Montréal composer, improviser and saxophonist Jason Sharp has a new album on the way entitled The Turning Centre Of A Still World. Unlike his two previous albums that saw him collaborate with guest musicians, the upcoming album is a solo effort conceived “as an interplay strictly bounded by his own body, his acoustic instrument, and his evolving bespoke electronic system”, as the press release describes. Sharp offered some insight into it:
“This music was developed and composed with the use of a customised electroacoustic interface in which I wear a heart monitor that sends signal to an array of modular synthesizers. All electronic rhythmic elements stem from my real-time human pulse, establishing a fluctuating centre that continually channels and responds to the physicality of the performance. The entire compositional process is given essential shape and colour through biofeedback; the electronics are humanized. The music is orchestrated with my bass and baritone saxophone playing, along with other methods of intentional breathing and heart-rate manipulation, to influence and interact with my electronic/synthetic materials to fulfill the arc of each composition.
In live performance, tempos and other signal-processed components of the music are different each time, directly conditioned by my visceral and emotional presence. My physicality is inherently patched into all aspects of these electroacoustic séances: concentration, vulnerability, emotion, meditation – all are at work in the performance of the music, including at a formal/structural level through biofeedback of constituent sonic materials. As synthesized sound elements shift according to fluctuations in the signal path sourced from my pulse, the performance accommodates and manipulates these responsive variables, continually re-synthesizing the synthesis. These works are always and fundamentally unique to each performed instantiation, in a connective way that encompasses audience, machine and me.”
The Turning Centre Of A Still World arrives on August 27th through Constellation and ahead of it Sharp has shared the first utterly moving ‘Everything Is Waiting For You’. The track comes with an accompanying video created by experimental filmmaker Guillaume Vallée. Watch it below.
