I Never Meta Guitar Three, Solo Guitars for the 21st Century, Produced by Elliott Sharp

The avant guitar solo scene these days is eclectic and all-encompassing, as electric and soulful as Hendrix, as painstaking new-sound oriented as Derek Bailey, as focused and single-minded as Elliott Sharp. All this we can experience in I Never Meta Guitar Three (Clean Feed CFG 007), the Elliott Sharp produced-curated anthology of solo guitar in its third volume. The third takes up where volumes one and two leave off, with a new crew of guitarists; some who follow such things will perhaps recognize many names, others perhaps will be unfamiliar to many.

We get highly electric or acoustically particular solos from the likes of John King, Indigo Street, Joel Peterson, Kirsten Carey, Cristian Amigo, Adam Brisbin, Sandy Ewen, Anders Nilsson, Peter Maunu, Bruce Eisenbeil, Simone Massaron, Lily Maase, David Fulton, Jim McCauley, Angela Babin, Brandon Seabrook, Alessandra Novago and Ed Ricart.

There are too many examples to cover individually here. Suffice to say that they all share a dedication to extending the sound color range and technical possibilities of the guitar today, from myriads of electrical transformations from effects and wattage to micro-tonalities and colors obtained via extended ways of sounding the strings.

It is another fascinating jaunt into the possibilities out there today. Anyone concerned with the guitar as a medium of new music sounds should explore this anthology. Even the merely curious will be rewarded with much to contemplate and appreciate on repeated listenings. This is what's happening NOW!

I Never Meta Guitar Too, Solo Guitars for the 21st Century

The guitar has occupied pride of place as the West's (whatever that means) instrument of choice for some time now. That such attention should attract creative musicians and innovation is logical. Guitarist-composer-conceptualist Elliott Sharp has taken the time to address the latest in such endeavors, specifically for the solo guitar, whether electric or acoustic, in an anthology of works by new and thoroughly contemporary artists, essentially from all over the world.

The second volume, I Never Meta Guitar Too (Clean Feed CFG06) is out and I've been listening to it. There are 16 artists playing 16 solo segments. Most names you probably wont be familiar with unless you have been a microscopic enthusiast. There's Ava Mendoza, Ben Tyree, On Ka'a Davis, Shouwang Zhang, Joel Harrison, Yasuhiro Usui, Alan Licht, and nine others.

The music varies from very electric metal and free wheeling sound poetry and soundscaping to acoustic compositional and/or folksy excursions. In short this is a barrier-free collection, as was the first volume. The proviso is that the music should characterize our new century--be new in whatever sense that might mean for a particular artist, even if there are some very rooted things going on at times.

Elliott Sharp as curator-producer is the ideal choice, in that he himself embraces a wide spectrum of musics and styles, and has keen ear to the ground.

What we get is another provocative, very enjoyable album of guitarists with lots of ideas. Some selections will be just what you would like to hear, no doubt, and maybe some others you wont expect. Either way this will stretch your ears and give you a nicely presented look at some of the possibilities being worked on today.

Take the jump and check this one out.

Elliott Sharp's "I Never Meta Guitar" Anthology

Based on Elliott Sharp's wide-ranging and intelligent webcasts on MOMA's PS1 website, I gained an appreciation for Mr. Sharp's keen ear for the contemporary and its roots. That appreciation has continued to grow after repeated listens to the anthology of modern solo guitar apty dubbed I Never Meta Guitar (Cleanfeed CFG 005) that Elliott curated and produced and that has been hitting the distribution avenues in the last several months. It's a selection of some of the brightest lights on the guitar scene today, as defined by the idea that they are doing new work, some avant garde, some just ahead of the pack in some less specifically formulizable way, some simply excellent purveyors of imaginative guitar playing.

There are 16 relatively brief pieces on the disk, some electric, some acoustic, some with a "prepared" guitar. Many are unaccompanied solo works; others include others. Either way it's a very cogent summing up of the present and perhaps some of the future directions that will branch from current practice.

Every cut is worth hearing. The list of guitarists is impressive: Mary Halverson, Jeff Parker, Henry Kaiser, Nels Cline, Brandon Ross, Michael Gregory, and Elliott himself are some of the more well-known participants. There's even a little banjo to be heard. Most of this could go under the rubric "improvisation," though some pieces sound worked out pretty thoroughly.

There's acoustic picking, slide, hammering-on, electric shredding, sound sculpture, soundscapes and much in between. The disk ends with Elliott Sharpe's rather incredible hammer guitar send-off, "Telemetry."

This is it. It's the dope on what is new in the world of the guitar and its currency as a solo vehicle unto itself.

No self-respecting guitarist or guitar fan should miss this one, seriously. It puts a frame around where we are so we can study, admire, and gain from it. That's very important and Elliott shows he's just the one to put it together.

Elliott Sharp: Solo Electric Guitar, Played His Way

Elliott Sharp, guitar pioneer, composer and multi-instrumentalist, has always seemed to go his own way, in the process becoming a major presence in the now globally recognized downtown music enclave. He's successfully created Sharpesque interpretations of the blues, composed and performed exciting works for both small and large ensembles, hosted a web radio show of great diversity and discernment for MOMA's PS1 web site, among other things. He's also recorded a series of improvisations for solo guitar.

Octal Book Two (Clean Feed CFG 004) finds Mr. Sharp on his Koll 8-string electro-acoustic guitar, which has both conventional and bass guitar strings. Without overdubs he creates a kind of suite of guitar events, each concentrating on various avant and conventional techniques that Sharp uses. Some he has developed in his own way; others, like harmonics, feedback sustain, and hammerings, he adapts to his own purposes.

What distinguishes Sharp's music from some other unaccompanied solo avant guitar efforts is that each event to a lesser or greater degree concentrates on a melodic cell, scalular passage or quasi-riff. The music is freely articulated but not free in the stream-of consciousness manner. It is Elliott's strong sense of structure that gives the listener clear musical sign-posts through the avant sound thicket (at least that is so for me). Each is a semi-miniature impro-compositional gem. He does not eschew repetition, and much of the music features dynamically invigorating cascades of rapidly articulated repeated lines. This of course is a feature of Elliott Sharp's style and it is paired down to a single solo voice for this outing.

It shows that Elliott Sharp's motor-sensory brilliance has in no sense abated. He is vital still.