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Text of Light TEXT OF LIGHT http://www.sonicyouth.com/symu/lee/category/text-of-light/ "[Text of Light] …explode with a formidable combination of free jazz skronk, seismic percussion, tonal drone and searing guitar noise." —The WIRE, March 2008 L to R: Lee Ranaldo, Ulrich Krieger, Alan Licht. Photo by Daša Barteková TEXT OF LIGHT The Text of Light group was formed in 1999 with the idea to perform improvised music to the films of Stan Brakhage and other members of the American Cinema avante garde of the 1950s-60s (Brakhageʼs film 'The Text of Light' was the premiere performance and namesake of the group). The original premise was to improvise (not 'illustrate') to films from the American Avante-Garde (50s-60s etc), an under- known period of American filmic poetics. Members of the group include Lee Ranaldo and Alan Licht (gtrs/devices), Christian Marclay and DJ Olive (turntables), William Hooker (drums/perc), Ulrich Krieger (sax/electronics), and most recently Tim Barnes (drums/perc). Various combinations of these players attend 'Text' gigs, depending on individual schedules, so the group takes on various permutations---sometimes all members participate, sometimes not. To date the group has performed with the following films: Brakhageʼs The Text of Light, Dog Star Man, Anticipation of the Night, Songs; Harry Smithʼs Mahagonny outtakes, Oz-The Approach to the Emerald City, and Late Superimpositions. The group has headlined the Victoriaville Music Festival, Canada (2002); Three Rivers Film Festival, Pittsburgh; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The Whitney Museum, NYC; and have done several tours of Europe as well as performing in New York City and other USA club and cinema venues. Releases: Un Pranzo Favoloso. FinalMusik, Italy. January 2007. 012805 Rotterdam 1. Room40, Australia. January 2007 Cosmic Debris Vol 1. Split 12” with My Cat Is An Alien (limited 100 copies). Italy. Dec 2006. Metal Box. 3xCD. Dirter Promotions. September 2006. Reel 1. Archive CD release, limited to 200 copies. May 2005 Text of Light s/t. CD. Starlight Furniture. June 2004. Piece for Harry Smith. Vinyl w screenprint in clear pkg. Table of the Elements Lanthanides series. May 2004. Text of Light / Tacita Dean—collaboration with visual artist Tacita Dean, limited to 100 copies. En/Of #21—Bottrop boy, Germany. Vinyl. April 2004 TEXT OF LIGHT notes Text of Light does not perform soundtracks to the films of Stan Brakhage. Rather it uses the film as a further element for improvisation, almost as a fifth (or sixth) performer. While Brakhage intended for these films to be screened silently as films, when framed in and of themselves in a movie theatre, in Text of Light presentations they are being juxtaposed with the music, in a kind of real-time performance, mixed- media collage. Any of the Text of Light performers may or may not be viewing the film as it unspools, and may or may not be reacting to whatʼs happening on screen— just as they may or may not be reacting to the sounds of any of the other individual performers. AMM used to loop the Beach Boysʼ “Barbara Ann” and improvise with the loop running, but they would not necessarily be “accompanying” the song, or even reacting to it. Derek Bailey would prepare a tape of silences broken by brief interludes of guitar and perform solo improvisations with it, never knowing exactly when the taped guitar would come in. Text of Light represents an extension of these free improvisational experiments into an intermedia environment. What is exciting is when certain members are engaged in a kind of dialogue with the film, and the others are just reacting to this, setting up a chain of events that is unique in audio/visual performance situations. Also of note is the role of records and the turntablist, which is crucial to Text of Light. The records, like the films, are “canned” documents that have already been carefully edited and prepared. The turntablist deconstructs them in any number of ways—changing playback speed, effects processing, scratching, skipping, looping. So in any given Text of Light performance, there is one fixed pre-recorded element unfolding without interference or variation in real time (the film), multiple pre-recorded elements that are manipulated and re- designed on the spot by a performer (the records), and multiple live elements are creating their own sounds and structures on the spot (the instrumentalists). The records bridge the gap between the predetermination of the film and the spontaneous composition of the instruments/instrumentalists. The filmʼs running length is used as a frame for the duration of the improvisation (although commonly the improvisation lasts slightly longer than the running time of the film). Having this frame sets Text of Light apart from other free improvisational situations, in which the duration of any individual “piece” is not determined beforehand (although in a normal free improv concert situation, a standard concert