Interview: ALAN LICHT
We met on the morning of June 4, 2017, after his performance at Montreal’s Suoni Per Il Popolo festival, with Kristin Thora Haraldsdottir and Vicky Mettler.
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ML: Last night, we talked about your Minimalist Top Ten lists [published in Halana magazine starting in 1996]. You said they had kind of taken on a life of their own.
AL: Yeah. People have done blogs where they post the albums, or links to them on Youtube. It's a little bit different, because I had to do a lot of digging to track those things down. Even when I wrote that article, I probably didn’t own the actual artefact of every album. It was either a CD reissue or someone had taped it. Now, some of them I have been able to track down, and a lot of them get reissued on vinyl too. It's a different era now where you can actually read this thing and actually listen to all the albums, whereas when I wrote it, it would have taken quite a bit of doing to actually hear the stuff. Like the Henry Flynt cassette “You Are My Everlovin” -- it got reissued a few years later, but before that it would have been virtually impossible. I only heard it because Donald Miller, the guitarist in Borbetomagus, had it. He played it and copied it for me. That was really the way I heard a lot of that stuff, someone copying it. Like Tony Conrad's “Outside the Dream Syndicate.” Originally that was a tape of a tape of a tape I got from someone who had gotten it from Phil Milstein, who ran the Velvet Underground Appreciation Society.
ML: Because that only came out on CD after you wrote that list?
AL: It came out maybe the year before, but it was sort of an encouraging sign, the CD reissue. It was a pretty unlikely record to be reissued at all. That was the great thing about CDs when they came out - it's a new format, maybe people will buy it this time around.
ML: You wrote about Tony Conrad. You've interviewed him?
AL: I interviewed Tony - this is kind of a long story. The long version is - I interviewed him but it was sort of after one failed attempt to interview him. That was for the piece I did on Theater of Eternal Music that ran in Forced Exposure in 1990. I was kind of researching that for a couple years. Tony was giving a presentation of his videos in New York and I introduced myself to him. I called him up and had no idea of the whole feud over the tapes between him and La Monte [Young], and that opened a can of worms, and so I didn't end up interviewing him for that article. A year or so later, while I was still in college, I had met this guy Neil Strauss. He later went on to write this book called "The Game".
ML: The same Neil Strauss?
AL: The same Neil Strauss who wrote this bestselling book about, like, picking up chicks. I met him in college. He turned out to be an experimental music enthusiast and he was getting involved in starting to write for magazines. In 1989, he pitched an idea of doing an article about minimalist composers now, and "where are they now," to Option magazine, which was the big experimental music magazine of the day, and they went for it. We split it up. I interviewed Charlemagne Palestine and Tony Conrad, and he interviewed Phill Niblock and Glenn Branca.
My interview with Charlemagne was kind of a disaster. That's one that lives on on the web, because he was kind of drunk, and went off on this whole rant about being excluded from the "big four" of minimalism, or whatever.
But then Tony - I had a very long conversation with. He was a little more amenable to talking about his own music than talking about La Monte. And that was right when he was starting to do Early Minimalism, kind of around the time of the first performances of that. He was doing it in New Music America and some festivals in Europe. Neil had seen him do it in, I think, Ars Electronica. He had taped part of it and played the tape for me. I was totally blown away by it. This was years before the CD of Early Minimalism came out.
I had heard that Charlemagne was getting back into music at that point too, which he was, but it was still very sporadic. Because of CDs he got more into it in the mid-90s than he was at that point. You gotta say, in 1989, hardly anybody remembered these guys as musicians. Charlemagne had his heyday in New York in the seventies, and in the eighties he didn't do music at all. Sort of the same with Tony, he had done the stuff with La Monte and John Cale in the sixties, and in the seventies he was doing a little bit, but not a lot.
ML: Because he was mostly doing film?
AL: He was teaching film, and that was mostly what he was working on. Although it seems he was kind of working on music on his own, there was just no public outlet for it.
ML: You mentioned Phill Niblock, who's also been featured on a Minimalist Top Ten list. Did you work with him?
