Centre

presents The Turning Centre Of A Still World with live visuals by Guillaume Vallée

The Turning Centre Of A Still World is Sharp’s first purely solo record and his most lucid, poignant, integral work to date. Following two acclaimed albums composed around particular collaborators and guest players, Sharp conceived his third as an interplay strictly bounded by his own body, his acoustic instrument, and his evolving bespoke electronic system. The Turning Centre... is a singular sonic exploration of human-machine calibration, interaction, expression and biofeedback.

A mainstay of Montreal’s avant-jazz, experimental and improv music community for many years, Jason Sharp is a saxophonist and electro-acoustic composer whose increasing focus on solo work since 2015 has yielded a unique corpus of music that fuses technology and the human body. Sharp blends a mastery of extended saxophone technique with customized microphones and electronics that translate his horn, breath and physical pulse into an array of triggers, samples and modular synthesis – resulting in formidable, visceral, highly evocative, and unfailingly musical works of electroacoustic biofeedback. Across three albums for iconic experimental music label Constellation, Sharp has been charting a singular soundworld embedded in his unique compositional processes, which rely on a combination of exceptional instrumental performance on baritone and bass saxophones, prefiguration/configuration of bespoke technology, discipline/control of corporeal bloodflow, and responsiveness to the stochastic variability of each performative iteration.

Symphony for Cutlery
Projections by Anthony Piazza

Annie-Claude Deschênes lives and works in Montreal. She is a visual artist, singer, keyboardist and singer-songwriter with the music group Duchess Says (Bonsound, Alien8 Recordings, Slovenly Recordings) and the band PYPY (Slovenly Recordings). She also studied sound design at Musitechnic and visual arts at Université Laval. The visual and performative aspect is a dominant part of all her projects. On stage, she is in a trance, she experiments and has fun making music visually palpable. She interacts with the audience, animates the space by improvising with the available objects and tries to distort the conventions of the show in an effort to capture the imagination of the crowd. Each musical performance becomes an immersive multidimensional experience where the audience is as much energized by the sound as by the visual and performative aspects. For her, visual art and music are inseparable.