Tuesday 29 September 2026, 7.30pm
Sharing fascinations with feedback systems, science fiction, algorithmic composition, and DIY instruments, this quartet of Sharp with Poulomi Desai, Trevor Mathison and Gary Stewart invite us to a musical experiment with the radical chemistry of social bodies in live performance.
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.
Trevor Mathison and Gary Stewart have been in search of a black avantgarde since the 1980s. Emerging from their pioneering work with the Black Audio Film Collective, their "Black Industrial" work as the duo Dubmorphology explores radical audio-visual installations, field recordings, and live cinema, reworking historical, political and scientific archives. Often employing fractured montage techniques, as well as elements of dub and musique concrète, their work is concerned with epistemological and phenomenological questions, ways of seeing, hearing and sensing our world.
Recent work includes a radical ‘essay-concert’ reclaiming a post-colonial lineage of techno and noise with Nkisi and Klien at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter where they collaborated with theorist and artist Kodwo Eshun (author of the acclaimed book on music and Afrofuturism, More Brilliant Than the Sun (1998)) on a radical performance-lecture outlining the aesthetic of Black Industrialism.
They have showcased their work internationally at major venues and events, including Nuit Blanche contemporary art Toronto, Nyege Nyege music and arts Uganda, True/False Film Festival Columbia, Arctic Moving Image & Film Festival Norway, and large-scale, ongoing collaborations with artists like John Akomfrah including Canto III, an immersive sculptural sound installation as part of Listening All Night To The Rain, for the British Pavilion at the 60th edition at La Biennale de Venezia.
Links:
Instagram http://instagram.com/dubmorphology
SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/dubmorphology
Bandcamp https://purgexxx.bandcamp.com/album/white-label
Website http://www.garystewart.org/dubmorphology
Vimeo https://vimeo.com/user1853285
Poulomi Desai is a queer musician, artist, curator and activist with South Asian roots, born in Hackney, London. Desai will give an improvised concert using a modified sitar with a range of exploratory devices such as modified cassette decks, circuit bent toys, optokinetic instruments, kitchen knives, and massage tools. Her sitar forms the basis for her sonic improvisation, and is a conscious response to the idea of »authenticity,« seeking to break the expectations of how a »sacred« instrument should be played, and the assumptions made upon the identity of the player herself. It is an allegorical antidote to the objectification of the »South Asian woman's body« in Bollywood cinema / popular culture and, in a broader sense, affirming her personal manifesto of noise as protest.
www.poulomidesai.tumblr.com | www.usurp.org.uk
