Alan Licht
Alan Licht (born in June 6, 1968) is an American guitarist and composer, whose work combines elements of pop, noise, free jazz and minimalism.
Alan Licht (born in June 6, 1968) is an American guitarist and composer, whose work combines elements of pop, noise, free jazz and minimalism.
Havens
"Alan Licht returns to VDSQ with Havens, a sprawling double-disc set of exploratory guitar-based compositions forged from the myriad possibilities arising when strings collide with electricity & space. Licht is masterful and relentless in his negotiation of the often-unknowable intersections that exist between juxtaposing strands of sound. His work is marked by contrast & contradiction: maximalism versus minimalism; rockist inclinations versus avant, expanded-field expression; loose improvisatio…
The Blue Hour
Totally beautiful and rare piano performance from Loren Connors, joined on guitar by long time collaborator Alan Licht.
Alan Licht & John Krausbauer
*363 copies limited edition* Alan Licht (electric guitar) and John Krausbauer (amplified violin/oscillators) have created two compositions on their new 7” that seemingly reside on opposite ends of the experimental/free-noise spectrum. Superstizione (Italian for "superstition") is a maximalist free-noise blast, seemingly chaotic, but with an intentional forward movement and flow. Licht's guitar playing starts off with a low end, thick fuzz, but quickly moves to an over-blown, frenetic pattern, al…
May 99
Tip! Black vinyl, with silkscreen and insert. In the spring of 1999, Charles Curtis, Alan Licht, and Dean Roberts brought an unconventional mix of drone, improvisation, and experimental rock on an eleven-stop tour of Europe. The concept was straightforward, yet novel: each night, they would improvise a single piece while sustained sine waves played for the duration of the concert. May 99, culled from three shorter pieces recorded for a radio program at Amsterdam’s VPRO near the end of the tour, …
Three Chords And A Sword: Solo Cover Versions 1988-2021
Tip! Three Chords and a Sword is a collection of eight cover songs recorded by rock/experimental musician Alan Licht over a span of three decades. Re-imagining both Van Halen’s “Jump” and Sonic Youth’s “Tom Violence” from the perspective of American Primitive guitar soli, employing a chord organ to twist Pere Ubu’s “Heart of Darkness” and Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’” into eerie, doom-laden ballads, conjuring the sound of New York’s Suicide with little more than a microphone and patch cord, …
Common Tones: Selected Interviews with Artists and Musicians 1995–2020
The collection of previously unpublished interviews and extended versions of Alan Licht's famous conversations with figures in the American art and music scene.
Sound Art Revisited
The first edition of Sound Art Revisited (published as Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories) served as a groundbreaking work toward defining this emerging field, and this fully updated volume significantly expands the story to include current research since the book's initial release. Viewed through a lens of music and art histories rather than philosophical theory, it covers dozens of artists and works not found in any other book on the subject.Locating sound art's roots across the centu…
Title TK
Title TK is an eponymous collection featuring ten performance transcripts from the conceptual band, Title TK. Band members Cory Arcangel, Howie Chen, and Alan Licht engage in unscripted conversations about music, the music industry, and popular culture, rather than perform music. Drawing inspiration from David Antin’s improvised “talk poems,” Title TK elevates on-stage banter to an art form, creating work that exists at the intersection of performance art, improvisation, and stand-up come…
Four Years Older
A new set by the coolest chap in New York City, documenting the development process of a solo electric guitar piece that Alan Licht has been playing out for the last four years. Revered for his work in the Blue Humans and Text Of Light, and a key figure in the pantheon of experimental solo guitar players born in the late '60s such Jim O'Rourke and Oren Ambarchi, Four Years Older is his debut Editions Mego release, representing another peak in a career of mining the rich seams of minimalism, noi…
Tomorrow Outside Tomorrow
Alan Licht: guitar, electronics. Tetuzi Akiyama: guitar. Oren Ambarchi: guitar on 'Blues Deceiver'. Rob Mazurek: cornet on 'Tomorrow Outside Tomorrow'.Recorded by Makoto Oshiro, Tokyo, Nov 4, 2014. Mixed by Ted Young & Alan Licht at Outer Space, Brooklyn, July 15, 2015. Over the years Alan Licht (USA) and Tetuzi Akiyama (Japan) have individually explored the lines that divide improvisation, composition, folk, blues and experimental music. It was inevitable their careers and styles would cross pa…
Currents
