The Squid's Ear Magazine


Sharp, Elliot: Tectonics: Field & Stream (Knitting Factory)

Elliott Sharp's 1998 Knitting Factory album finds the saxophonist, guitarist & electronic artist in a solo setting of rhythmic works using MAX/MSP and DSP applications to create rhythmic and sonic environments over which he improvises, with assistanceĘon one track each from Zeena Parkin on "little green drone guitar" and Frank Rothkamm providing drums sequences.
 

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Personnel:



Elliott Sharp-doubleneck guitarbass, guitars, analog synthesizers, Buchla Thunder, drum programming, tenor saxophone, processing

Frank Rothkamm-drum subsequences

Zeena Parkins-little green drone guitar

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UPC: 035828022729

Label: Knitting Factory
Catalog ID: KFR-227
Squidco Product Code: 30751

Format: CD
Condition: New
Released: 1998
Country: USA
Packaging: Jewel Case
Recorded at Studio zOaR, in New York City, by the artist.
Descriptions, Reviews, &c.

Artist Biographies

"Elliott Sharp is an American multi-instrumentalist, composer, and performer.

A central figure in the avant-garde and experimental music scene in New York City for over 30 years, Elliott Sharp has released over eighty-five recordings ranging from orchestral music to blues, jazz, noise, no wave rock, and techno music. He leads the projects Carbon and Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics, and Terraplane and has pioneered ways of applying fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetic metaphors to musical composition and interaction.

His collaborators have included Radio-Sinfonie Frankfurt; pop singer Debbie Harry; Ensemble Modern; Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; Kronos String Quartet; Ensemble Resonanz; cello innovator Frances Marie Uitti; blues legends Hubert Sumlin and Pops Staples; pipa virtuoso Min-Xiao Feng; jazz greats Jack deJohnette, Oliver Lake, and Sonny Sharrock; multimedia artists Christian Marclay and Pierre Huyghe; and Bachir Attar, leader of the Master Musicians Of Jajouka.

Sharp is a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow, and a 2014 Fellow at Parson's Center for Transformative Media. He received the 2015 Berlin Prize in Musical Composition from the American Academy in Berlin. He has composed scores for feature films and documentaries; created sound-design for interstitials on The Sundance Channel, MTV and Bravo networks; and has presented numerous sound installations in art galleries and museums. He is the subject of a new documentary "Doing The Don't" by filmmaker Bert Shapiro."-Elliott Sharp

-Elliott Sharp website (http://www.elliottsharp.com/bio.html)
12/15/2025

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

Frank Rothkamm is a composer and artist who was born on July 2, 1965 in Gütersloh, West Germany.

To date, Frank has composed 989 tracks ranging from the microscopic 4 second "ID 7" (opus 13) to the 7 hour and 27 minute macroscape of "Midtown" (opus 596) and has released 169 solo albums (of which 26 are solo piano) and appeared on 29 others. His 18 Compact Disc releases, of which 16 were issued by his own Flux Records imprint between 1995 and 2015, were the subject of 241 reviews and articles.

Originally interested in drawing in his pre-teen years, as a teenager Frank produced a graphical notation system for music, studied to become a pianist at the "Musikschule" (music school), built his own electronic music studio and worked as both a composer and actor at the "Schloss Theater" (castle theatre) in Moers, Germany. After a stay as postulant at the cloister of Lilienfeld, Austria, he rose to prominence in Moers with FISCH II, a performance involving analog tape music, lights, 4 actor-instrumentalists and a fish.

Frank refused to serve in the army and worked instead at Cologne's University Clinic for his civil service. At the same time he studied privately with Clarence Barlow, lived in the artist-run gallery Atelier Soemmering, where he produced his first body-manipulation works and performed in galleries & clubs, culminating in the release of his first solo release in 1986 via the Maria Bonk Gallery.

After studies in communication science, bionics and philosophy at the Technische Universität Berlin, where he co-founded the CAMP group, studied Csound with Horacio Vaggione and performed at the International Computer Music Conference 1988, he left Europe and moved to Canada. There Frank composed, for his first wife Emily Faryna - FISCH III 5 - his first digital sampling based release, studied privately Forth with Kenneth Newby and wrote his first commercial software - PaintMusic - for Science World of British Columbia. He concluded with coding FM synthesis for computer games (Unlimited Software), working for Rodney Graham and the last FISCH performance in Vancouver, Canada.

