Morricone Playing Love Midi
Wan Cabiness
Alan Licht is a writer, musician, and curator based in New York City. He is equally known for his guitar work in the underground rock bands Run On and Love Child and in the experimental groups the Blue Humans and Text of Light. He has released eight solo guitar albums and more than a dozen duo and trio records of improvised music.
I first met Alan Licht after a show in Montreal in 2017, and he agreed to an interview. We met again around a year later, this time at a show at Wonders of Nature in Brooklyn, New York. We did an extended interview after that show, talking about playing with Arthur Lee, Jandek, and the Boredoms, along with many other moments in his career. That interview is finally seeing the light of day thanks to Tone Glow. In advance of its publication I caught up with Alan on May 11, 2021, and talked about some of his current works.
That was recorded in November 2018 at Union Pool. Steve Gunn was doing a residency there and asked me and Loren to open. It was the first time anyone had asked us to play in around eight years. It was a little weird to play together after that long a gap, but the audience was watching with rapt attention and seemed really focused on it. We had a good recording of the show and Loren was really keen to have it released.
Three Chords and a Sword, an album of covers released only as a download on Bandcamp, is a kind of personal history, both as a dive into your archive and through the selection of songs and artists for the new recordings.
I knew Chris Brokaw from when he was in Codeine, because Love Child and Codeine played together quite a bit. Chris was out of the band by the time the two bands toured Europe together in 1992. He was playing in Come at that point. I still stay in touch with Chris. The show I played before the Montreal show you saw in 2017 was me, Chris, and Bill Nace all doing solo sets in Northampton, Massachusetts.
You mentioned some Chicago musicians. When you and Loren made Hoffman Estates, did you already know some of the Chicago people who played on that record?
I was wondering about that time in your life. I thought about Hoffman Estates as a fulcrum, with Run On and Love Child coming before, and new directions in experimental music after.
AL: Yeah, it was one gig. It was Ken Vandermark, Rob Mazurek, Chad Taylor on drums, Joshua Abrams on bass, Jim, me, and Loren. I think Ken, Josh, and Rob were in town for another show. That was a really good gig. I wish there was a recording, it would be fun to hear.
Last night we talked a little about the Jandek show in Glasgow, released as Glasgow Sunday 2005. You and Loren Connors both played with him, but not all together at that show. Then you and Loren also recorded a duo album around the same time in Glasgow.
Press Release info: Loraine James comes with her second album for Hyperdub, made in the summer of 2020. Reflection is a turbulent expression of inner-space, laid out in unflinching honesty, that offers gentle empathy and bitter-sweet hope.
2020 was tough for Loraine; unable to tour and build on the success of For You and I, Loraine was prolific in the studio, self releasing, plus releasing the well received stepping-stone Nothing EP, which realised a unique pop sensibility she develops more here. Her 2020 listening habits - Drill and R&B seep through into Reflection too. In contrast to the brash splashes of For You and I and the grimey anger of Nothing, Reflection is pared down and confident, taking the listener through how the year felt as a young Black queer woman and her acolytes in a world that has suddenly stopped moving.
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Alan Licht: Yeah, I think that was almost exactly three years ago, give or take a week. Rob\u2019s latest record on VDSQ, Arc Minutes, is great. He was already great when I did that show with him and he keeps getting better and better.
It took a little convincing for me to get behind it, but when I compared it to some of the recent solo recordings he\u2019s been doing it was really different, even though Loren dominates a bit he\u2019s not doing what he would do on his own, so for that reason I thought it was valid to release. Unlike older shows where I would try to reharmonize what he was doing, that was hard for me to do this time because Loren\u2019s playing has gotten more atonal. It\u2019s like an alien landscape, where you\u2019re trying to take it all in and navigate it at the same time. And I feel like it\u2019s coming from this emotional place that\u2019s hard to put a finger on. It\u2019s not happy, sad, angry, or something simplistic, but maybe it has something to do with the two of us playing together again after such a long time.
The shortwave piece was performed in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2009 on a bill with a short-lived trio that Chris Brokaw, Doug McCombs, and Elliott Dicks had, and Major Stars. I\u2019m not sure why I didn\u2019t play guitar. I had a shortwave radio that belonged to my partner Angela Jaeger. This long power ballad came on about three quarters of the way through, and that was just a complete fluke\u2014a peak moment that couldn\u2019t have been better. Keith Fullerton Whitman had recorded it, and I\u2019d wanted to release it for some time.
Lawrence asked me to do a drone cassette. I wasn\u2019t working on any pieces that fit that description, but I\u2019d been going through my archive and finding lots of older recordings. I got into Bandcamp a year ago, at the start of the pandemic. It\u2019s the best internet platform I\u2019ve ever worked with and it\u2019s given me a new way of trying to get these unreleased recordings out there. One-off gigs at Tonic, or a grouping of people that just happened the one time\u2026 I realized I had thirty years of unreleased live recordings that were sitting here doing nothing, and it gave me a forum to put them out. So as I was putting stuff on Bandcamp I remembered the show at PA\u2019s and the other piece, which accompanied a piece by the video artist Birgit Rathsmann. I\u2019ve known Lawrence for a long time. When I toured New Zealand with Oren Ambarchi and Tetuzi Akiyama, the first show was in Auckland. Lawrence opened the show and the Dead C headlined.
The Suicide cover (\u201CRocket USA\u201D) was from an old cassette made on Will Baum\u2019s 4-track. I recorded it one morning in 1988 when I was waiting for the rest of Love Child to show up to my parent\u2019s basement in New Jersey to record our demos.
Yeah, those recordings were all from the same show at Cooler in 1996. That was one entire show where I played the chord organ and sang. I also did a medley of \u201CNightime\u201D by Big Star and \u201CDoesn\u2019t Anyone Love the Dark,\u201D one of my songs that we did in Run On, which almost made it onto this release.
Three of the tracks were recorded on acoustic guitar at home. I was surprised to hear your American Primitive-style take on Van Halen\u2019s \u201CJump,\u201D though I know you\u2019re a big fan of Eddie.
I thought of it when Eddie passed away last year. I saw an amazing, virtuosic arrangement of the song for acoustic guitar by Mike Dawes, who did it in memoriam of him. I wanted to try something more in the John Fahey guitar soli school. You know, I can\u2019t replicate all the crazy synth lines, which Dawes did, and I wanted to focus on the song\u2019s drone aspect.
\u201CTom Violence\u201D is in G minor tuning. The midsection in the original is a noise breakdown, which you couldn\u2019t really replicate on an acoustic guitar. Initially I was trying to do a fake flamenco thing, which didn\u2019t really work. Then I remembered Derek Bailey\u2019s Ballads CD, where he starts off playing jazz standards and then spins off into free improv. I started to do an arrangement where I was doing a lot of Derek extended techniques, pinging the strings behind the nut and so on and so forth, but I pulled back from that a little bit and thought more about Robbie Basho. Like you said, the whole album is a personal history, but this track is also, to me, a history of alternate tunings and techniques, from Robbie Basho and Derek Bailey to Sonic Youth, trying to show that lineage which is definitely there.
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