Minimal acoustic melodicism from this NYC mainstay. Over the past two decades, guitarist Alan Licht has worked with a veritable who's who of the experimental world, from free jazz legends (Rashied Ali, Derek Bailey) and electronica wizards (Fennesz, Jim O'Rourke) to turntable masters (DJ Spooky, Christian Marclay) and veteran Downtown New York composers (John Zorn, Rhys Chatham). Licht is also renown in the indie rock scene as a bandleader (Run On, Love Child) and supporting player to cult legen…
Lost City
Lost City project started as a series of photographs shot by visual artist and composer Aki Onda in New York starting right after 9.11 in 2001. A decisively introspective response to the major world event taking place, his pictures were devoid of direct references, but documented his immediate surroundings, focusing on how what happened resonated on a personal micro-level.Since 2005, Onda has been presenting this series as slide projections, which function as a visual score for improvisation, a…
We Thought We Could Do Anything
Collaborating with drummer Brian Chase (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Man Forever), guitarist Alan Licht (Lee Ranaldo & the Dust, The Blue Humans, Love Child, Run On, etc.) is back for another release on New Images Ltd. We Thought We Could Do Anything is a far less literal take on spontaneous dialogue than his “talk-rock” project Title TK, whose album / sleeve / book Rock$ was published in 2013. Impressive pedigrees aside, Licht and Chase are a real-deal pairing; each has a longstanding involvement in underg…
An emotional memoir of Martha Quinn
A thoughtful and entertaining look at how music and culture infect ('cross-pollinate?') each other, Alan Licht's An emotional memoir of Martha Quinn succeeds by being real. Paper, ink, binding -- it's all there -- but Licht, a long-time musician -- and writer of music-inspired commentary -- has brought the lessons learned, the high and low-lights of the last few decades in the realms of popular music, back home again. In his own words, Licht's book 'is a highly subjective survey of the last two …
Into the Night Sky
Into the Night Sky is the sixth album from avant guitarists Alan Licht and Loren Connors, the first after 2003's In France (FBWL). Since 1993 these New York City artists have evolved an instrumental dialogue merging shades of electric blues and minimalism. These two epic pieces -- one from 1996, the other 2006 -- recorded live in concert clearly show far their desolate sound world grew over a decade of collaboration while the core of layered guitar complexities and alien melodies remain. T…
YMCA
YMCA is guitarist Alan Licht's first solo release since 2003's A New York Minute double CD (on XI), and his first solo vinyl outing since 1994's long out-of-print Sink The Aging Process (on Siltbreeze). Largely recorded at a 2004 concert at a Cambridge Massachusetts YMCA by Keith Fullerton Whitman, YMCA documents Licht's solo guitar set of the time -- a three-part structured improvisation that moves from mournful, layered sustained tones that sound more like a reed organ than a guitar, to a gent…
Sound art: beyond music, between categories
Totally essential guide to sound art: a 304 pages book in hard cover + a CD with pieces from Bill Fontana ('Harmonic Bridge'), Steve Roden ('Rust'), Jean Dubuffet ('Terre foisonnante'), Destroy All Monsters ('Jam Smear'), Anthony Burr et Charles Curtis ('Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas' (1973-74) from Alvin Lucier) and Bernhard Gal ('57A').Over the past century, an art form has emerged that draws from the worlds of visual art and music. Sound art's roots can be found…
Five A\'s, Two C\'s, One D, One E, Two H\'s, Three I\'s, One K,
The Snow/Licht/Onda concert was proof that the most unconventional of instruments can be used to create imaginative soundscapes. Canadian pianist/electronic manipulator Michael Snow has led a life of diversity as a celebrated avant-garde filmmaker and improvising artist. New York-based guitarist Alan Licht has operated in a variety of musical spheres, influenced by everything from the minimalism of Steve Reich to no wave bands like Sonic Youth. Japanese-born, New York-based Aki Onda is an equall…
Everydays
Debut collaboration of New York artists and long-time duo partners Alan Licht and Aki Onda, whose combined history connects artists straddling the pop and experimental worlds, including Fennesz, Loren Connors, Takemura Nobukazu, Lee Ranaldo, and Toriko Nujiko. In the past decade their montage-inspired solo work - Licht's permutational guitar and tape pieces on Rabbi Sky and A New York Minute, Onda's field recording recontextualizations on Bon Voyage! and Ancient & Modern - has co-existed with th…
Rabbi sky
Mr. Ubiquitous lends his formidable name and image to a Siltbreeze project. Experimental drones and noises with nods to Phill Niblock and noted pop subversive James iDumpi McNew. A big, clanging, obstreperous, kosher meatloaf of an album.