Tag Archives: Sonny Sharrock

Sonny Sharrock – Monkey Pockie Boo 12”LP

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Sonny Sharrock – Monkey Pockie Boo Bleg Excerpt

The seminal shockwave. Passion-sodden discordant ictus lurid contumacious mayhem with all the hinges gone & the screws ejected from their cavities. Sharrock & his mad-moll Linda took certain principles further than anyone & FIRST! it certainly did not always work but this classic LP is an excellent display of Sharrock’s churlish Avant-Garde aggression. Summoned to agitate the storm-currents are Sharrock on guitar & vocals, his partner Linda on vocalizations & two French session musicians that were synonymous with the BYG/Actuel collective & performances – Beb Guerin on Double Bass & the excellent Jacques Thollot on drums. there are three expeditions, one with a hugely destructive radius – “Soon”. Side-A’s solitary track is the unsettling & ectopic “27th Day, a sixteen minute plus metaplasia of cardinal Avant oddity. It’s a spectacular, bizarre & intensely estranging experience. Continue reading Sonny Sharrock – Monkey Pockie Boo 12”LP

Sonny Sharrock – Black Woman 12”LP

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Sonny Sharrock – Peanut (Bleg Excerpt)

So this is actually the initial Sharrock as a leader effort, recorded in 1968 two years before the more widely vaunted Monkey-Pockie-Boo LP. Sonny scrambles Dave Burrell on piano, Milford Graves on drums, Norris Jones on bass & of course Linda on larynx-lallation. There are five tracks on the LP, all splaying to different dichotomies. Frankly, I think all but one are really quite terrible, albeit very interesting & adventurous conceptually. Some of Sharrock’s themes & the simplicity exacted (stripped back acoustic for example on Blind Willie), plus the nature of the totally admirable but (to my ears) lost & unfulfilling experimentalism fail to accomplish substantiation as a complete track. Continue reading Sonny Sharrock – Black Woman 12”LP

Sonny & Linda Sharrock – Teleport & Time-Warp

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Sonny Sharrock was an American guitar-maverick/revolutionary who inspired by the turbulence & absonant progression/permutation of John Coltrane & Ornette Coleman (& others) transfused what is to me the earliest form of Noisecore through the prism of chronic Avant-Garde Free Jazz Expeirmentalism. Imbued by the saxophone as a leading solo instrument, Sharrock created his own approach to the electric guitar, adhering loosely to the same antiphonic expression & intense extemporization as colossus saxophonists in The New Music/Avant Garde. During the mid-sixties he performed in session with Marzette Watts, Herbie Mann, Pharaoh Sanders & incredibly even Wayne Shorter (on 1969’s excellent Super Nova LP) before finally recording his debut as a leader “Black Woman” on the Frisco label “4 Men With Beards” in 68. Sharrock’s indelible supra-progression was largely in his course, anti-phonic, aggressive & ludicrously advanced methodology of guitar playing. At his most abrasive & “out-there” sections of Sharrock’s mid-sixties cacophonic-clarion sound, very literally, like modern-day Noisecore, Extreme Music, Improvisational Noise, Harsh Experimental genres. I find it difficult to overstate his precocity, the guy was there in a developed stage decades before anyone else (certainly to my knowledge) was doing anything like it. again, even comparing these bouts & techniques to neoteric “Noise” assimilating rubrics, this guys ridiculously futuristic & astoundingly-atypical playing style & compositional approach is so far forward it’s hard to believe, & I see his unique innovation & musical hostility as the first incarnation of so much modern “Extreme” music from Metal to Noise & it’s sub-strata’s. Continue reading Sonny & Linda Sharrock – Teleport & Time-Warp