Joe Morris & Elliott Sharp Realism (2025)

Few others besides avant-garde composer/instrumentalist Elliott Sharp could record a collection of blues songs and make them sound like a new genre altogether, a sort of blues/folk/jazz/new age sound with droning keyboards, slinky reverbed vocals, sinuous guitar parts, and angstful horns. The album is by turns haunting, sexy, volatile, and soothing

Mathematics and the various sciences are just ordered ways of looking at and analyzing all of the raw data supplied by the universe. It's all about mappings and correspondences. At the same time, my work often takes a speculative and irrational/intuitive approach. It includes both the ordered and rational, the intuitive and irrational, and the acoustics of the ear. - Elliott Sharp

Recorded and originally released in 1996, Rheo-Umbra is a two-part composition by Elliott Sharp for a typically bizarre ensemble consisting of electric harp, electric bass, two bass clarinets, percussion, sampler, string quartet, and electric guitar (along with the Slab, a somewhat guitarish instrument invented by Sharp himself). The first six minutes of "Rheo-Umbra 1" are built on a repetitive theme that is carried by the string quartet and muttered about, commented upon, subtly undermined and sometimes supported by the others.