The Squid's Ear Magazine


Sharp, Elliott: Mare Crisium (zOaR Records)

Elliott Sharp unites six electric guitarists in a powerful, overtone-rich work built from droning harmonies, graphic scores, shifting rhythms, and open improvisation, transforming his long-running compositional ideas into a vibrant, resonant soundscape that channels the tension of our present moment into bold, electrifying musical energy.
 

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Product Information:

Personnel:



Angela Babin-electric guitar

Sally Gates-electric guitar

Matteo Liberatore-electric guitar

Gian Perez-electric guitar

Kevin Ramsay-electric guitar

Elliott Sharp-electric guitar

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UPC: 755491355855

Label: zOaR Records
Catalog ID: ZCD 188
Squidco Product Code: 36852

Format: CD
Condition: New
Released: 2025
Country: USA
Packaging: Cardboard Gatefold
Recorded, at Studio zOaR, in NYC, in August, 2025.
Descriptions, Reviews, &c.

Artist Biographies

"Angela Babin has been playing guitar and bass since she was 13 years old in a variety of musical styles from blues, disco, folk, punk, new wave, R&B, jazz, rock, pop, reggae and soca, to klezmer, glam rock, instrumental, acid-jazz and more.

Angela entered the downtown New York music scene playing with the band Off Beach. Subsequently, she was a founding member of The Ordinaires, whose songs critics likened to both Stravinsky and Captain Beefheart. "

-Prepared Guitar Blog (https://preparedguitar.blogspot.com/2014/12/angela-babin-13-questions.html)
12/3/2025

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

"Sally Gates is a New Zealand musician and composer based in New York. Her avant-rock trio, Titan to Tachyons recently released their second album Vonals through John Zorn's Tzadik records. Received to excellent critical acclaim, Vonals was included in Spin's Best Metal of September 22, and was said to "harness virtuosity...with an enticingly organic fluidity" by The Wire.

This year's recipient of the Wellington Jazz Festival Composer Commission, Gates returned home to premiere her piece Thought & Terraform for solo guitar at the Wellington Opera House, and booked a series of other performances around the country.

A versatile musician with "slinky, avant-noir guitar work", Gates often curates performances in NYC with various improvisational music groups, most notably as a 'secret guest' in a John Zorn ensemble. Other recent collaborators have included Zoh Amba, Brian Chase, Greg Fox, and Sam Ospovat.

Before relocating to New York, Gates released original music with the Miami progressive-metal band Orbweaver, and toured throughout the US, Canada, and New Zealand with other acts such as Gigan, Success Will Write Apocalypse Across the Sky, and Relentless Attrition."

-Sally Gates Website (https://www.sallygates.com/)
12/3/2025

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

"Matteo Liberatore is a boundary-pushing guitarist and composer working at the intersection of free, contemporary classical, electronic, and noise music. Based in Brooklyn, Liberatore spent much of his life in the medieval region of Abruzzo, Italy, amidst dramatic landscapes reflected in a playing and composing style of "unsettling beauty" and "striking physicality" (The New York City Jazz Record).

Matteo is known for his nuanced treatment of timbre, texture, gestures, and rhythms, and his work aims to convey precise musical ideas--whether through the elegant immediacy of unadorned instrumentation or the affecting dislocations of electronics and preparations. The latter approach can be heard in his first solo album--aptly titled Solos--released on Innova Recordings in 2018: "This is not just sonic novelty or gratuitous use of extended techniques; each of the pieces, while largely improvised, [has] clarity and purpose" (Avant Music News). Solos was included in Ted Gioia's best albums of 2018.

An active member of New York's improv scene, Liberatore has performed with Ralph Alessi, Elliott Sharp, Tony Malaby, Ingrid Laubrock, Jon Irabagon, Tom Rainey, Nina Dante, Brian Chase, Andrea Parkins, Ava Mendoza, Amirtha Kidambi, Sandy Ewen, Weasel Walter, Joanna Mattrey, Brandon Lopez, Carlo Costa, and Michael Foster. Liberatore also partners with performance artists and dancers such as Dia Dearstyne and Rachel Mckinstry.

In his formative years Liberatore studied classical guitar under Maestro Marco Salcito at Conservatorio di Foggia; obtained his M.M. in Jazz Performance at NYU, working with Jean-Michael Pilc, Wayne Krantz, and Peter Bernstein; and toured the U.S. and Europe in art-rock and electropop projects such as Una Lux, with a debut EP produced by former Sonic Youth producer Nick Sansano and reviewed favorably by NPR, WNYC, and Magnum Magazine."

