ISSUE Project Room : an open and versatile environment in which established and emerging artists conduct, exhibit and perform new and site-specific work

Composer and guitarist Elliott Sharp sat down with ISSUE curator Zach Layton to discuss his work as well as his long history of collaboration with Jo Andres & Steve Buscemi, the hosts of his 60th birthday celebration next Friday at 110 Livingston in Brooklyn, featuring Sharp, writers Jack Womack and Tracie Morris, the JACK Quartet, and the Sirius Quartet. The next night, the party will move to ISSUE's current home, where we'll have an open rehearsal of Sharp's Flexagons at 5 pm followed by a Q&A led by artist and composer Luke DuBois, both totally free. The night stretches on past midnight, with performances by Sharp, pianist Jenny Lin, Sharp's improvisatory group Bootstrappers, Marco Cappelli playing Sharp's Amygdala, and a guitar army of SyndaKit players.

Zach & Elliott talk about a variety of his pieces, among them the algorithmic composition SyndaKit, which Sharp describes as the process of "creating an organism that grooves, and loops, and chains itself into various shapes." The piece has already been featured in two separate incarnations on the FMA, and we've got a totally different one here. They also discuss Sharp's new commission for ISSUE, Occam's Razor, for double string quartet, in which Sharp tried to write a "piece that was absolutely true to the sound…but that wouldn't require people having their face buried in the piece of music for fifteen minutes."

I've uploaded a number of Elliott's tracks that are featured in the podcast, among them the overture from Sharp's opera Binibon and a track from Sharp's acoustic album Velocity of Hue, called "Euwrecka." If these pique your interest, check out the open rehearsal and Q&A next Saturday, totally free courtesy of Meet the Composer's Creative Connections program.