Elliott Sharp

IrRational Music

© 2019 by Elliott Sharp all rights reserved

ISBN: 978-1-949597-15-8  ebook format

Published by Terra Nova Press

in collaboration with: found sound nation

Publisher: David Rothenberg

Editor-in-Chief: Evan Eisenberg

Designer: Martin Pedanik

Development: Kyla-Rose Smith and Christopher Marianetti, Found Sound Nation

Copy editor: Tyran Grillo

Cover photo by Andreas Sterzing

Cataloging-in-publication data available from the Library of Congress.

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www.terranovapress.com

Distributed to the trade by the MIT Press

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/imprint/terra-nova-press

epub version 1.5

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IrRational Music

Sixteen Pieces in the Shape

of a Memoir

Preface

Introduction: Portal to Sound and Silence

I.  IrRational Music and the Inner Ear

II.  Vibrations

III.  Former Postal Worker

IV.  In and Out of Place

V.  June in Buffalo (December Too)

VI.  Down in the Valley

VII.  From the Hudson to the Donau

VIII.  A Brief Carbonic History

IX.  Self-Organizing Systems from Cyber to Punk (With a Side of Blues)

X.  Out in the Worlds

XI.  Lines, Planes, Jews

XII.  Black Dots, Caves, and the Frozen Zone

XIII.  Octal, Twins, Foliage

XIV.  Acts and Spectacle

XV.  Room Tone

XVI.  Pursuing the IrRational

Discography

Acknowledgments

Illustration Credits



Preface

FOUND SOUND NATION (FSN) is an artists’ collective that uses music-making to connect people across cultural divides. We believe that collaborative music creation is a deeply effective way to become aware of the beauty, trauma, and hidden potential in our communities. Our aim is to enliven a global conversation about how creative collaboration in music can address issues we face locally and collectively, while making the world a funkier and more harmonious place.

When we began Found Sound Nation, we started with with two seemingly disparate questions: how can we be the most creative musicians that we can be? And how can our music be relevant to the greater world? We found that at the confluence of these two questions was a fraught and intriguing slice of artistry that some call art as social practice, and others (perhaps Eliott Sharp included) might prefer to call art as life itself.

Over the years we’ve had countless inspiring encounters with musically luminous souls, from greats like Pauline Oliveros to incarcerated teenagers to third-graders just discovering the endless joys of noise- making. We wish to support books and media in which musicians share their creative processes so that readers can be inspired to make things in new ways—in solo contexts, in collaboration, and within our neighborhoods and nation-states.

We are very honored to take this maiden voyage into publishing under the wide sails of Elliott Sharp. His dedication to listening to the minutiae of the Inner Ear is both relentlessly abstract and deeply rooted in morality, linked with the mass movements of humanity and even the grinding of tectonic plates. IrRational Music is part memoir, part philosophical treatise, and part manifesto. We hope that upon reading it you, dear reader, will listen to the wildest tones within your imagination, and explore the sonic potential of all the resonant objects within your grasp.

Jeremy Thal

Kyla-Rose Smith

Christopher Marianetti

www.foundsoundnation.org

Introduction:

Portal to Sound and Silence

I ENTER THE FACTORY. Its dark space looms over me, dominated by three towering punch presses, their black iron cut by the gleaming shafts of pistons. The presses make a visceral impact—a deep thud accompanied by a crunch, then a muted ring—as a raw metal speaker basket is stamped out. There’s movement in the air with each cycle, a slight breeze to accompany the distortion and cutting of steel.

Stamped steel has a smell, a tang of iron and chill, tempered here by lubricating oil. As the machines are hardly ever in sync, there’s a continuous asymmetrical dance, a groove of seemingly infinite variations that never resolves. It’s monstrous, terrifying, seductive. I don’t think of it as music, though it reminds me of the dinosaur segment in Disney’s Fantasia (which I will later learn was Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring). I’ve never heard a clatter like that before. I love it.

A few steps away, a door leads to an office. Quiet and fluorescent-lit, it glows against the dark of factory. Then another door. I enter the anechoic chamber, amber tiles absorbing and dissipating all reflection. It’s eerily quiet. When I say Hello, my voice feels disembodied. The hearing part of my brain feels like it’s been transported outside of my skull.

It’s 1958, and I’m seven years old. This is my first visit to the plant, the office and factory of University Loudspeakers where my father has recently become a design engineer. With that initiation, doors open to sound, and from there to music.

I’d never imagined that music would become my life. But the exhilaration I feel being in the plant for a few short minutes is like escaping from my familiar world to an alien universe that I can’t even begin to describe, only replay again and again. That night I dream about the punch presses, about the silent chamber. More than just the sensations or their organization, sound has become a mapping of the physical to the metaphysical, what I hear in the world translated to what I hear in my Inner Ear and back again. I can immerse myself in the memory of the sound. The Inner Ear is now a place to both reflect on the perceptions of the world and invent what sound could possibly be: a soundtrack to the utopian.



