Ear-Rational Records
1989
Monster Curve
About This Album
Elliot Sharp's guitaristry is seemingly a highly contested thing among the punters who follow avant-garde music, as are his other explorations of the saxophone, clarinets, and his various stringed inventions. There is no doubt that Sharp is both a stylistic and technical innovator. He has designed instruments to do specific things, and has learned to play in a way that suggests none of his peers' or heroes' influences, but only his own experiential encounter with sound itself. The answer to the question lies in this compilation of work from 1983-1987. Carbon is essentially Sharp on his many instruments with a rhythm section. Two drummers here are Charles K. Noyes and Bobby Previte. Jim Staley plays trombones on a couple of cuts as well. This collection documents the development of a sonic architecture that is at once brutal and aesthetically beautiful, one that relies on the assemblage of sounds as much as their elocution. Thus the percussion-heavy guitar work -- "Geometry," "ISO," "Helicopters," -- revolves around one riff, mutated and transformed over time via repetition and changes in textural space. The later works that employ other stringed constructions, saxophones, and clarinet such as "Squig," "Turbulence," and "Lacunar" take the textural dynamics allowed by the inclusion of such instruments and create a dark, wrangling, edgy kind of ordered noise. There is no dearth of rock or improvisational intensity here, and the music isn't for everybody, but Sharp's work sounds almost ripe for its time, over 14 years after the fact; the guy is a visionary and this comp proves it. ~ Thom Jurek, All Music Guide
Track List (try tracks 1,3 and 8)

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