-Matteo Liberatore Website (https://www.matteoliberatore.com/about)
12/3/2025

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

"Gían Pérez is a multi-disciplinary artist, improviser, and composer from Puerto Rico, based in Brooklyn, NY, whose work focuses on the elucidation, fermentation, and subversion of form. Recently, Pérez has worked with artists like Brandon Lopez, gabby fluke-mogul, Elliott Sharp, Brandon Seabrook, Marc Edwards, among others. He's performed at venues like The Stone, Downtown Music Gallery, and Joe's Pub. By extending the guitar to its extremes as a physical material, Pérez denatures the electric guitar beyond its ascribed historical identity, envisioning a language that was never conquered and had been left to govern itself. His debut solo guitar record, bambú, was released on zOaR Records. Ñ, his most recent solo record, is available everywhere now."-https://www.rhizomedc.org

-Gian Perez Website (https://www.gianperez.com/)
12/3/2025

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

"Kevin Ramsay is a composer, producer, recording/mixing/mastering/sound engineer, and musician on several critically acclaimed international albums. Brooklyn born and based, Ramsay's work focuses primarily on theoretical, practical aspects of sound recording/reproduction with unpredictable pairings of acoustic and electronic instruments. Kevin's current works explore new ways to capture, mix, and process immersive audio for playback, on multichannel sound systems. In addition to serving as the Lead Sound Engineer at Harvestworks Digital Media, he continues to collaborate with a variety of international artists committed to using sound as their main creative medium. Kevin has worked with notable artist such as Michael Byron, Henry Threadgil, Art Jones, Joan Jonas, Pauline Kim- Harris and Conrad Harris (String Noise), Anne Tardos, Danilio Correale, Maria Grand, Prince Harvey, Emilio Vavarella, Malik Ameer Crumpler, Daniel Belquer, Jon-Carlos Evans and many others."

-Kevin Ramsay Website (https://www.kevinramsaysound.com/copy-of-contact)
12/3/2025

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

"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)
12/3/2025

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
Compositional Forms
Graphic Scores
NY Downtown & Metropolitan Jazz/Improv
Sextet Recordings
Guitarists, &c.
Staff Picks & Recommended Items
New in Experimental & Electronic Music
New in Improvised Music
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Recent Releases and Best Sellers

Search for other titles on the label:
zOaR Records.


Recommended & Related Releases:
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Recorded across two sessions eight years apart, Nels Cline and Elliott Sharp forge a vivid acoustic-guitar dialogue that blends crisp articulation, percussive attack, spectral overtones, and patient, boundary-pushing interplay, creating a set of inventive, empathetic improvisations that expand the guitar-duo tradition with wit, texture, and fearless curiosity.
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A vital and inventive meeting between NY guitarist Elliott Sharp and Chicago guitarist Scott Fields, two visionary electric guitarists whose longstanding collaboration finds them weaving complex textures, sharp counterpoint, and dynamic interplay into a seamless blend of free improvisation, experimental composition, and nuanced sonic dialogue.
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A powerful meeting of guitar luminaries Joe Morris and Elliott Sharp, recorded at Park West Studios in Brooklyn, where the duo delve into an intricate and exploratory dialogue of free improvisation and expanded sonic vocabulary, blending effects, electronics, and their singular guitar languages in a session that bridges avant-garde jazz, experimentalism, and raw creative spontaneity.
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A tour-de-force exposition of the mandocello, acoustic and electronic, an instrument evolving out of the 18th century mandalone into a louder instrument intended to take the bass role in mandolin ensembles, which Sharp demonstrates through strings that ring with powerful resonance as he performs original compositions with references to Derek Bailey, Kinshi Tsuruta, and Harry Partch.
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Following his 2017 trio album with guitarists Marc Ribot and Mary Halvorson, New York guitarist Elliott Sharp returns to his Manhattan studio with two different guitarists--Bhutan guitarist Tashi Dorji living in Asheville, and New Zealand guitarist living in New York Sally Gates--for ten far-ranging improvisations of inspired technique and creative intent.
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A series of concise noise explorations from Italian-born, Brooklyn-based guitarist Matteo Liberatore, more typically heard in composed and improv/experimental forms including work with Elliott Sharp & Weasel Walter, here in an assertive album of guitar-driven analog synthesis & noise using unusual structures, alien utterances and intense twists and turns.
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The title referencing a Blind Willie McTell entreaty to himself, Elliott Sharp's contemporary blues project Teraplane truly "kicks" in 8 burning pieces of concentrated guitar work from Sharp, solo and in overdub, recording in Studio zOaR while performing on electric guitar, vong co guitar, lap steel guitar, console steel guitars, mandocello, mandola, basses & drum programming.
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Semantics (Elliott Sharp / Ned Rothenberg / Samm Bennett)
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The Squid's Ear Magazine

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