A Boat Upon Its Blood (LP)

Taking its title(s) from Robert Creeley’s poem “The Heart”, A Boat Upon Its Blood deploys the human metronome of amplified pulse as a recurring undercurrent, with compositions that incorporate electroacoustic and musique concrète strategies, drone, noise, electronics, methodical dissonance, tone poem, layered rhythmic and melodic figures, and improvisation.

Jason Sharp has been a fixture of Montréal’s ex­perimental/im­prov scene for many years, chiefly as a saxophonist exploring drone and durational music, while also collaborating in a wide variety of jazz, avant and contemporary music ensembles.

Sharp’s work as a composer, conductor and band leader in his own right is now featured on A Boat Upon Its Blood, the first album-length recording to be released under his own name: a bracingly meditative multimovement instrumental work that charts a highly compelling arc of shifting energies and intensities, tracing a heterogeneous cycle of minimalisms and maximalisms. Using custom-built equipment to translate breath and heart rate into variegated sonic triggers, along with other modes of signal processing and in tandem with traditional instrumentation, A Boat Upon Its Blood features Sharp’s own reed playing and contributions from a few guest musicians, particularly Josh Zubot on violin and Joe Grass on pedal steel guitar.

Recorded by Thierry Amar (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Silver Mt Zion, Vic Chesnutt) at the Hotel2Tango in Montréal and mixed and mastered by Jesse Zubot (Tanya Tagaq, Drip Audio Records), A Boat Upon Its Blood is a genre-defying album with a highly immersive and satisfying sound palette that impels deep listening and demands to be taken in as a whole

LP is pressed on 180 gram virgin vinyl and comes in a heavyweight jacket with black poly-lined audiophile dust sleeve, credit insert, pull-out art poster and download code.