Moving to San Francisco in 1990, Frank appeared with his second wife Monique Marquisa de Magdalena in the February 91 issue of Playboy magazine, organized raves and performed with digital tape music, lights, 2 dancers and a drummer at clubs where he met his third wife Nina Schneider. His first appearance on 12'' vinyl record "Magick Sounds of the Underground' (Hardkiss Records) and on Compact Disc "Death Rave 2000" (21st Circuitry Records), as well as the establishment of his first production company "Suite Zero" followed after writing his first commercials for Levi's 501 (Foote, Cone & Belding) in 1992.

Relocating with Nina to New York in 1993, he composed and remixed for the Cranberries, DJ Spooky, Wolfgang Muthspiel, Elliott Sharp, Alfred Harth, Peter Scherer, Corin Curschellas and produced his first industrials for corporate clients like Sears. In 1995 the first of his 2 soundtracks for George Lucas "Star Wars 3D" trailers (New York Film & Animation) appeared. He suffered his first panic attacks, symptoms of a depression with psychotic features that would progressively and severely impact his life. In 1997 his Flux Records released DJ Glove's "Tuning", a 12'' record of a woman tuning a piano, and Frank became the last Freemason of the German-speaking Hermann Lodge to be initiated in Manhattan.

After gaining his first internet client in 1998, a pet sanctuary in upstate New York, Frank moved to Hollywood and for the next 11 years worked on web design, Coldfusion development and Server administration for numerous clients - from Vampire Cosmetics to Warner Bros. - all the while moving between Los Angeles and New York. He was bi-coastal from 2001-2004 and 2007-2009. In 2000 he became the Director of Technology for Musicblitz in Culver City and he was the Senior Systems Analyst for the New York Philharmonic from 2006-2010.

Following the licensing of the Flux Records catalog to ringtone providers, Frank had an epiphany in the summer of 2002 in Hollywood and devised a new method of composition. All tracks were now created on the verge of sleep through IFORMM, a intelligent synthesizer he built from 2002 to 2006 with 1980s sound modules and an Atari ST. 2007 saw the destruction of his entire archive of hardware synthesizers and master tapes in the California Witch Creek wildfire, but Frank continued with the method until 2010, when he released his first syntheastic film - "Birth of Primary Cinema from the Spirit of Sound" - made after he passed out on a flight from New York to Copenhagen.

From 2005-2010 he averaged 3 Compact Disc releases per year on Flux Records. Meanwhile, Moscow-based label Monochrome Vision discovered and released his teenage "Moers Works (1982-1984)" in 2006 and Paris-based label Baskaru issued "ALT" in 2009 - a survey of this 1989-2002 algorithmic work with analog computers. After his first release of organ music "just 3 organs" (2008) and piano music "Opus Spongebobicum" (2008) he restored a 1924 E.Gabler & Bros. grand piano and went back to practicing Czerny and Mozart.

From 2010-2015 Frank restored a 1935 Steinkamp house in View Park, California, migrated to open-source Linux software and licenses, built a collection of vintage computers, synthesizers, pianos and related books; and following his diagnosis with the brain processing disorder Tinnitus, formulated psychostochastics as a research discipline and method of composition. The first public result of this was the "Wiener Process" (2010-2014), a 24 hour 24 part Csound score written in 3 computer languages, released on Baskaru as a datastream, download and a 24 Compact Disc box set.

In 2015 he wrote a music streaming app and started to issue his complete tracks on digital albums which commenced with "Stockhausen Star Formula" (2013) on July 2nd, 2015 and ended over 20 months later on March 3rd, 2017 with "The Last Post" (2016).

Frank markedly stepped up production in 2015, 2016 and 2017 with the realization of over 200 tracks and the release - via Google Play, YouTube, Bandcamp and Rothkamm - of 23 albums in 2015, 36 in 2016 and 62 in 2017.

