MARIA DUARTE, FIONA O’CONNOR and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Savage House, Enzo, Madfabulous, and Erupcja
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Elliott Sharp, Cafe Oto London
Avant-garde excellence from the Elliott Sharp trio
True to form: Elliott Sharp
CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
CLEVELAND guitarist Elliott Sharp has been a central figure in US avant-garde and experimental music since the 1970s and as if to stress the point he begins his Cafe Oto gig by reading from his autobiography irRational Music.
It tells of of his early years in music and his contemporaries’ deep suspicion of free improvisation, “as if the music I was playing was cheating.”
His trio, with bassist John Edwards and drummer Mark Sanders seething in the cauldron of improvisation, has Sharp playing guitar with Hendrix-like screeches and agonies. Yet, in an instant, sudden moments of tenderness and quietude radiate, with notes like droplets of rain.
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