Unlockstep

Elliott Sharp has spent forty-five years at the intersection of jazz, noise, and systems music, and Carbon — his long-running ensemble — is where those interests are most fully realized. A downtown New York fixture since the late 1970s, Sharp's work draws on everything from Ornette Coleman to Glenn Branca.

Unlockstep, from the 1992 album Tocsin, demonstrates Carbon at their most rhythmically aggressive: Sharp's guitar processing creating textures between jazz vocabulary and pure noise, the ensemble maintaining collective intensity without a conventional lead. The music is difficult in the way that rewards difficulty.

Sharp remains one of the most prolific and underrecognized figures in American experimental music — a composer whose work spans jazz, noise, classical, and everything between.