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Home , Alan Licht, DJ Olive, Elliott Sharp, My Cat Is an Alien, Okkyung Lee, Table of the Elements

TEXT OF LIGHT http://www.sonicyouth.com/symu/lee/category/text-of-light/

"[Text of Light] …explode with a formidable combination of free skronk, seismic percussion, tonal drone and searing noise."

—The WIRE, March 2008

L to R: , , . 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), 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 City and other USA club and cinema venues.

Releases: Un Pranzo Favoloso. FinalMusik, . 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. 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 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 wizards (Fennesz, Jim OʼRourke) to turntable masters (DJ Olive, Christian Marclay) and veteran Downtown New York composers (, 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 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 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 group , 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 . 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 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, 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: , , Phill Niblock, David First, Lee Ranaldo, , Thomas Köner, Witold Szalonek, Mario Bertoncini, Miriam Marbe, hespos, , Dietmar Diesner, Wolfgang Fuchs, and many others. His works were performed by: , 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 (including '' 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 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 "" 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. some recent venues played: Munich Opera House, Munich, Germany, 2000, Lincoln Center, New York, 2000, burning man festival, 9:30 and Brain, Black Rock Dessert, Nevada, 2000, Saalfelden Jazz Festival, Saalfelden, Austria, 2000, Centre Pompidou, Paris, , 2000, Cosmos Arts Culture International, Taipei, Taiwan, 2000

"the term illbient was born as Dj Olive relates... i said as a joke ʻthat's illbientʼ, meaning sick." Illbient, Jana Martin, the village voice, page 37 - 40, July 23, 1996.

William Hooker William Hooker is one of New York's most important band leaders, an avant-garde drummer and poet who has been performing with various cutting-edge ensembles, bridging the gap between the jazz of the past and the possibilities of the future and taking jazz composition to new levels for over 25 years. He has led bands which included David Murray and David S. Ware, has toured and recorded extensively with Lee Ranaldo and of Sonic Youth, and has worked with artists as diverse as Christian Marclay, DJ Olive and Jim O'Rourke. He has released records on Silkheart, Homestead, RGI, Table of the Elements and Works.

Highly regarded in both the alternative rock and avant-garde jazz circles, Hooker has always placed himself beyond catagory, creating sounds and making music which makes quick work of the earth- bound semantics used to describe it. A product of New York's loft scene, he has recently done live scores to films of avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage and black film pioneer Oscar Micheaux. Hooker's latest recordings are Black Mask; Complexity 2 and The Gift all available at finer record stores. A collection of Hooker's poetry and images, as well as interviews and discography, can be found at www.williamhooker.com.

Christian Marclay Christian Marclay is a New York based visual artist and composer whose innovative work explores the juxtaposition between sound recording, , video and film. Born in California and raised in Geneva, Switzerland, he studied at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and at Cooper Union in New York. As performer and sound artist Christian Marclay has been experimenting, composing and performing with records and turntables since 1979 to create his unique "theater of found sound." Marclay has collaborated with musicians such as , Elliott Sharp, , , Shelley Hirsh, Christian Wolff, , Otomo Yoshihide, Arto Lindsay, and Sonic Youth among many others. His and video installations display provocative musical and visual landscapes and have been included in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art New York, Venice Biennale, Centre Pompidou Paris, Kunsthaus Zurich, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Tim Barnes (b. 1967) is a Sound designer, percussionist, composer, archivist, and operator living in New York City. His gesturalistic drumming style reaches for the pause in music through textural possibilities, as well as pointillist punctuations. He has performed solo and group works in Japan and in the U.S. with such visionaries as Jim O'Rourke, , Toshimaru Nakamura, Nagisa Nite, John Zorn, Okkyung Lee, and Neil Michael Hagerty (to name a few). Since 1998, Tim's record label, Quakebasket, has released records by Angus MacLise, Minamo, On Fillmore, Michael Schumacher, and Glenn Kotche. His sound design work has been heard around the world in television commercials, and in the film Hearts In Atlantis. In January of 2002, Tim Barnes started the year off by presenting 4 of his first conceptual compositons in a concert at TONIC in NYC (a recording of these compositions will be released in May on Quakebasket). Other recent projects include drumming for Tzadik recording artist Raz Mesinai, releasing a duo cd of percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani and the late bassist Peter Kowald, releasing a trio cd of Marina Rosenfeld, Toshio Kajiwara, and Barnes himself, recording music for both the Avant and Erstwhile record labels, and editing/mastering archival recordings of Henry Flynt and the "American Avant-Garde's best kept secret", Christopher Tree. Time Out magazine has called Tim "the missing piece of the New York avant-garde puzzle."

* * * * *

Stan Brakhage (1933-2003) Stan Brakhage is widely considered the most important avant-garde filmmaker of his generation and one of the greatest of the 20th century. His impact on the cinema has been compared to that of or Jackson Pollock on their respective mediums. Brakhage made nearly 400 films during his life, starting at age 19. His works range from a few seconds to a few hours and are mostly silent. Like the work of many artistic radicals, his is often described in terms of what it is not: working in a photographic medium most commonly defined by storytelling and the reproduction of real-world objects and events, Brakhage made non-narrative, non-representational films and at times even dispensed with photography altogether—in one of his best known works, Mothlight, he stuck mothwings, twigs, and leaves onto tape and made prints from it. An admirer of Ezra Pound and a close associate of poets like Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan, Brakhage preferred to think of his films as metaphorical, abstract and highly subjective — as a kind of poetry written with light. Still, he also made intensely personal films that depicted the birth of his first child (Window Water Baby Moving), war (23rd Psalm Branch), an autopsy (The Act of Seeing With Oneʼs Own Eyes), and various portraits of friends and family. Brakhage was also a film professor, author, and lecturer. TEXT OF LIGHT

Glasgow Herald Kill Your Timid Notion, Dundee Contemporary Arts December 14 2004

When this provocatively titled three-day festival of avant-garde sound and vision constituted itself last it gushingly promised to boldly go where few festivals had been before. It pretty much succeeded, too. This year, the film programme was expanded to include six separate strands, while the evening-only musical side of things appears to have contracted. It's an interesting balance, crucial to which is the shotgun marriage of live event to celluloid, where the performers effectively soundtrack silent works in a way that has already become de rigueur for more mainstream acts.

