Reflective Hands Presents: Jason Sharp

Montréal saxophonist and electroacoustic composer Jason Sharp presents his third album on Constellatiom : The Turning Centre Of A Still World is Sharp’s first purely solo record and his most lucid, poignant,integral work to date. Using saxophones, foot-controlled bass pedals, and his own pulse – patched through a heart monitor routed to variegated signal paths that trigger modular synthesizers and samplers –Sharp paints The Turning Centre Of A Still World with organic waves of glistening synthesis, pink noise and digitalia. Melodic strokes and harmonic shapes ripple and crest across ever-shifting seas, through an inclement cycle from dawn to dusk. The album’s six main movements navigate a world where placid surfaces are always roiled and disquieted by a deeper inexorable gyre: the gravitational pull and tidal perpetuity of our bodies made of water, buffeted by terrestrial atmospheric pressures, wrung out by emotions, coursing with blood, sustained inescapably by breath, inevitably yearning for and returning to ground again and again. Sharp’s heartbeat is always at the core of these compositions – while only occasionally surfacing as a clearly recognizable pulse or rhythm, it is patched in and activating the work at all times, literally feeding and regulating synthetic processes throughout every piece.