Moers 1990 by Elliott Sharp

Jump Cut is a matrix of grooves and instruction sets realized by the musicians of this edition of Carbon and recorded in concert at the 1990 Moers Festival in Germany.

Fresh off the release of the Carbon album Datacide and gigs in NYC, the band appeared at the Moers Festival in the industrial Ruhr area of Germany. For this appearance, I was asked to create a theatrical presentation and so suggested that we include a butoh dance troupe as I had been working with such artists in Japan and NYC. It was arranged that the Berlin-based Tatoeba -Théâtre Danse Grotesque would join us.

In some ways a holdover from the hippie rock festivals of the 1960s and 1970s, Moers in the 1980s was one of the premier presenters of new jazz and experimental music although in less than perfect conditions. The performances were either in a large sports stadium with terrible sound or outdoors in a tent subject to both bad sound and capricious weather conditions. Moers' director was a wonderful person to sit down and discuss art and politics with over kaffee mit küchen but as a contracted performer one had to be very careful as his business practices rarely left the artist feeling satisfied and respected. Monetary promises were often made and were equally often not fulfilled.

Jump Cut, the composition, defined its construction with its name. As a student at Bard College I obsessively attended screenings of new cinema at Sottery Hall and greatly appreciated the French New Wave and the "jump cut" technique exemplified in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless. I first used jump cuts in my 1973 extended composition Yugen, a suite of widely varying scenes performed at Bard in December 1973 and using a prerecorded 4-channel audio background created with synthesizers, guitars, and piano to accompany live improvisations by drummer Harvey Nosowitz and myself. The jump cut technique receded into the background of my tool box until June 1982 when I began working on production for the compilation Peripheral Vision: Bands of Loisaida for my zOaR label. To represent my band I/S/M, I decided to use jump cuts to collage excerpts of every performance of the band from its first in November 1981until the most recent in May 1982, all recorded to cassette but on different machines and in different venues. Thanks to Wayne Horvitz and his Revox tape deck, an Editall block, and some single-edge razor blades, I was able to transfer portions of the cassette recordings to ¼" tape and then fine-tune the edits to create a 5:29 history of the band with segments ranging from 4 seconds to 45 seconds in length. Through headphones, the result was a headspinning transformation of spatial orientation with each edit. Soon after the completion of Peripheral Vision, my attention turned to producing the first State of the Union album for zOaR, a collection of 1-minute pieces on the eponymous theme, a symphony of jump cuts.

The band Carbon debuted in 1984 with an album released by both zOaR and the Berlin Atonal label. The initial lineup included Lesli Dalaba - trumpet; Charles K. Noyes - bass drum, bowed cymbal; M.E. Miller - snare, toms, congas; and David Linton - electric talking drum and metal percussion. I used my first double neck guitar & bass (a flea market Hofner that I revived from the grave) plus bass clarinet, saxophones, trombone, and tubinet. The following Carbon albums all appeared on the Dossier label from Berlin. I began working with the Mirage sampler in 1985 and went crazy sampling every bit of hardware in my apartment and whatever I could find on the street as well as saxophone squeaks and squeals plus sounds from my invented instruments: nailimba, slabs, and pantars. The first manifestation of this work was the album Virtual Stance, again a suite of jump-cut scenes and grooves. With the recording of Datacide in 1989, I moved over to the Munich-based Enemy label with the band now comprising Zeena Parkins on electric harp, David Linton on drum kit and triggered tapes, Samm Bennett on percussion and electronic drums, and myself on double neck guitarbass MIDI'd to a sampler plus various electronics, bass clarinet, and soprano sax. The pieces on Datacide were compact and groove-oriented, nearly "pop songs". We would perform these pieces in a continuous suite with improvised group and solo interludes. To formalize this approach, Jump Cut was composed which provided core rhythms and a menu of operations, textures, and timings to create a piece whose overall structure was identical in each performance though the internal detail would vary widely. Given the nature of the given core materials, Carbon in this iteration functioned as a percussion ensemble as may be heard in the Moers recording.

The weather in Germany in May is unpredictable and the hand we were dealt for our Moers concert that year was wet and cold. Sound check proved to be slow and frustrating and complicated by the television crew that was setting up to document the event for later broadcast on the WDR station from Cologne. The chill and damp made for less-than-ideal playing conditions but I felt especially sorry for the three dancers of Tatoeba, who in classic butoh fashion, wore nothing but white powder.

We all felt that the performance itself was visceral and focused despite wrestling with iffy monitoring and the damp. In addition to Jump Cut, we performed Lost in Cyberia as an encore, a piece that emphasized the sampled sounds. After the performance I was able to view about twenty minutes of the video and much to my dismay, the camera crew seemed to be operating without artistic direction and appeared to have spent much of the set documenting the crotches of the dancers. Just recently I was sent the audio from the set by a German friend. While it was not of great quality, it did capture the energy and I deemed it a worthy document and so performed forensic audio techniques on the files to bring out the sonic detail.

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.