Text of Light are back!
 

http://issueprojectroom.org:80/2009/...text-of-light/

02/11 @ 8pm - Text of Light

Admission: $10 for members







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; and have done several tours of Europe as well as performing in New York City and other USA club and cinema venues.
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, Derek Bailey) and electronica wizards (Fennesz, Jim OʼRourke) to turntable masters (DJ Spooky, Christian Marclay) and veteran Downtown New York composers (John Zorn, 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. Licht has collaborated on film and video performances with Charles Atlas and Andrew Lampert. He has written extensively about the arts for the WIRE, Modern Painters, Art Review,
Film Coment, Sight & Sound, Premiere, Purple, Village Voice, New York Sun, Time Out New York, and other publications. His book, 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/performer, 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 visual art exhibition “Sonic Youth etc : Sensational Fix” recently opened in itʼs second venue (October 2008, Museion, Bolzano, Italy) of an extensive tour. Leeʼs visual art & sound works have been shown most recently at ZKM, Karlsruhe; MACBA, Barcelona; and ISCP, Brooklyn. His latest collection of poems is Hello From The American Desert. Maelstrom from Drift, a new solo CD, was released in May 2008. His longstanding duo performance Drift with partner Leah Singer has been presented in clubs, galleries, and museums around the world, and debuted as an installation work at Gigantic Art Space, NYC in 2005. The pair are now at work on a new conception for installation and performance, I Love You/I Hat You, the premeire version of this piece opened at the Teaching Gallery, Hudson County Community College, Troy NY in October 2008. In February 2008 further iterations of this piece will be presented at Cneai, Paris; and Magasin3, Stockholm. In 2007 & 2008 the pair were artists-in-residence at Atelier Cneai, Paris.
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. 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, France, 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, meaningsick.” 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 Thurston Moore 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 Knitting Factory 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, photography, video and film. Born in California and raised in Geneva, Switzerland, he studied sculpture 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 phonograph records and turntables since 1979 to create his unique “theater of found sound.” Marclay has collaborated with musicians such as John Zorn, Elliott Sharp, Fred Frith, Zeena Parkins, Shelley Hirsh, Christian Wolff, Butch Morris, Otomo Yoshihide, Arto Lindsay, and Sonic Youth among many others. His sculptures 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 record label 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, Ikue Mori, 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.”

I'm hoping for a DVD release from them so we can see the relations between the images and sounds.

I want:

Some cool place in central Europe, easily reached by plane, to have a Text of Light festival, featuring solo sets by each member, and finishing with a full Text of Light performance. And it has to happen on a Saturday.

I could die relatively happy if that was to happen.

don't you want tol to play songs you can hum to?

:mad:

You know very well that I prefer to whistle quietly to myself.

I saw them in 07 and had a really great time. I'd love to see more from them

that is one fucking awesome idea.

Issue Project Room is having some great shows over the next month: NNCK, D Charles Speer, Tom Carter, Helena Espevel and Marcia Bassett duo(!!), Acid Birds....my only gripe is they always keep you waiting, the start time is a joke. there is never any point in getting there early for a good seat because they shuttle you into another room to wait so actually the people who get there last get in first.

a dvd would be fuckin great. from the 2002 berlin gig please :)

no you are right, as far as I know!
I remember reading something about that silent thing too.
and about the shooting angle....

I just agree, hahaha

thanks!

The crew that recorded this sounds very familiar to me :D :D