumWikipedia entry for this album Rate Your Music entry for this album |
Comments