Vodka by Elliott Sharp

Not a paean to the clear and powerful alcoholic beverage, Vodka is a collection of pieces for acoustic guitar that were composed as backgrounds for the poetry of Ronny Someck and released in 2001 under Someck's name on the ZuTa label as A Short History Of Vodka. For this release, Sharp remixed and remastered the original tracks to present them as purely instrumental compositions.

Sharp's collection of personal idiosyncratic techniques reveals an orchestral world of sounds within his guitar and a virtuosic approach that reflects a deep immersion in blues, jazz, and musics of North Africa, Vietnam, and Indonesia as well as the abstract sonics of contemporary Western classical musics. Dynamically, the music ranges from shimmering tranquility to raging torrents of notes, never static or cliched.

These Vodka pieces initially presented the sounds and approaches that were later refined and manifested in Sharp's 2003 album The Velocity Of Hue.

Elliott Sharp: composer, multi-instrumentalist, producer, author, leads Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics and Terraplane with compositional strategies including fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetic metaphors as well as new techniques for graphic notation to yield work that catalyzes a synesthetic approach to musicmaking as well as functioning as retinal art.