“I have dedicated my life to the avant-garde,” declares Alan Licht, celebrated composer, guitarist, and music critic. It would be hard to think of a statement that rings more true. Indeed, Licht’s involvement with the experimental and avant-garde worlds of film, visual art, writing, and music in the past three decades have been significant in shaping critical opinion and taste.
A Hoboken native, Licht moved to Williamsburg in the mid-90s when faced with increased rent, but he has been heavily involved with the experimental music scene since the early 90s, both in his solo career (which includes releases on Atavistic, Ecstatic Yod, and Siltbreeze) as well as a number of other projects, most notably his collaboration with celebrated guitarist Loren Mazzacane Connors (particularly 1998’s Hoffman Estates on Drag City), the now-defunct bands Lovechild and Run On, and ongoing “supergroup” project Text of Light, in which improvised music is played alongside Stan Brakhage films and other members of the cinema avant garde. Text of Light has featured Lee Ranaldo, William Hooker, Christian Marclay and Roger Miller as members.
Licht has also enjoyed a rich and prolific career as a music critic for magazines such as Bomb and Wire (where he’s profiled iconic NYC figures Lou Reed, Tom Verlaine, and Michael Gira, and a host of others), and has a distinctive intellectual and theoretical approach to music journalism.
“There should be a tradition of musicians writing theoretically about what they’re doing, and writing about it as a member of the community, rather than as a critic looking at it from the outside,” Licht said in a recent conversation. “It seems to me that some of the best critics are musicians, or at least they have some musical knowledge or training.”
Licht has written liner notes for notable reissue albums such as Glenn Branca’s Lesson No. 1, but he’s also published a work on music and culture, the widely praised “An Emotional Memoir of Martha Quinn,” which appeared on Drag City in 2000.
Licht notes certain key similarities between creating music and writing about it. “The written page is a composition in terms of a certain flow and rhythm, in the same way the one writes music,” says Licht. “It’s a very musical thing.”
Last Saturday, Licht performed a solo guitar improvisation to experimental filmmaker Elka Krajewska’s 25-minute piece “Plany Mela for Dome,” part of a larger program titled “New Vision / New Sound / Big Screen.” The event, which was a part of the Syracuse International Film Festival 2007, also featured the works of photographer and video artist Carrie Mae Weems and video artist Bill Viola, both of whom presented provocative works that were based on music-image interaction.
Out of these entries, Krajewska and Licht’s collaboration was the most interesting. Formally and aesthetically, “Plany Mela” was also the most impressive, perhaps because “Plany Mela” was the only piece specifically conceived for the Bristol IMAX theater, where the program was held, and Krajewska took advantage of the unusual, concave screen.
Based on the concept of a “ring and afterimage,” “Plany Mela” works with image and sound in a form reminiscent of “call and response” forms found in the sacral or folk music traditions of Krajewska’s native Poland.
As Krajewska’s program explains, “The program’s sequencing, guided by core principles of the afterimage effect, addresses
porous relationships between periphery and center, linking every part and the whole, seen and just seen. It stimulates our ‘remembering eye,’ activates our blind spots clashing organizational structures with those temporal urgencies most singular and primal. It renounces ‘target thinking.’”
Licht, who had never seen “Plany Mela” on the IMAX screen until the actual performance, contributed a solo guitar piece that interacted with Krajewska’s laptop visual manipulations. “It’s not something that I’ve synchronized to the images,” explains Licht. “It’s something where things will go in and out of sync just by chance, or perhaps organically.”
“I’ll be looking at the screening, but I won’t necessarily be ‘reacting’ to what Elka is doing,” Licht continues. “I have a general idea of what I’m going to do, but it’s not charted out in relation to what the images are. In fact, I actively dislike doing things that are illustrative of something happening onscreen,” Licht elaborates. “I just feel like the time for that has long since passed.”