Here it works best when Text Of Light, featuring Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo alongside Alan Licht, guitar, saxist Ulrich Krieger, drummer Tim Barnes and DJ Olive on turntables, raise up a glorious barrage of electronic scree to accompany the screenings of five separate films by the legendary auteur Stan Brakhage. The effect of attempting to watch four separate screens of flickering abstraction is wonderfully, head-splittingly disorientating…

—Neil Cooper

L to R: Lee Ranaldo, DJ Olive, Ulrich Krieger, Alan Licht, Tim Barnes. Photo: Carlos Van Hijfte

Musicworks March 2006

HEAD: Brakhage-inspired laconic music Text of Light. Text of Light. Starlight Furniture STAR024 CD.

Alan Licht and Lee Ranaldo formed Text of Light in 1999 in order to improvise alongside the silent films of Stan Brakhage. They provoked an outcry from certain members of the experimental film community, who complained that Brakhage films were always intended to be silent and should only be seen that way. In response, Text of Light put disclaimers on all their screenings to explain that they were not creating soundtracks, but using the films as a starting point for their own improvisational forays. This , removed from the images, proves their claims and opens up a listening experience that draws from both the agility of the musicians and the inspirational energy of Brakhageʼs body of works.

This recording documents three performances, with guitarists Licht & Ranaldo joined at various moments by percussionist William Hooker, saxophonist Ulrich Kreiger, and turntablists DJ Olive and Christian Marclay. The first set features a sinuous interplay between , saxophone, and traps, with the five musicians shuffling around as if they were all part of a many-headed beast. With the second set, DJ Olive steps to the fore, bringing in washes of bell-like tones and a sparse, lone voice that feels like it was ripped from an avant-garde film from the ʼ60s. Christian Marclay steps in for the third and final set, which starts with a beautifully sampled string quartet before tumbling into a full, free guitar-and-drum freak-out that caps off these three performances brilliantly.

Separated from the image, the music of Text of Light seems very different from the filmwork of Stan Brakhage. This is most noticeable in the different rhythm featured in the music. Brakhageʼs films are often densely edited, with either quick photographic cuts or dancing tendrils of hand-painted colour applied directly to the film. In contrast, this music unveils itself laconically—it is music of layers rather than propulsion. In this way it feels more akin to the Brakhage film stills that are found on the albumʼs cover: layered implying a vision that stretches to infinity. This music survives well outside its original context. Just as Brakhage films are worth seeing silently on their own (on 16mm film if you can, but the DVD By Brakhage, on the Criterion label, is a worthwhile introduction), Text of Light works beautifully without the imagistic inspiration and the baggage of the debate about whether Text of Lightʼs live performances desecrate those images. Like the film the duo took their name from, Licht and Ranaldo brilliantly explore the possibilities of the imagination in the confines of the space they inhabit, whether it is onstage or on CD.

—Chris Kennedy TEXT OF LIGHT REVIEW Phosphor Magazine January 2003 X-Tract Sculpture Musicale: Dialogue between music and art 01.04.2003 Podewil, Berlin

The next band on stage was Text of Light. This five-piece performed improvised music to the films of Stan Brakhage. Stan Brakhage is a prolific experimental film maker and member of the American cinema avant-garde of the 1950-60s. His film shown here was called The Text of Light from 1974, in which light plays the major role. The film shows short fragments of unidentifiable light objects, most of the time rather vague and with lots colours. Every 20 seconds the images change, so one keeps interested and curious what the next image will be. The band Text of Light, this evening consisting of Lee Ranaldo, Alan Licht, Ulrich Krieger, DJ Olive and Tim Barnes created improvised music to the film. And their sound was rather experimental, starting with concrete scraping sounds, reverb bass and . It took the band a while to reach a musical understanding among each other, a certain unity, but after this warming-up period their sound became better and better. Some African music showed up during a calmer moment, a fragment from a record being played, some tingling bells could be heard before the band starting heading towards a climax. Especially Ulrich Krieger on electric sax played very furious and percussionist Tim Barnes seemed to get a positive hysterical mood, resulting in a beautiful wall of noise. After this climax the music became more low- key again and some guitars could be heard again. The calmer parts were just as interesting, which made that these five individuals delivered a fine fusion, ending an excellent opening night of the X-Tract festival.

Downtown Music Gallery Victorialville May 2002

“The new ʻText of Lightʼ quintet with Lee Ranaldo & Alan Licht on guitars, DJ Olive on turntable/sampler and Ulrich Krieger on sax accompanied films by Stan Brakage, which were very strange and constantly in motion. William Hooker is often known as one of heaviest of all free-jazz drummers , but here played extremely light and spacious, showing a side few have rarely heard. Their sonic soundscapes fit Brakhageʼs films with a well seasoned and well placed stew of restrained, yet occasionally explosive results.”

—Bruce Galanter

Rotterdam International Film Festival, 2005. Olive, Uli, Tim, Lee. Photo: Carlos Van Hjfte

L to R: Lee Ranaldo, DJ Olive, Ulrich Krieger, Alan Licht, William Hooker. Photo by Andy Moor