Sixteen Seconds by Elliott Sharp

While sorting through a box of CDRs from 20th century recording sessions at Studio zOaR, I came upon a disc from 1996 of improvisations performed on my lime-green metalflake Mutantum Stratocaster, Hagstrom 12-string, and most importantly, the original ElectroHarmonix 16-Second Delay. Going back to the late 1960s, EHX made a variety of low-cost pedals, perhaps a little shoddy in construction but providing musicians with previously unheard of sounds. I had been a fan since I first began playing guitar in 1968 and used their Linear Power Booster, Big Muff Pi, Small Stone phase shifter, Memory Man analog delay and Frequency Analyzer ring modulator pedals with my guitars, basses, drum machines, and anything else that I could plug in. Sadly, EHX was shuttered in 1981 after strong-armed union thug tactics and physical battles which led to bankruptcy as the company had lost the confidence of its financial backers. I should say that I'm a big supporter of unions but the EHX workers were treated well and, most importantly, didn't want the union interference that led to the shuttering of the company. I was friends with a number of people who worked there and they were devastated by the closing.

EHX had just released their 16-Second Delay pedal and word was out on the street that it was a revolutionary device but completely unavailable because of the company's situation. At that time, Nic Collins was working for Studio Consultants and had received word that EHX founder Mike Matthews was doing business clandestinely as Broadway Computers on lower Broadway near Worth St. In a transaction very reminiscent of the hyperactive underground drug trade in NYC at the time, one would go to the specified address and knock on the perpetually lowered security grate. The grate would be raised by 3 inches and you would slide in $200 in cash after which a box containing this greatly-desired pedal would emerge!

After obtaining mine, I ran home and excitedly plugged it in, quickly entering the Zone. Though the sound quality was far from pristine, it allowed one to generate heretofore impossible sounds using looping, modulation, reverse, and overdubbing. It became an indispensable part of my rig and was used in improvisations, recording sessions, and gigs with various bands. In 1984 I experienced a vast philosophical sea-change regarding my sonic strategies and completely abandoned all digital processing while creating the music of my group Carbon, based on the use of Fibonacci numbers to create tunings, rhythms, and structures for vibrating strings, membranes, and columns of air. This approach reached its culmination in late 1986 as I began the composition of Larynx for an orchestral version of Carbon after which I again embraced digital technology with explorations in sampling, processing, and of course, the 16-Second Delay. I made extensive use of it in my Virtual Stance project; with the bands Semantics and Mofungo; and in sessions with Wayne Horvitz' The President, The Scene is Now, John Zorn, and other groups.

On a 1989 tour in Germany, a very drunk punk tried to crash my solo set as a vocalist at a culture center in Wurzburg. After I strongly suggested that his contribution would not be welcome, he jumped back on stage and poured a beer on the 16-Second Delay thus ending the concert and as far as I knew, the pedal. That night, I had to completely disassemble the unit to swab it out with alcohol and gently dry it with a hair dryer and was able to restore its operation for the remainder of the tour. After that incident I decided to retire it from touring but used it for select gigs with the likes of Christian Marclay, Jin Him Kim, and Henry Kaiser but also began to use a variety of alternate devices, both rack-mounted and in pedal form (though none could approach the unpredictable wackiness of the 16-Second Delay.)

After abandoning it for quite a long time, I was struck by the need to revisit it and one afternoon in 1996, alternately plugged the Strat and 12-string into it and freely improvised adding only an Ebow to the tools at hand. The unmixed recording was burned to CDR for archiving and forgotten about until a few days ago when it was imported into ProTools and mixed adding compression and resonant reverbs to fill it out and employing select edits to divide it into coherent chunks.
- Elliott Sharp - December 2023

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.