Wide-ranging discussion of culture, consciousness, and music from a unique artist's perspective_x000D_
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/>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.
Table of Contents:
Foreword
1 Introduction
2 An Asymptotist Manifesto
3 Experimental? Music and Sound
4 Applications and Builds
5 Socioacoustics
6 Sakunicki
7 Improviser's Mind
8 Derek Bailey
9 Mind: The Gap
10 The Musical Garden of Tōru Takemitsu
11 Nicolas Slonimsky
12 The Implicate Drone
13 Glenn Branca
14 Tim Wright: Street Shamanic
15 Current Strategies for Graphic Notation
16 Future of Mind
17 A Gig's a Gig
18 The Rising Star Fife and Drum Band
19 Peter K. Siegel: Worlds of Music
20 John Fahey on the Decline of the Western World
21 Hubert Sumlin Speaks
22 Pete Cosey: Bridging Worlds
23 Bekerey: Pastry and Politics on the Lower East Side
24 On the Journey That Wasn't
25 Migration and Sanctuary in Bochum
26 Wholly Land
27 On the Road and in New York with Bachir Attar
28 Tarab and Beyond: Beirut, New York, Sharjah, Berlin
29 Incident in Catania - 1999
30 From the Italian Academy to Miami Beach
31 Soviet Jazz
32 China Times
33 Vong Co: Music of Longing
34 Non-Asymptotic
35 Index
About the Author :
ELLIOTT SHARP is an American multi-instrumentalist, composer, and performer. A central figure in the avant-garde and experimental music scene in New York City for over 40 years, Sharp has released myriad recordings and he is the author of IrRational Music (2018).
Review :
"Elliott Sharp's writing, like his music, recombines the scrupulously discursive with the deeply humane and reflective. What a joy it is to be informed by this remarkable account of the coming-of-age of his psyche, his curiosity, and his methodology. Sharp paints a picture of lost kingdoms of the avant-garde which aren't really lost, but continuous in our present if we're inclined to notice them. With this book, a reader joins Sharp in the step-by-step reinvigoration of intentional sound itself--sound as culture, as science, as art--a process that can never be finished."--Jonathan Lethem, reviewing a previous edition or volume
"In the Frankfurt gallery, where he presented his current book Feedback: Translations From The IrRational (Wesleyan University Press), it becomes clear how closely everything intertwines for him: music and mathematics, reflection and guitar playing, time, rhythm, and imaginative spaces in texts and sound fields."--Hans-Jürgen Linke, Frankfurter Rundschau
"[T]he 30-odd chapters of Feedback range from espresso-sized musings to multi-cup conversations, some pieces previously published, others seeing light for the first time. It's a heady and suitably stimulating brew, ranging across a fascinating overview of homemade instruments such as his viola-dulcimer-zither hybrid the violameriyah; theories on the connections and contrasts between Western academic drone music, Tibetan ritual gongs and Mississippi's Rising Stars Fife & Drum Band; and personal appreciations of Derek Bailey, Toru Takemitsu and Glenn Branca."--Abi Bliss, The Wire
"Elliott Sharp is among the most important musicians to ever 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."--Marc Ribot, guitarist, author of Unstrung
"With his strong physics background and exemplary music practice, Elliott Sharp explores the concept of feedback through many lenses. He discusses a broad array of scientific, cultural, and artistic systems feeding back on and amplifying each other in this compelling and resonant volume."--Pamela Z, Composer/Performer
