ChorData by Elliott Sharp

This album is the first in the 2021 series of releases and concerts under the rubrik "E#@70" to observe Sharp's 70th birthday. It includes a live version of the string quartet Tranzience performed by JACK Quartet at Roulette, a live recording of Jenny Lin performing IX - In Memoriam Iannis Xenakis, plus the previously unreleased 1986 version of ReIterations performed by Orchestra Carbon featuring the Soldier String Quartet, Ratzo B. Harris, Bobby Previte, Charles K. Noyes, and E#.

From E#'s notes to Tranzience: The transient, the short burst of harmonics and noise at the beginning of any sound, reveals much to the listener about the nature of what is being heard. Ephemeral and often below the threshhold of perception, it carries a disproportionate amount of information. A transient attack may be slowed down vastly so that a few milliseconds stretched out to 30 minutes reveals landscapes, textures, and rhythms unheard and unpredicted in the original sound. I first came upon this phenomenon in 1985 when exploring digital sampling in its early days and it became an important compositional tool for me. Rather than an actual sound slowed and transcribed, Tranzience is an imagined manifestation of this action. To create some of the sounds required, I fashioned "tube bows" from aluminum conduit with aperiodic grooves carved into one side and the other left smoothly polished. Composed in 2014 for JACK Quartet, Tranzience also considers the evanescence of events once scale is adjusted much as the recalibration of duration may reveal a universe in the briefest of signals." A studio version of Tranzience was released by New World Records.

IX was composed by Sharp in 2002 in tribute to the great composer and musical philosopher Iannis Xenakis. The score mixes through-composed and graphic material leaving great latitude for the performer. In this 2008 performance recorded at The Stone in NYC, E# uses a variety of software strategies to process Jenny Lin's performance in real-time.

Composed in 1986 for the American Composers Orchestra and premiered in June of that year, ReIterations uses Fibonacci numbers to generate pitch, rhythmic, and structural elements. This studio recording was created by overdubbing the Soldier String Quartet plus bassist Ratzo B. Harris three times to emulate the full string orchestra version.  After the strings were recorded, drummers Bobby Previte and Charles K. Noyes plus composer Elliott Sharp on double neck guitarbass were overdubbed.

Elliott Sharp: composer, multi-instrumentalist, producer, author, leads Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics and Terraplane with compositional strategies including fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetic metaphors as well as new techniques for graphic notation to yield work that catalyzes a synesthetic approach to musicmaking as well as functioning as retinal art.