Goshozyg by Elliott Sharp

Goshozyg is dedicated to the English inventor, improvisor, and sound artist Hugh Davies. Davies created instruments inside of hollowed-out books, the first being in an encyclopedia volume Sho-Zyg yielding shozyg as the generic name for these devices. These instruments would be constructed with springs, strips of metal, and other objects with a contact microphone to transmit the sounds to the outside world. I had a very congenial conversation with Hugh in 1980 when he did a solo performance at Studio PASS/Harvestworks in Manhattan and he took the time to give me a tour of his shozygs. When Stefano Bassanese invited me to take part in the festival To Listen To at the Conservatory in Torino, Italy he requested that I prepare something not guitar-oriented and that could make use of the 8-channel spatialized sound system. With an empty Havana cigar box inherited from my father staring at me from a shelf in the studio, I decided to pay tribute to Hugh and in it construct my own version with various bolts, springs, metal computer detritus, and two different grades of sandpaper with an embedded piezo pickup. I named it the Stogar, for "stogie-guitar." In conceptualizing the strategy for the piece, I first recorded a number of samples of the stogar to build up a library of sounds. Some of these were to be used as-is, most were processed with time stretching, pitch shifting, various forms of modulation, delays, and reverbs - not so much as to hide their character but to augment it. I created a loose narrative structure from the samples and built a patch in Ableton Live with the samples arrayed in five banks, triggered by the QWERTY keyboard. This essentially was the "score" to the piece. Each of the banks would be routed to a different stereo output and each bank had its own dedicated effects processing using a variety of resonators, granulation delays, and reverbs. Two master effects returns were also set up with a reverb and a delay. To play the Stogar live, I would use objects that I normally use on guitar including springs, wooden and ceramic plates, metal rods, slides, plectra, and EBow. I also had my alto sax mouthpiece with me and found that touching it to the springs in the Stogar while blowing into it created a unique and penetrating sound. This recording is a stereo version mixed down from the 8 channels but also making use of 4 channels of room microphones to add acoustic ambience.

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.