Text of Light


Thursday, September 20, 2007, 8pm
Alan Licht / Lee Ranaldo / DJ Olive / Marina Rosenfeld
performing with the film I Take These Truths

View photos of the performance

The Text of Light group was formed in 2001 with the idea to perform improvised music to the films of Stan Brakhage and other members of 1950-60s American Cinema avant-garde (Brakhage's film Text of Light was the premiere performance and namesake of the group). The original premise was to improvise (not illustrate) to the 1950-60s American Avant-Garde Films, an under-known period of American filmic poetics. Members of the group include Lee Ranaldo and Alan Licht (guitars/devices), Christian Marclay and DJ Olive (turntables), William Hooker (drums/percussion), Ulrich Krieger (saxophone/electronics), and most recently Tim Barnes (drums/percussion). Various combinations of these players attend Text of Light gigs thereby presenting various group permutations, while other times all members participate.

Alan Licht has released four albums of pieces for solo and multiple guitars. Since 1990 he has recorded and performed as an improviser with Rashied Ali, Jim O'Rourke, Lee Ranaldo, Christian Marclay, Thurston Moore, Arto Lindsay, John Zorn, Zeena Parkins, Ikue Mori, Lukas Ligeti, Derek Bailey, Dean Roberts, Charles Curtis, Ulrich Krieger, Loren Mazzacane Connors, Nihilist Spasm Band, Fred Lonberg-Holm, William Hooker, Michael Snow, Keiji Haino, DJ Olive, Rudolph Grey, Fennesz, DJ Spooky, and others.  He is the founding member of several bands and has toured as a guitarist with Tom Verlaine (2001), Brokeback (2001), Papa M (1999-present), Royal Trux (1999) & Plush (1999). He performs the work of Phill Niblock regularly.  Alan Licht is also a writer, (An Emotional Memoir of Martha Quinn, Drag City Press, 2001) and a curator.

Lee Ranaldo is a musician, writer, and visual artist.   As an original member of the group Sonic Youth, formed in 1981 in New York City, he has recorded and performed around the world. Their last record was Sonic Nurse. The group has just completed a Goodbye 20th Century tour of Europe, performing the compositions by John Cage, Christian Wolfe, George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, Steve Reich and others. Among Lee's solo records are Dirty Windows, a collection of spoken texts with music, and Amarillo Ramp (for Robert Smithson), pieces for the guitar. His books include Bookstore, Road Movies, Jrnls80s, Lengths and Breaths and a full-length book of writings on Moroccan travels was published in 2002.  His writings appear in the collections Heights of the Marvelous and Verses that Hurt. His visual work has been included in recent exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery in London and the Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art.

DJ Olive is the son of two ethnographic filmmakers. Raised in Rhode Island, Nova Scotia, Trinidad, and Australia, he 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, www.multipolyomni.com, and We? while producing ambient events throughout Brooklyn and Manhattan . He has started two recording labels, Phonomena and The Agriculture.  He has recently played at such venues as the Munich Opera House, Lincoln Center, burning man festivalr, Saalfelden Jazz Festival (Australia), Centre Pompidou (Paris), and Cosmos Arts Culture International (Taipei).

Marina Rosenfeld is a composer and turntablist based in New York City. She initiated a decade-long engagement with composition, improvisation, performance and situational aesthetic practices while still a student in 1994 with her now-notorious "sheer frost orchestra", a performance realized by 17 women on floor-bound electric guitars, deploying nail-polish bottles as sensitive and magical sound-producing implements. As a turntablist, Marina has developed a distinctive practice playing her own custom acetate records ('dub plates'), which are imprinted with original, fragmentary sound created in the studio to be remixed, manipulated, and otherwise transformed live. She performs frequently in the U.S. and Europe, and has performed with many leading contemporary musicians, including Ikue Mori, Christian Marclay, Tony Conrad, Kaffe Matthews, George Lewis, Nels Cline, Lee Ranaldo, Martin Tétreault, Otomo Yoshihide, Philip Jeck, Kim Gordon, Christof Kurzmann, Alan Licht, Elliot Sharp, Dieb 13, Raz Mesinai, Anthony Coleman, and many others.  Marina's work has appeared in a wide variety of contexts including the Whitney Museum, the Tate Modern Museum, Artists Space, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions; a public-art project for Creative Time; and festivals in the US and abroad including Donaueschingen, Ars Electronica, Musikprotokoll/Steirische Herbst, Pro Musica Nova, Maerz Musik, Mutek, Wein Modern and The Wire's Adventures in Modern Music, among others. Marina's writing has appeared in Artforum, Leonardo and the LA Weekly and will next appear in John Zorn's forthcoming Arcana 2: Musicians on Music. She's been a member of the faculty of the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College since 2003.

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