Recording: Elliott Sharp

Artist: Elliott Sharp

Songs: [excerpt, in two parts]

Recorded at Soybomb (Intersection Festival – Day 1), September 2, 2016.

Elliott Sharp - [excerpt, part 1]

Elliott Sharp - [excerpt, part 2]

The Intersection Festival has a habit of augmenting its free day of music in Dundas Square with a ticketed concert. Like last year, that entailed going "off-site" as part of the Music Gallery's Departures series. This show was perhaps a bit more of a departure than usual, bringing some chamber music to DIY/punk venue Soybomb — definitely an intersection between different sounds and different crowds.

An avant garde-ist and no waver whose works have been released by everyone from SST to Tzadik, Elliott Sharp probably has as much "punk cred" as any chamber composer you care to name. Across dozens of ensembles and recording projects, that manifests in the freedom to explore across a wide range of sonic terrains. In this set for solo guitar, his decades of musical inquiry were compressed into dense, knotty streams of technically-rich playing, filled with double-tapping arpeggiations, prepared strings and slide abstractions that hinted at in-the-moment inventiveness as well as higher-order mathematical unities.