I. IrRational Music and the Inner Ear

FEEDBACK: SOMETHING FOR NOTHING. Generation of sound and light, structures growing from a seed, the tiniest impulse. Feedback loop: returning information from output to source. The Inner Ear could not exist without it.    is my name for the manifestation of that which I hear in my Inner Ear.

In grade school I became fascinated by number patterns, such as the Fibonacci Sequence and the irrational numbers, both for their nature and for their appearance. Their presence, I felt, infuses the infinite into all that we perceive and act upon. Most of the music I was experiencing was all too concrete: songs, short classical pieces, television music. I wondered how music could be infinite, but I couldn’t then move beyond the finite limits of my thinking. As math and science pulled me into a working relationship with the Void, the concept of the irrational number became a symbol for how a simple equation or set of operations could result in a process that was complex and unpredictable, endless and non-repeating, an elegant synergy of form and function.

The need to capture this essence and apply it to sound drove me as I began diving into the process of making music outside prescribed borders. I would imagine wonderful music—hear arcs of pure sound unfolding, with no way of bringing them into the outer world. These sounds inhabited a place I began to refer to as my Inner Ear. The prime question was how to manifest this inner world as physical sound so that both I and others could hear it.

At first, there was the obstacle of everyday noise, both internal and external, always interrupting the beauty unless I took it in and made it mine. Observation, reflection, self-discipline, practice—all techniques to quiet the noise. The quest seemed asymptotic: how to strip away everything but unfettered sonic manifestation. Came the realization: this is a process, not an arrival.

It continued. Music didn’t appear fully realized, but required work. In a positive feedback loop, I obtained skills in the techniques of various musical styles while exploring sounds and their production. Eventually, I came to codify my strategies, constructing a music drawn from the abstract locus of the Inner Ear yet based on the results of research, informed both by history and by real-world experimentation. Each approach amplified and transformed the other.

Initially applying these strategies to my own explorations of guitars, saxophones, synthesizers, and electronics, I later tried them in improvisatory ensemble meetings, in rock and jazz groups, and in written compositions, whether fully notated, algorithmic, or graphic. The resulting music would be equally grounded in intentional acts and in something more evanescent: the very nature of sound and psychoacoustic phenomena.

I sought to create music that, when improvised, had the inevitability of a well-constructed composition and, when composed, had the spontaneous excitement and mutability of an improvisation. Such music wouldn’t be trapped in temporal anchoring, but rather exist in the ever- present now: one foot in the past, one in the future.

When I began to perform this music in public, I would invariably be asked: Just what kind of music is this? The question might just as often be posed after I’d played as before. Preparing to move to New York City in 1979, I began to think about how to explain my work. Should I proclaim the indivisible totality of the music, or define it by breaking it down into the elements from which it was composed? Should I invoke the mystery of improvisation, or allow myself to be pinned and placed in the taxonomy of a vast and diverse musical scene?

While clarifying my analysis of what the music was, I began using a process of elimination to define what it wasn’t. Despite often working with formal systems, I felt little resonance with the academics. Though I’d cut my teeth playing in dozens of odd electric bands between 1968 and 1979, used electric instruments and loud dynamics, and often performed in rock clubs, most who heard my music didn’t consider it rock. It definitely wasn’t jazz, though suffused with improvisation and fashioned, in part, of raw materials shaped by years of playing jazz of all styles. I sometimes made use of motoric repetition and simple motifs inspired by non-Western music, mimicry of natural processes, and acoustic phenomena, yet the music had no place in the sociocultural milieu of Minimalism—which, inextricably tied to its origins in New York City’s Downtown music scene of the 1970s, was meant less for engagement than for zoning out or as sonic wallpaper. Neither did I have any desire to bury the muse in politics or social realism, so I dumped any baggage from those realms. While in a few works I’d flirted with the ironic stance of postmodernism, I never resonated fully with it. As someone not nostalgic by nature, I had no desire to recreate any past era or to reinvent a flat tire. I scanned the list of isms only to cross them off.

I return again to the Inner Ear, a metaphoric device but as real as anything in my life. With no instrument at hand, I could hear forms and processes in their ideal state. Working with a physical instrument revealed certain spectra through correspondences between sound and the physics of nerves, muscles, bone, wood, metal, and moving air. The feedback loop was everything. My solo pieces were always the most concentrated representations of this ethos. Now that I was a New Yorker, I performed as often as possible, playing gigs in basements, lofts, bars, galleries, parties, and museums, solo or with other musicians or dancers. In 1980, I decided to release on my zOaR label a cassette of excerpts of solo concerts from the previous year and decided on the title IrRational Music—a phrase that would serve as a general description of the underlying sonic strategies of my compositions:

Ir: the acoustics of sound in a space and in the ear, and its connection to the perceptual engine of difference tones, feedback, volume effects, dynamic definitions of melody, groove, and vertical simultaneity (a.k.a. harmony).

