Elliott Sharp - Octal: Book Four (2022)

This fourth volume of Octal was recorded at the same session that yielded Book Three, released on Clean Feed in 2013. Though scheduled to follow Book Three, various realities intervened to postpone the release of Book Four until now. Books Three and Four depart from the previous two in that the pieces are less composed structures and etudes than they are documentations of themed improvisations played on the Saul Koll 8-string guitarbass. Determining parameters were set for each movement and then realized. In trying to maintain the spirit of a live session, Says E#: "In trying to maintain the spirit of a live session, I would stop only for technical problems such as broken or extremely-out-of-tune strings. There is occasional distortion from tubes or speakers overloading - I consider this to be part of performance. I allowed myself two versions of each theme and then moved on. In assembling the master I sometimes terminated pieces early but no cut & paste editing was used to construct the music - it is heard as played."

Geek stuff: The Koll 8-string is in standard tuning (E B E' A' D' G' B'' E'') and is augmented with distortion and electronic processing. The piezo pickup was routed through the K&K Pure preamp and into one channel of the Eventide TimeFactor delay and from there into the Pearce G2R amp with a Hartke 2x10 speaker cabinet mic'd with a Neumann TLM103 condensor. The Lollar magnetic pickup was fed into the Celmo compressor and from there through the Zoom UltraFuzz and into the remaining channel of the Eventide with the signal finally going to a Fender 75 valve amplifier with a 15" JBL speaker mic'd with a Royer 122 ribbon. The microphones were routed through a Sytek preamp and into ProTools via the MOTU 828. Mixing was accomplished with just a touch of limiting and reverb, again to preserve the sound of the music as performed.