FEEDBACK: Translations From The IrRational
Elliott Sharp
GENRE
Reading/Concert
WHEN
September, 2026
Elliott Sharp will present a combined performance on acoustic guitar and readings from his latest book, Feedback: Translations From The IrRational, published by Wesleyan University Press.
Elliott Sharp is a composer, producer, multi-instrumentalist, visual artist, and author who leads the projects Orchestra Carbon, SysOrk, Tectonics and Terraplane. His compositional strategies have encompassed the use of fractal geometry, chaos theory, algorithms, genetic metaphors, and new techniques for graphic notation to yield work that catalyzes a synesthetic approach to musicmaking as well as functioning as retinal art.
Elliott Sharp
Elliott Sharp is a composer, producer, multi-instrumentalist, visual artist, and author who leads the projects Orchestra Carbon, SysOrk, Tectonics and Terraplane. His compositional strategies have encompassed the use of fractal geometry, chaos theory, algorithms, genetic metaphors, and new techniques for graphic notation to yield work that catalyzes a synesthetic approach to musicmaking as well as functioning as retinal art. Sharp has been awarded both the Berlin Prize and the Jahrespreis from der Deutscher Schallplatten Kritiks as well as receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Fellowship from the Center for Transformative Media at the New School. He has been featured in the Darmstadt, Donaueschingen, and Huddersfield festivals, RuhrTriennale, Shenzhen Tomorrow, New Music Stockholm, Au Printemps-Paris, Hessischer Rundfunk Klangbiennale, and the Venice Biennale. He is the subject of the documentary film Doing The Don't and has been featured on NPR's All Things Considered. His collaborators have included qawaali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali-Khan, the RadioSinfonie Frankfurt, media artists Christian Marclay and Pierre Huyghe, pianist Cecil Taylor, jazz greats Jack deJohnette and Sonny Sharrock, and Bachir Attar, leader of the Master Musicians of Jajouka. His latest opera, Substance: The Infinite Spinoza, was premiered in June 2026 at New Opera Days Ostrava
From the Publisher
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.
Reviews
Elliott Sharp is among the most important musicians to 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
It's a heady and suitably stimulating brew, ranging across a fascinating overview of homemade instruments such as his viola-dulcimer-zither hybrid the violameriyah; theories on the connections and contrasts between Western academic drone music, Tibetan ritual gongs and Mississippi's Rising Stars Fife & Drum Band; and personal appreciations of Derek Bailey, Toru Takemitsu and Glenn Branca. Interviews include Sharp's blues hero Hubert Sumlin, Pere Ubu bassist Tim Wright, Elektra Records staffer and Nonesuch Explorer co-founder Peter K. Siegel, and a late-career chat about society's dumbing down and UFO sightings with John Fahey.
-The Wire
Gallery
Credits
Written and Performed by Elliott Sharp
FEEDBACK: Translations From The IrRational Published by Wesleyan University Press
Links:
Elliott Sharp Website http://www.elliottsharp.com »
Elliott Sharp on Bandcamp https://zoar-records.bandcamp.com/ »
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/elliott_sharp/ »
Publisher’s Page https://www.weslpress.org/9780819502049/feedback/ »
Substack https://elliottsharp.substack.com/ »
MIT Press https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/irrational-music »