Leap Into the Unknown: Elliott Sharp & Janene Higgins

Elliott Sharp, 74, has been experimenting his whole life. “In popular usage it denotes exploration,” Sharp writes in his new book, Feedback, Translations from the IrRational, “an action without predictable results, an ascent into the unknown for the purpose of discovery or illumination. But its usage in labeling music is often pejorative and meant to marginalize the work and explain why most people consider the experimental unpleasant to listen to.”

His performance at Holyoke Media on November 13 with visual artist Janene Higgins, which they called "Entanglement Suite", consisted of 50 improvisational minutes of colliding sound and image, a clear “ascent into the unknown”. Twenty-five fearless individuals braved the unpredictable and experienced a change in body chemistry.

Seated on either side of a large screen, Sharp, with his 8-string electric guitar, and Higgins, with her laptop, created a dizzying, ever changing media landscape. But the evening began with Sharp reading excerpts from his latest volume, published by Wesleyan University Press. He launched the evening with An Asymptotic Manifesto (“Your goal is in sight and you will approach it but you will never reach it. Relax and enjoy the journey.”) He followed with an essay titled Future of Mind (“With every positive advance in knowledge of the physical and chemical workings of the brain, in a paradox worthy of Zeno, humans remain woefully distant from complete knowledge of the nature of our own consciousness.”) Sharp is an inventor, a self-described science geek, and a smarty-pants. When he was 65, his mother, now 99 and still living independently, asked him if it was too late to enroll in medical school.

E#, as he’s long been known, produced a plethora of other worldly sounds by tapping strings, manipulating pedals, inducing feedback and taking liberties with the equal tempered scale. Not a blues lick or major chord to be found, and not a predetermined note to be had. While Higgins had a finite number of images at her disposal, the order and manner of display were determined on the spot. Pictures of birds and warplanes moved across the screen, fading into each other. Desolate landscapes juxtaposed with endless oceans, a cosmic abyss morphing into celestial tumble. Abstract squiggles in split screen with a mass of humanity. Almost all of it devoid of color.

Ivor Miller said the performance reminded him of Koyaanisqatsi, Godfrey Reggio’s non-narrative documentary. While the 1982 film, with a score by Phillip Glass, also had no dialogue, its message of a world out of balance - imbedded in the title - had a clear intent. Thursday’s event, while equally evocative, left us each to draw our own conclusions.

Sharp has been an iconoclast since his career launched in the late 1970s. His recorded legacy, including dozens of solo projects, duos with Bachir Attar, Nels Cline, Christian Marclay and Tracie Morris, operas, film scores, string quartets, his hardcore band Carbon, his blues band Terraplane, and his collaborative efforts with John Zorn, Andrew Cyrille, Vernon Reid and others, provides a pretty complete 45 year survey of the New York avant guard. He continues to be a fearless innovator. I hosted him in 2005 as part of the UMass Solos & Duos Series, soon after the release of his solo acoustic record, The Velocity of Hue (Emanen).

Janene Higgins, Sharp’s partner on and off stage, is a renown graphic designer and video artist whose video and projection design were part of Sharp’s operas Binibon, Port Bou, Filiseti Mekidesi, and Die Grosste Fuge. She was the art director at Vanity Fair and RCA Music Group, and has exhibited and organized events at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, Documenta, MOMA’s PS 1 and Lincoln Center. She designed the cover of Sharp’s new book.

As usual, Higgins and Sharp were both dressed in black. Twenty years ago Marty Ehrlich, a long time East Village neighbor, reported seeing Sharp pushing a stroller with his two toddlers, also dressed in black.

Sharp and Higgins are quintessential hipsters who come by their cool naturally, without pretense or airs. They are fashionable because being curious about the world is always in vogue. Unconcerned about generating legions of fans, they are immersed in art experiments that bring them closer to wherever the eternal truths take them, without fear or favor.