Concatenate from Occam's Razor by Elliott Sharp

Concatenate is a tribute to the late great Fluxus composer Takehisa Kosugi who passed in 2018. During the 1980's and 90's he lived near to my studio and we would often run into each other on the street, at a friendly sushi bar, or at each other's gigs. We spoke about playing together but sadly we never made it happen. His music was enigmatic and powerful, beautiful without being pretty, spontaneous yet inevitable. To honor the Fluxus spirit, I created a set of graphic scores to be realized on viola and processed in real-time using the wonderfully unpredictable granular delay unit Particle. I recorded a number of realizations with the idea that they would ultimately be assembled together as two parallel concatenations to create a stereo field. "String concatenation" is an operation in logic and computer coding of joining character strings end-to-end. In string theory (not to be confused with the post-quantum physics "string theory"), string concatenation is defined as a "primitive notion", that which is itself defined through intuition and praxis. The role of a primitive notion is analogous to that of an axiom though primitive notions are not defined by axioms. In a Gödelian touch, primitive notions cannot be dispensed with unless one is willing to endure the pain of infinite regress.

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.