Feedback: Translations from the IrRational

by Elliott Sharp

Overview

Wide-ranging discussion of culture, consciousness, and music from a unique artist's perspective

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780819502056
Publisher:	Wesleyan University Press
Publication date:	11/04/2025
Pages:	252
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.00(d)

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).

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

Editorial Reviews

"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

"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

From the Publisher