Elliot Sharp in conversation with Jonathan Lethem

Elliot Sharp in conversation with Jonathan Lethem

City Lights and Wesleyan University Press celebrate the publication of

Feedback: Translations from the IrRational

By Elliot Sharp

Published by Wesleyan University Press

Wide-ranging discussion of culture, consciousness, and music from a unique artist's perspective

Feedback is a wide-ranging meditation on music, sound, artificial intelligence, consciousness, contemporary culture and politics, and the life of the touring musician. Author Elliott Sharp is considered one of the central figures in NYC's Downtown Scene and is a composer, producer, multi-instrumentalist, visual artist, and educator. Starting from a background in the sciences, Sharp found his passion for music as a teen, and it has never abated. His philosophy is informed not just by music and its creation but by continuing studies in physics and genetics and a visceral interest in our modern world and its joys and horrors. In Feedback, Sharp engages in speculative thought about how consciousness might have arisen and what the future holds for humanity with the advent of an Artificial Intelligence that is certainly artificial but might not exactly be intelligent. The "Improviser's Mind" is discussed in the context of post-quantum physics, probability, socio-acoustics, and Butoh dance. Sharp loves to digress into unpredictable areas but ties it all together in an overarching narrative that is both personal and conceptual.

Elliot Sharp is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, producer, and performer. A central figure in the avant-garde and experimental music scene in New York City for over forty years, Sharp has released over one hundred and sixty recordings, ranging from orchestral music to blues, jazz, noise, no wave rock, and techno music. Sharp leads SysOrk, Orchestra Carbon, Terraplane, and Tectonics and has pioneered the use of fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetics in musical composition and interaction. Sharp was awarded the Berlin Prize for Music Composition for 2015 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014. His composition Storm of the Eye appears on violinist Hilary Hahn’s Grammy-winning album In 27 Pieces. Sharp has been featured on National Public Radio and at such festivals as the Venice Biennale, New Music Stockholm, Donaueschingen, and Au Printemps–Paris. He is the subject of the documentary film Doing the Don’t. His first book was IrRational Music (Terra Nova Books/MIT Press, 2019).

Jonathan Lethem is the bestselling author of twelve novels, including The Arrest, The Feral Detective, The Fortress of Solitude, and Motherless Brooklyn, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. His most current published work is Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture, published by ZE Books and Brooklyn Crime Novel, published by Ecco Press. He currently teaches creative writing at Pomona College in California.

This program is made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation.