The Velocity of Hue

First released in 2003 on the Emanem label in UK, The Velocity of Hue is Elliott Sharp's first album dedicated entirely to acoustic guitar. In his continuing exploration of the limits of instruments, composition, and improvisation, E# performs a collection of pieces, while based upon his personal sonic vocabulary of textures, densities, and groove, also filters it through the string traditions of the music of central Asia, India, and North Africa, country blues, and the "American primitive" strain of John Fahey and Robbie Basho. "This is an album of solo acoustic guitar. Elliott Sharp by habit and intellectual compulsion has grasped all the expectations such a bare description evokes and confronted and confounded them. Steel guitar blues stands at a pole of gritty hard won authenticity utterly inimical to the art music schoolings of someone like Elliott Sharp. Bluesmen learn their lessons from life, not from Morton Feldman. These recordings could fall into one of two traps. The virtuoso Sharp could merely reproduce and inhabit the well-established clich市 we have learnt from moody soundtracks to cowboy dramas, desert road movies, and lazy advertising. Alternately he could deconstruct, subvert or satirise the same clich市 by way of the same virtuosity. If all you want is to see one man play his guitar you would be pleased - even if far too easily. VELOCITY OF HUE, therefore, is all the more wondrous for transcending such crowd-pleasing follies. While Sharp's knowledge of global musics must inform his playing, the overall effect is of an intrinsically American, intrinsically blues, and specifically guitar derived, music. The playing is elegiac, lyrical and passionate, and uses several extended techniques of finger-tapping, harmonics and fretboard noise as well as a subtle sinuous acoustic feedback to extend notes at will. Few other players have managed to liberate the language of steel blues so completely - one is reminded of Leo Kottke's more surreal passages. A track like Icontact slides and smoulders, constantly unstable, and seeking resolve, while the bright opening drone of Euwrecka evolves into a skittering lattice of brittle energy and the delicate harmonics of Otolith glister like gold dust waiting to be panned out of a desert creek. Most of all, though, the music has an extraordinary saturated living colour, as the title track (and its title) Velocity Of Hue so succinctly suggest." - Nick Southgate - The Wire