Band Details

From the Promoter

We couldn’t start our season on a more exclamatory note than this chamber-punk showdown between New York post-punk guitar hero Elliott Sharp and Thin Edge New Music Collective. They’re joined by one of this city’s loudest and most devastating bands, the Soupcans.

Elliott Sharp remains one of the key artists who arose from New York’s downtown scene of the 70s and 80s, having made his mark in improvisation, no wave and punk. He has also invented his own insanely complex musical systems that pioneered the use of fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetics in musical composition and interaction. His unique path has led him to stunning collaborations with Debbie Harry; Frankfurt's Ensemble Modern, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Hubert Sumlin, Pops Staples, Cecil Taylor, Christian Marclay and Bachir Attar, leader of the Master Musicians Of Jajouka. Sharp plays solo here.

Sharp’s chamber compositions are less known than his superhuman guitar work, and our friends Thin Edge New Music Collective step up to the plate to untangle them for a Toronto audience. “One of Toronto hottest and bravest new music collectives” (Musical Toronto), TENMC were founded in 2011 by co-artistic directors, pianist Cheryl Duvall and violinist Ilana Waniuk. Since its inception, TENMC has grown to include 13 of Canada’s brightest emerging performers.

The Soupcans, in their own words, are “gooey-gross bass cranking out yucky, warbled sounds, stripped-down drums pumped with wild, impotent abandon, guitar tones like shards of glass in the webbing of your toes and broken occult throat gurglings calling to Cthulu. Soupcans will play your birthday or bar mitzvah.”

Promoter