Alan Licht’s first-ever solo performance in Seattle closes out a West Coast tour in support of his new double album Havens (VDSQ/Black Editions), a sprawling summation of his decades-long exploration of solo electric and acoustic guitar performances that navigate and challenge the boundaries of Minimalism, rock, and other non-idiomatic music-making. 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 improvisation versus considered performance. What these dichotomies shouldn’t obscure, however, is the simple pleasure that transpires in his refracting of idiom, conjuring expansive pieces that collapse, stratify & convolve competing schools of music to wholly singular ends.
Alan Licht has released several albums of his own structured improvisations for solo guitar and tape pieces and appears on dozens of other commercially released recordings. A co-founder of the indie rock bands Love Child and Run On, he has played with figures in the worlds of jazz, rock and the avant-garde, ranging from Rashied Ali to Tom Verlaine to Yoko Ono. He’s also known for his long-standing duo with guitarist Loren Connors, and for Text of Light, an ongoing ensemble which performs freely improvised concerts alongside screenings of classic avant-garde cinema, which he co-founded with Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo in 2001.
Alan has written extensively about the arts for Artforum, Modern Painters, Rhizome, the WIRE, Film Comment, Sight & Sound, Village Voice, Time Out New York, and other publications. His books include Common Tones: Selected interviews with artists and musicians (Blank Forms), Sound Art Revisited (Bloomsbury) and Will Oldham on Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy (Faber & Faber/W.W. Norton). Licht was curator at the famed New York experimental music venue Tonic from 2000 until its closing in 2007.
Presented by Nonsequitur.