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Book
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9781953691019
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"Conversations with the avant-garde's leading lights--from Suicide to Anohni -- by experimental music's go-to interviewer, guitarist and sound artist Alan Licht. For the past 30 years, Alan Licht has been a performer, programmer and chronicler of New York's art and music scenes. His dry wit, deep erudition and unique perspective -- informed by decades of experience as a touring and recording guitarist in the worlds of experimental music and underground rock -- have distinguished him as the go-to writer for profiles of adventurous artists across genres. A precocious scholar and improvisor, by the time he graduated from Vassar College in 1990 Licht had already authored important articles on minimalist composers La Monte Young, Tony Conrad and Charlemagne Palestine, and recorded with luminaries such as Rashied Ali and Thurston Moore. In 1999 he became a regular contributor to the British experimental music magazine the Wire while continuing to publish in a wide array of periodicals, ranging from the artworld glossies to underground fanzines. Common Tones gathers a selection of never-before-published interviews, many conducted during the writing of Licht's groundbreaking profiles, alongside extended versions of his celebrated conversations with artists, previously untranscribed public exchanges and new dialogues held on the occasion of this collection. Even Lou Reed, a notoriously difficult interviewee, was impressed. Interviews by Alan Licht with Vito Acconci, ANOHNI, Cory Arcangel, Matthew Barney, Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham, Tony Conrad, the Dream Syndicate's Karl Precoda, Richard Foreman, Henry Flynt, Milford Graves, Adris Hoyos, Ken Jacobs, Jutta Koether, Christian Marclay, Phill Niblock, Alessandra Novaga, Tony Oursler, Lou Reed, Kelly Reichardt, The Sea and Cake, Suicide, Michael Snow, Greg Tate, Tom Verlaine, Rudy Wurlitzer and Yo La Tengo's Georgia Hubley and Ira Kaplan. Introduction by Jay Sanders.
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LP
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VDSQ 012LP
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2015 release. 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).
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2CD
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XI 128CD
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2003 release. Two CDs for the price of one. Alan Licht wears many hats. Over the years, he's been a curator of music as well as a tireless performer. And he's as well-known an author as he is a musician. It's one thing to have eclectic tastes; it's another to make a practice of them. While Licht's earlier records have seamlessly melded his improvisational guitar playing with extended plundered sounds, A New York Minute takes things a few steps further. Instead of fusing the many sides of Licht into one monolithic mega-mix, this disc separates them into discrete compositions. There's a lot more at stake here: the guitar pieces are showcased as guitar pieces and the plundered works are just that. The conceptual tendencies in Licht no longer hide behind his talent as a guitarist; likewise, the guitar pieces are no longer propped on hooky concepts that take our attention away from his fretwork. The good news is that both work: Licht is as strong a conceptual artist as he is a composer.
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LP
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EMEGO 166LP
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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, noise and avant-garde in general that stretches back more than two decades. As it says on the box, side A was recorded four years later than the side B (and vice versa). Four Years Older sees a move away from the loop-based pieces of recent releases. On Four Years Later in particular the guitar's fingerboard is actually touched more than on any other solo piece of the last 10 years, although the guitar is pushed to sound more like a suitcase synth, a church organ, a hornet's nest, and a malfunctioning PlayStation than a guitar per se. As Alan points out: "Four Years Earlier was the debut of the piece; it was in three sections, the latter two of which appear here. The first section was identical to the first section of Four Years Later. I scrapped the second two parts after a couple of subsequent performances and developed it into a six-part piece, and then a seven-part piece in this studio version. In concert the piece lasts at least 30 minutes, I've shortened it on Four Years Later with an eye towards top 40 radio play." The initial "Four Years Earlier" session is a blistering electronic nail storm that would not feel out of place on one of Russell Haswell's legendary Live Salvage sets. "Four Years Later" is equally relentless but lets in some light with an ecstatic mid-section that ascends toward the spiritual. At the end of the day, the final result is music which is both corrosive and lyrical, a feeling which is reflected in Stephen O'Malley's eye-melting artwork.
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LP
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FV 063LP
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"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 gently plucked middle section, to a final firestorm of loop processing that is a tour de force of 'the changing same.' Inspired by his friends Oren Ambarchi and Tetuzi Akiyama's then-current albums (Triste and Don't Forget To Boogie), Licht proposed YMCA to Idea Records to form a kind of trilogy with those releases. With Idea's subsequent demise, Family Vineyard has stepped in to bring this peak performance out as a special limited edition vinyl release, exactly as the artist originally conceived it. Limited to 500 copies."
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Book
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DC 213BK
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"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 decades as seen through my prism as a music performer, listener, scenester, and occasionally, writer. It traces the changes in the New York and national underground music scenes, paralleling my personal journey through adolescence to adulthood.'"
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