Ayako Kanda & Elliott Sharp

The barking, chirping, whirring and melodic vocalist from Japan, Ayako Kanda, joins legendary multi-instrumentalist Elliott Sharp in a duo for Erototox Decodings. Ayako's vocal performances encompass a kaleidoscopic range of expression. Steeped in music from childhood, she -is an improviser and performance artist whose medium is her voice. Ayako's work moves between total improvisation and standard jazz, quick sketches and impressionist painting, creating rules and then breaking them as she roams freely between linguistic and alinguistic facets of expression. Sharp, a composer and multi-instrumentalist, is also a producer, sound designer, author, and visual artist who leads the projects Carbon , SysOrk, Tectonics, and Terraplane along with countless collaborations and whose compositional strategies encompass fractal geometry, chaos theory, algorithmic approaches, genetic metaphors, and new techniques for graphic notation. He has been awarded the Berlin Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and fellowships from the Foundation for Contemporary Art and the Center for Transformative Media. With Kanda’s voice accompanied by Sharp on guitar, both make for a very visceral combination, creating textures that compliment each other.
Their release on Erototox Decodings, entitled Hi-Gengo, is available May 2, 2025 for Bandcamp Friday on CD and digital formats.