Living Room by Elliott Sharp

Composed in 2001, "Living Room" embodies a performance using mechanics, feedback, and room resonance as resources. A small microphone is swung overhead continuously for the duration of the piece and picks up the sound of its own movements plus acoustic feedback, fragmented spoken texts and vocal sounds, as well as any sounds occurring in the performance space. Sounds are processed in real-time through filtering and delay plug-ins in a laptop to orchestrate the output. The work ranges in duration from 30 minutes to one hour and also concerns the physicality of its action. "Living Room" was premiered at Henry Gallery, Seattle, July 2001. This recording was made in August 2001 at Studio zOaR, NYC. As a studio recording, it is (unfortunately!) free of most environmental sound and is therefore the composition in its purest state. "Living Room" also pays tribute to visionary composer Alvin Lucier and his seminal composition "I Am Sitting In A Room".

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.