Monday 28 September 2026, 7.30pm
The Clinamen, formed at the 2017 Venice Biennale, is the trio of Elliott Sharp, John Edwards, and Mark Sanders performing high velocity improvisation based on groove, texture, and extreme timbres. This event also features Sharp as a soloist and as a writer in the American experimental mode of Cage, Oliveros, Braxton, Lucier and others, with a set alongside a reading from his latest book Feedback.
Elliott Sharp is an American composer, producer, author, visual artist, and multi-instrumentalist. For more than four decades, he has been a central figure in New York City’s avant-garde and experimental music scene with a vast catalog of releases spanning orchestral music, opera, blues, jazz, noise, no wave rock, and electronic music. He leads the projects SysOrk, Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics, and Terraplane, and has pioneered the application of fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetic metaphors to musical composition and interaction as well as devising a synesthetic approach to graphic notation.
Sharp is a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow and was also a Fellow at Parsons Center for Transformative Media. In 2015, he received the Berlin Prize in Musical Composition from the American Academy in Berlin. He has composed scores for feature films and documentaries, created sound design for television interstitials on the Sundance Channel, MTV, and Bravo, and presented numerous sound installations in galleries and museums. He is the author of the books IrRational Music and Feedback: Translations From The IrRational as well as the subject of the documentary Doing The Don’t by filmmaker Bert Shapiro. His latest opera, Substance: The Infinite Spinoza, premiered in June 2026 at the festival New Opera Days Ostrava in Czechia.
Sharp's collaborators have included pianist Cecil Taylor, multimedia artists Christian Marclay and Pierre Huyghe, Radio-Sinfonie Frankfurt, pop singer Debbie Harry, Ensemble Modern, qawwali master Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Ensemble Musikfabrik, JACK & Arditti string quartets, cellist Frances Marie Uitti, blues legends Hubert Sumlin and Pops Staples, pipa virtuoso Min-Xiao Feng, jazz musicians James Brandon Lewis, Jack DeJohnette, Oliver Lake, and Sonny Sharrock, as well as Bachir Attar, leader of the Master Musicians of Jajouka.
John Edwards is a true virtuoso whose staggering range of techniques and boundless musical imagination have redefined the possibility of the double bass and dramatically expanded its role, whether playing solo or with others. 
Perpetually in demand, he has played with Evan Parker, Roscoe Mitchell, Sunny Murray, Derek Bailey, Joe McPhee, Lol Coxhill, Louis Moholo, Peter Brötzmann, Mulatu Astatke, Jonny Greenwood and countless others.
"I think John Edwards is absolutely remarkable: there’s never been anything like him before, anywhere in jazz." - Richard Williams, The Blue Moment
Mark has worked with many greats of the British, European and American free jazz improvised music scene including Roscoe Mitchell, Roswell Rudd, Evan Parker, John Butcher, Henry Grimes, Elaine Mitchener, Wadada Leo Smith, Myra Melford, Charles Gayle , Sirone and William Parker
He has also played with Jah Wobble, Harold Budd, Bill Laswell, Christian Marclay, International Contemporary Ensemble, Ilan Volkov and The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.
He is a member of many working groups including duos with Nicole Mitchell and Rhodri Davies, Neil Charles' 'Dark Days' with Cleveland Watkiss & Pat Thomas, 'Last Dream of the Morning' with John Butcher & John Edwards, 'Shifa' with Rachel Musson and Pat Thomas and 'Sarost' with Larry Stabbins & Paul Rogers.
As an educator he has taught improvisation at many universities around the country as a lecturer and guest tutor.
Mark has played concerts and festivals around the world and appears on over 220 CD and Vinyl releases.
Mark was a recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists 2024
"Drop the needle on the first track — or any track for that matter — and the first thing one is bound to notice is the amazing percussion skills of Mark Sanders" – Peter Thelen... Exposé
"Mark is just incredible and immensely diverse, he is at the center of "Kwingyaw" and it is difficult to tell what he is doing to get some of these sounds." – Bruce L Gallenter, Downtown Music Gallery, NY