Rational: denoting structure and order, algorithms of use and process, systems of organization, and social context.

IrRational: chaos, intuition, emotion, and the tangential.

Improvisation—nonlinear and tied to no specific genre—is an essential part of IrRational Music. Improvisation brings the music to life. It transforms the static into the dynamic, is the individual effector in the sonic flux. Forces revealed by improvisation are embodied in the fixed construction—they feed each other.

Like any creative act, the manifestation of music is a translation from one frequency band in the spectrum of consciousness to another. The creative impulse appears; our job, then, is to decode it and find the proper mode of presentation. This output may be of any form that remains true to the impulse. The impulse creates tension, questions, disturbance, elevation, excitement—in stark contrast to the everyday noise that engulfs us. It may also welcome the noise and interference and build from them. Ultimately, the signal must rise above all-that-is-not-the-signal to be heard. Actualization is the process by which we reach one of the many paths to inevitability. It may mean picking up an instrument, making a score or painting, cooking a meal, or taking a walk with eyes and ears open. Inspiration is recognition of the impulse; creation, translation of the spectrum.



II. Vibrations

MEA CULPA: I was an electronics geek and amateur radio operator during my late childhood in the early 1960s. I loved the smell of solder and would build kits and circuits from scratch using parts purchased from Lafayette or Allied Electronics. These distributors carried items appealing to hobbyists and professionals, including musicians, and the pages in the catalogs devoted to electric guitars drew me in with a heavy magnetic force. I’d gaze at images of beautifully garish made-in-Japan mutants laden with chrome and studded with banks of mysterious switches and knobs, and imagine myself generating Godzilla-sized waves of sound. So much of that early appeal of the electric guitar was visual: it looked like the sound of the future.

In 1956, our family moved from Cleveland, Ohio to White Plains, New York when my father, Bernard Charles Sharp, took a position at University Loudspeakers. Cleveland left its mark on me, or rather a cloud of murk: memories of being packed off to nursery school in a dark car plowing through heavy snow; the Terminal Tower, a huge edifice that haunted my nightmares; waiting on the railroad platform just after sunset to board an overnight train to New York State. In White Plains, we first lived in a small apartment before moving to a newly built middle-class housing development that allowed Jews. Our new home was filled with books on acoustics, electronics, and art history. My father was an accomplished visual artist who painted and sculpted in his spare time with great skill, vision, and joy, and his artworks covered our walls: landscapes, portraits, abstractions, nudes. I loved hanging out in the basement with him, working on my own little projects while he invented or painted. His balancing act between inspiration and systematic methodology was a fine model for my operations. I didn’t have a lot of toys. If I wanted a model airplane or spaceship, my father would say Make one, and would show me how to choose materials and use the proper tools.

My mother, Eugenie Hoffman Sharp, a Holocaust survivor, was born in Pont-à-Mousson, France, near the city of Nancy, and spent much of World War II hidden, together with her mother, by farmers in the Lorraine region while her two sisters and brother were hidden elsewhere by local partisans. She could never know when she would be confronted on the farm by German soldiers suspecting that this pretty little French farm girl might actually be a Jüdin. Needless to say, she had some thrilling tales. My grandmother, however, looked very Jewish and was always kept well away from view, hidden in a barn loft or even in the trunk of a car. My grandfather was imprisoned in the Drancy internment camp for most of the war and then deported in January 1945 to a camp in Poland, which he survived. With amazing luck, compounded by the kindness and bravery of local farmers, my mother and her immediate family survived the war and came to the United States in 1948, invited by cousins in Philadelphia and in Cleveland, where she met my father. She loved to regale us with stories of her close calls with the German occupiers. This, I believe, imbued in me a sense of defiance, along with the notion of having an escape route at hand for any situation. My sister Denise was born with Down syndrome, and much of my mother’s energy was taken up with her care, as well as crusading for schools for Down children. Later, two more brothers were born into the family, Howard and Kenneth, who would become, respectively, an educator and a computer scientist.

Art was part of my daily life. I’d spend hours drawing and painting dinosaurs, outer-space scenes, monsters and horror characters, and post- nuclear-apocalypse scenarios, fueled in no small part by the tenor of the times, with widespread instructions for making a fallout shelter in the basement and duck-and-cover drills at school. Walking to school on the morning of the denouement of the Cuban Missile Crisis, I nervously scanned the sky.

