Tuesday 3rd May | 7pm | £15 // £10 // £6 ADV
Montréal saxophonist and electroacoustic composer Jason Sharp presents his third album on Constellation . Jason is a key instrumentalist on records by Matana Roberts, a live member of Land of Kush, in collaborations with Roscoe Mitchell, Nadah El Shazly, Thee Silver Mt Zion, Grøenland, Lori Freedman, Malcom Goldstein, and Jean Derome, to name just a few... The live show features a custom built heart monitor/midi controller which controls the beat... as Jason's heart rate goes up, so does the tempo… with visuals which also follow the pace.He has played at Rewire Festival The Hague, BRDCST Festival Brussels, Sonica Festival Ljubljana, Maintenant Festival, Atlantique Jazz Festival, Confort Moderne Paris, Peniche Excelsior, Arkaoda Berlin, Colston Hall Bristol…and we are very lucky to have him here!
Montréal saxophonist and electroacoustic composer Jason Sharp presents his third album on Constellation. The Turning Centre Of A Still World is Sharp’s first purely solo record and his most lucid, poignant, integral work to date. Following two acclaimed albums composed around particular collaborators and guest players, Sharp conceived his third as an interplay strictly bounded by his own body, his acoustic instrument, and his evolving bespoke electronic system.
The Turning Centre Of A Still World is a singular sonic exploration of human-machine calibration, interaction, expression and biofeedback. These immersive, intensive, widescreen electronic compositions would sit comfortably as a masterful and stellar contribution to the space/sci-fi/synth soundtrack genre, owing to their overall sound palette and oceanic scope. But this is ultimately deeper, grittier, earthier stuff – pulsing with terrestrial granularity, charting subterranean geographies of the heart and soul.
The new album was visualised by a series of hand-processed & hand-painted Super8 films by Vallée. An entire visual album was previously premiered via Constellation around the album release, this particular video is one of three:
Support from the wonderful sound artist and musician Paul Khimasia Morgan.
"...feedback-like tones rising carefully amid a cloud of metal thorns...more physicality than most you hear, which gives the performance some nice faux visual weight"- Byron Coley in The Wire magazine 429
"The more relevant part of the process here is not about recycling (though that’s a good thing to do), nor anything to do with woodwork craft, but the development by Paul of very specific playing techniques and methods which he used to play this empty guitar body. It’s a combination of electronics, percussion, feedback loops – many approaches, all of them deployed in a very subtle and unexpected manner, and evolved over many years, most often in the context of simply playing (with others) and working away at it. Without much foofaraw, Morgan has devised something genuinely new and innovative in the field of that much-contested area, electro-acoustic improvisation. More to the point, he’s still developing and working on it, so it’s not a static dead-end contribution to the culture, but is alive and growing. Of course it is also completely wedded to Paul as a performer."
- Ed Pinsent in The Sound Projector