Elliot Sharp combines a keen interest in math, musical genius, and not a small number of handsaws and other tools in his search for elusive sounds. In an interview at The Morning News, Sharp ranges over an immense range of topics, including politics, cyberpunk literature, and technology in music
And then when cyberpunk happened—Gibson’s first writing, Lucius Shepard, Pat Cadigan, and Jack Womack—I became associated with the cyberpunk movement because I was one of the first to use computers in performance, in an improvisational context, in 1986, with my Atari ST when I was doing a project called “Virtual Stance.” And then I switched to laptops in ‘91. I had the first PowerBook laptop—the PowerBook 100—and started doing concerts with that, using it to control various samplers and software devices. And that put me automatically in the cyberpunk vein. And a lot of my titles and concepts were informed by Philip K. Dick and things from cyberpunk, the things that Gibson talked about.
Toward the end, Sharp edges into philosophy. Sharp (and the interviewer) are, on the whole, not fond of postmodernism:
Posted by johndanseven at October 9, 2005 12:06 AM[Interviewer]: A couple of years ago some academic postmodernists assembled at the University of Chicago and declared themselves irrelevant.
[Sharp}: That’s very good. I hope they all committed suicide afterward.