Elliott Sharp

Elliott Sharp is someone who is a household name at this point in time with a music career going back to the early 1970s. His collaborations and projects range from film work, solo, collaborations, work with his band Carbon, not to mention his long list of pieces performed and scored by the likes of the hr-Sinfonieorchester, the Ensemble Modern, Continuum, the Orchestra of the SEM Ensemble, Kronos Quartet, the FLUX Quartet, Zeitkratzer, the Soldier String Quartet, the JACK Quartet, and Grammy-winning violinist Hilary Hahn.Sharp received the 2015 Berlin Prize in Musical Composition, spending six months as a Fellow-in-Residence at the American Academy in Berlin. He was a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2014 Fellow at Parson's Center for Transformative Media, and is the subject of Bert Shapiro's documentary Elliott Sharp: Doing the Don't, for Pheasant Eye Film. He was a 2009 Master Artist-in-Residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and a 2010 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in music. Sharp received a 2003 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. Sharp is not only an amazing virtuoso guitarist having his roots in the blues, jazz and other no-wave and avant-garde forms of expression but also a makeshift luthier with a visionary eye for stringed instruments along with having modified and created musical instruments since his teen years, and frequently borrowing terms from science and technology for his compositions. His release on Erototox is no different in terms of his homage to science, entitled Phlogiston, aptly named after a substance supposed by 18th-century chemists to exist in all combustible bodies, and to be released in combustion. It’s also his first purely electronic and synthesized record to date.