In 2017, after a year of misdiagnosis, Frank was admitted to UCLA's Santa Monica hospital because of acute renal failure and diagnosed with multiple myeloma cancer. Frank then sold all his possessions, donated his archive to UCSB (The Frank Rothkamm Collection), his CD releases to SONM (Murcia, Spain) and moved to Germany where he underwent chemo and radiation therapy at Cologne's University Clinic.

In 2018 he was left with severe physical and mental health problems from the treatment and returned, after 1 year abroad, back to Los Angeles where he underwent more chemo and in 2019 a stem cell transplant."

-Frank Rothkamm Website (http://rothkamm.com/bio)
12/15/2025

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"Multi-instrumentalist/composer/improviser, Zeena Parkins, pioneer of contemporary harp practice and performance, reimagines the instrument as a "sound machine of limitless capacity." Parkins has built three versions of her one-of-a-kind electric harp and has extended the language of the acoustic harp with the inventive use of unusual playing techniques, preparations, and layers of electronic processing.

Inspired and connected to visual arts, dance, film, and history, Zeena follows a unique path in creating her compositional works. Through blending and morphing of both real and imagined instruments, crafting, recombining, and layering mangled, sliced, massaged or possibly disengaged sounds, drawing from extra-musical sources for unusual scoring and formal constructions as well as utilizing multi-speaker environments, Zeena remains in process with sound as material and music, engaged in translations of sonic states in the concert hall, the black box theater, the dance studio, the recording studio, the classroom, the cinema, the skyscraper, the ocean and the gallery. Zeena has a particularly strong commitment to making scores for dance and continues to re-evaluate the nature and issues of the body's imprint on sound and sound/music's imprint on movement.

Parkins's compositions have been commissioned by NeXtWorks Ensemble, Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Roulette Intermedium, The Eclipse Quartet, William Winant, Bang on a Can, The Whitney Museum, The Tate Modern, Montalvo Arts Center, The Donaueschinger Musiktage and Sudwestrundfunk/SWR.

Parkins has released four solo records featuring her electric and acoustic harp playing and has released her compositions and band projects on six Tzadik recordings, with a new Tzadik CD with Ikue Mori and Phantom Orchard Orchestra, Trouble in Paradise, to be released in November 2012. As a sought-after collaborator Zeena has worked with: Fred Frith, Björk, Ikue Mori, Dame Evelyn Glennie, Maja Ratkje, Hild Sofie Tafjord, John Zorn, Butch Morris, Chris Cutler, Elliott Sharp, Nels Cline, Alex Cline, William Winant, Anthony Braxton, Pauline Oliveros, Yoko Ono, Christian Marclay, Matmos, Yasunao Tone, So Percussion, Bobby Previte, Carla Kilhstedt, Tin Hat, James Fei, Kim Gordon, Lee Renaldo and Thurston Moore.

Awards: The Foundation for Contemporary Arts Fellowship, NYFA Music Fellowship, Meet the Composer Commission, NYSCA Composer Commission, Multi-Arts Production Fund Grant, American Music Center, BAFTA award for best interactive media with visual artist Mandy McIntosh and sound artist Kaffe Matthews, Peter S. Reed Fellowship, Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust Commissions, Arts International, Prix Ars Electronica Honorary Mention for Phantom Orchard in the Digital Music category.

Curatorial: Guest curator for The Music Unlimited Festival in Wels, Austria, co-curator of the Movement Research Festival: Sidewinder, in NYC and curator for a month + a week of shows at The Stone in NYC

Residencies: Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, Oxford University, Harvestworks, Steim, Paf: Performing Arts Forum, Wooda Arts Residency, Montalvo Arts Center, RPI/iEAR and The Watermill Center.

Teaching: Zeena has given lectures at Oxford and Princeton Universities and has taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Bard and Mills College. Currently, Zeena is a Distinguished Visiting Professor, at Mills College Graduate Music Department."

-Zeena Parkins Website (http://www.zeenaparkins.com/about.html)
12/15/2025

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.


Track Listing:
Related Categories of Interest:


Improvised Music
Free Improvisation
Electro-Acoustic
Electro-Acoustic Improv
NY Downtown & Metropolitan Jazz/Improv
Parkins, Zeena
Solo Artist Recordings
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Knitting Factory.


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