Sharp, Elliott And Scott Fields

AFIADACAMPOS

Label: NEOS Music Country: Germany

"Elliott Sharp: There is both ease and difficulty in an ongoing collaboration, especially one between two guitarist composers. We now both have a good sense of each others' language on the instrument - not just the surface shape and form but the underlying syntax and substance. This allows for a flow and interlock of sounds and ideas, the ability to complete each others' sentences, a relaxed interpretation and expansion of our compositional personalities.

Scott Fields: Our handful of gigs and recording sessions have exposed commonalities and contrasts, as composers and as instrumentalists. We are both interested in fuzzing up relationships between written and improvised sounds, rejecting the free-jazz model in which heads are matched with unrelated blowing. Our methods of obfuscation, however, differ. One tends to offer large themes for metamorphication. The other often works with fragments and asynchronism. But by now each has a pretty good handle on what the other is getting at.

Elliott Sharp: The difficulty lies in that very relaxation. As with every creative history, there is a fine line between style and self-parody, between exploring our identities and falling prey to cliché.

Scott Fields: Our emphasis on composition, and specifically composition for the relatively narrow dynamic range and timbral pallet of paired steel-string, acoustic guitars, directs us away from dependence on muscle memory and set phrases. These structures focus us on interactions that grow out of our immediate reactions to how each of us is, in the moment, interpreting the material.

Elliott Sharp: With Afiadacampos, I feel that Scott and I have deepened our ability to improvise together and to orchestrate compositional strategies, pointing the way to our future work together."-NEOS

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