length will be in mind, i.e. if youʼve played a 40 minute improv and then a 20 minute improv, you might stop or continue with only a short 5 or 10 minute piece). The cumulative result is a new chapter in the annals of free improvisation and mixed media. —Alan Licht TEXT OF LIGHT Individual Bios Alan Licht Over the past two decades, guitarist Alan Licht has worked with a veritable whoʼs who of the experimental world, from free jazz legends (Rashied Ali, Peter Brotzmann) and electronica wizards (Fennesz, Jim OʼRourke) to turntable masters (DJ Olive, Christian Marclay) and veteran Downtown New York composers (Phill Niblock, Rhys Chatham). Licht is also renown in the indie rock scene as a bandleader (Run On, Love Child) and supporting player to cult legends like Tom Verlaine, Arthur Lee, Arto Lindsay, and Jandek. He has released five albums of compositions for tape and solo guitar, and his sound and video installations have been exhibited in the U.S. and Europe. With Sonic Youthʼs Lee Ranaldo, he founded Text of Light, an ongoing ensemble which performs freely improvised concerts alongside screenings of classic avant garde cinema. Licht was curator at the famed New York experimental music venue Tonic from 2000 until its closing in 2007, and has written extensively about the arts for the WIRE, Artforum, Modern Painters, Art Review, Film Coment, Sight & Sound, Premiere, Purple, Village Voice, Time Out New York, and other publications. His first book, An Emotional Memoir of Martha Quinn, was published by Drag City Press in 2003; Sound Art:Beyond Music, Between Media, the first extensive survey of the genre in English, was published by Rizzoli in fall 2007. Lee Ranaldo Lee Ranaldo is a composer, visual artist, writer, and founding member of the New York City group Sonic Youth, who continue to record new music and tour the world on a regular basis. Their most recent record, The Eternal, was relased in June 2009 on Matador Records. His visual and sound works have been shown at galleries and museums around the world. Among Lee's solo records are Dirty Windows - a collection of spoken texts with music, Amarillo Ramp (for Robert Smithson) - pieces for the guitar, and the recent collection Maelstrom from Drift. His most recent solo recording is Weʼll Know Where When We Get There, in collaboration with partner Leah Singer [2009, CNEAI]. His books include Bookstore, Road Movies, Jrnls80s and Lengths and Breaths. The recent publication, Hello From The American Desert, a book of poems based on internet spam, was published by Silver Wonder Press in 2008. His visual work is currently on view in the show Sonic Youth, etc : Sensational Fix, which will next open at the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid on January 28, 2010. Ulrich Krieger Ulrich Krieger studied composition, electronic music and saxophone in New York and Berlin, Germany. He calls his way of sax playing : 'acoustic electronics' and often uses his instrument more as an 'analogue sampler' from which he can play his 'quasi-electronic' sounds, which then get processed - rather than as a traditional finger-virtuoso instrument. By amplifying his instrument in different ways, he gets down to the 'grains of the sounds', changing their identity and structure from within. He collaborated with artists like: Lou Reed, La Monte Young, Phill Niblock, David First, Lee Ranaldo, Elliott Sharp, Thomas Köner, Witold Szalonek, Mario Bertoncini, Miriam Marbe, hespos, Merzbow, Dietmar Diesner, Wolfgang Fuchs, and many others. His works were performed by: Soldier String Quartet, zeitkratzer, oh-ton ensemble, Ensemble United Berlin, California Ear Unit, Seth Josel, and many more. He toured as a soloist, composer, and with various bands, ensembles and orchestras (including 'Ensemble Modern' and the 'Berliner Philharmoniker') through Europe, North America, Asia and Australia, including radio and TV broadcasts. He has been awarded various international grants, residency, and prizes and has released several CDs on American and European labels. DJ Olive the Audio Janitor (aka Gregor Asch) son of two ethnographic filmmakers. Raised in Rhode Island, Nova Scotia, Trinidad, and Australia. received a BFA from SUNY Purchase in 1987. In 1990, after living in Greece, he moved to Greenpoint Brooklyn becoming an active member of the infamous Williamsburg art scene co-founding Lalalandia Entertainment Research Corporation. In 1994 he started up Multipolyomni.com and We˙ while producing ambient events throughout Brooklyn and Manhattan. During a joke he gave birth to the term "illbient" the same year. He has started two recording labels in 2000, Phonomena and theAgriculture and continues to design and produce segments from multipolyomni's opera "Quark Soup" a few solo and collaborative compositions, recordings by We˙: "as is", Asphodel, San Fransico, 1997. "Square Root of Negative One", Asphodel, San Fransico, 1999. "Decentertainment", Home Entertainment, New York, 2000.
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