Home life was a contradictory mix: stifling and overprotective, yet highly encouraging for academic and artistic endeavors. Piano studies began at age six and were drudgery, an affliction of banal ditties and Czerny exercises that I had to play over and over until perfect. Despite my deep aversion to this routine, I managed to develop a fair amount of proficiency and greatly enjoyed attempting to play dark, fast music such as Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, which I performed at Carnegie Recital Hall at age seven as a student of Ms. Jean Mayer—my first NYC gig, though I had to play it dressed by my mother in a red blazer and bow tie. Shortly thereafter, I was hospitalized for asthma and nearly left this earthly plane. When I emerged from the hospital after nearly two weeks’ stay, my arms, thighs, and buttocks were black and blue from round- the-clock injections of adrenalin and penicillin. Though I suffered from allergies, I still believe that the pressure of piano practice was the major exacerbating factor in my illness. Recovery process in the works, I was freed from the piano and, now in the fourth grade, took up the clarinet, as I liked the sound and it was therapeutic for my lungs. I practiced somewhat dutifully and skills developed.

Electronics had become a major obsession and I obtained an advanced amateur radio license, call letters WA2CLX. By fourteen, I’d become a huge fan of any music with intense electric guitar. The sound resonated deep within my soul and I wanted to hear more and more of it: the medicine that healed my ills, the missing chemical that restored my metabolism to balance, the philosopher’s stone of sound. Was it the attack, the whine of a bent string, the pulse of a tremoloed chord? Perhaps the saturated sound of even harmonics over the fundamental frequency?

I could never break it down into components. The Yardbirds, The Rolling Stones, and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band opened the door. Thanks to them, I found my way to the masters of electric blues: Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Otis Rush, and so many more. The Beatles’ psychedelic masterpiece Revolver was a revelation and inspiration, and Bob Dylan’s electric records were the musical equivalent of a trepanation, as vivid verbal imagery framed by megawatts of guitar from Mike Bloomfield and Robbie Robertson opened my skull to a previously unimagined cosmos of sounds, punnery, and the possibility of revelation. Watching television, I might also take in twangy cowboy music, Les Paul and Mary Ford, Elvis Presley with Scotty Moore, the talking steel guitar of Alvino Rey, fat-box jazz guitar, James Burton with Ricky Nelson, fancy picking from Chet Atkins, and even Lawrence Welk’s hot guitarist Buddy Merrill.

I enjoyed it all, but it didn’t change my chemistry in the way the simple fuzz lick in (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction or one of Jeff Beck’s chaotic extrapolations could. In 1966, some friends and I formed a rock ‘n’ roll band that we called The Last Words, with a set list comprised of our favorite tunes of the day. I taped a cheap crystal microphone into the bell of my clarinet and ran it through a homemade fuzz box in an attempt to emulate Beck’s solos, carefully learned from Yardbirds records. Guitar was what I most wanted to play, but the closest I could get to it was randomly plunking on my father’s unplayable Harmony with nylon strings and impossibly high action. When The Jimi Hendrix Experience was unleashed on the world via the debut album Are You Experienced, I was beautifully devastated, my ears and conception of the guitar irrevocably altered. Hendrix had redefined the instrument so completely as to create an onomatopoeic, incomprehensible, alien entity. I couldn’t even imagine that the sounds he was making were findable anywhere on a normal guitar fingerboard. Pulled into this parallel reality by Hendrix’s music, I felt my neurons following new pathways to a place that was utopian, ecstatic.

Jazz was an unknown world. On July 17, 1967, I saw notice of the death of John Coltrane on the front page of the New York Times. His name meant nothing to me, but after reading the detailed obituary I was very curious to hear his music. Calling up my buddy Steve Cohan, I mentioned Coltrane’s death; Steve thought that his father, a jazz fan, had some of his LPs. Later that day, we spun Coltrane Live at the Village Vanguard, starting with Side 2’s Chasin’ the Trane, then advancing in reverse to Side 1’s Spiritual. Again, I was absolutely and joyously destroyed by the passion, power, and virtuosity of the music and became, at that moment, a true believer. The next day, I found a copy of Charles Mingus’ magnificent Oh Yeah in the bargain bin of a local department store for $.99 and began to check out other jazz records from the town library. The cutout bins yielded more treasures: John Coltrane’s and Don Cherry’s The Avant- Garde; Cecil Taylor’s Unit Structures; Archie Shepp’s Three For A Quarter, One For A Dime; Sonny Rollins’ East Broadway Run Down; and Thelonious Monk’s Solo Monk. I didn’t always understand what I was hearing, but I understood the commitment and discipline that went into making music of such glorious abandon. I needed to find out more.

The guitar beckoned again, but my first attempts on that wretched Harmony guitar bore little connection to the fluid soliloquies I could imagine myself playing and only created frustration. Finally, in April of 1968, with money saved from various after-school jobs and inspired by visions of Jimi Hendrix, B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Jeff Beck, Otis Rush, Albert King, and Mike Bloomfield, I