AL: I've played Phill's music a number of different times. He has one piece for e-bowed guitars, and I'm on the recording [“G2,44+/x2,” Moikai, 2002] that Jim O'Rourke's label put out, and I've done it live a number of times. And I've played at Experimental Intermedia. I know him pretty well actually.
ML: When you were writing that article, you were working in film distribution?
AL: I was a film student at this point, when I'm talking to all these guys. After I got out of college, I got a job at a film distribution company. Film was an interest but music was always the main interest. I'd contemplated majoring in music, and could never get my head around music theory. Most of the stuff I was working on didn't need to be notated in that way. Actually, the composition teacher I had as a freshman in college was Annea Lockwood, who does a lot of experimental music. Funnily enough, she was actually very strict about rules of harmony.
ML: We were also talking about Kelly Reichardt. You said that you introduced her to Will Oldham. I love his acting in her film “Old Joy.”
AL: I had a number of friends in common with Kelly. She knows a lot of people in the music scene. I got to know her that way, and in fact, I even got her a job at the film distribution company I was working at at one point. I think after I left, she actually worked there full time for a while. Will was living in New York at one point in the late nineties, around when “I See a Darkness” [Palace Records, 1999] came out. I think I introduced them. We'd done this film series at Tonic and we showed “River of Grass.” I don't think Will knew it, and at the screening I introduced the two of them. Then he did the score for “Ode,” this Super 8 movie Kelly did because she had one script that was in turnaround for years and years. She said, forget it, I'll make this shorter movie on my own. Will did the score for that, and then she cast him in “Old Joy.”
ML: And then Yo La Tengo did the score for “Old Joy.”
AL: Kelly is pretty good friends with all of them. And this guy Smokey Hormel is sitting in with Yo La Tengo on that score. Smokey is married to this woman who did lights for Sonic Youth and Nirvana and lots of bands, who is also a good friend of mine. It's one circle of people.
ML: We were also talking last night about “Calvin Johnson Has Ruined Rock for an Entire Generation,” [1994] your solo record on Tom Scharpling’s label 18 Wheeler. With that, and the Love Child and Run On records, how did you fit with the whole New Jersey/New York scene in the nineties? How did you end up dedicating one of the tracks on “Rabbi Sky” [Siltbreeze, 1999] to James McNew of Yo La Tengo?
AL: I think the dedication to James is because that track is using an MXR Blue Box, which is an octave fuzz pedal, and James really liked that pedal. I guess it just reminded me of Phill [Niblock]'s music, so that's probably why.
ML: That kind of thick sound.
AL: Yeah. Now, the music scene… Tom [Scharpling] and I, and this guy named Jim Romeo, were all from New Jersey. They were from a little different part of NJ than I was. Jim Romeo - this is funny because it does all kind of tie together - was my roommate when I first moved to Hoboken.
He moved into a place in Hoboken that had been lived in by these guys that were friends with a guy named Ken Katkin, who put out the first Love Child single [“Know It’s Alright,” Trash Flow, 1989]. These friends of his kind of abandoned this apartment, I think, and Jim moved in. It was super cheap rent. The total rent of the apartment was four hundred fifty dollars, and there were two of us. Even in 1990 that was unheard of.
One of the guys that lived there, Eric [Fischer], went on to become the road manager for the Stooges. He also shot a video of Love Child, the only real video we made, for the song “Sofa,” using Pixelvision.
Jim moved in there and was looking for a roommate. He had just started working at this booking agency that Bob Lawton ran. They booked Yo La Tengo, Sonic Youth, and so forth. The way he got that job was because he somehow knew somebody in Big Dipper, and I think they were booking Big Dipper at that point. Bob would have known them from the New England scene. Anyway, I was Jim’s roommate, and Tom was Jim’s best friend from New Jersey. Tom actually worked at this weird music store in Summit, which was the town next to the town I grew up in. Once or twice I kind of stopped in and said hi.
ML: I’ve heard him talk about that sheet music store. I think that’s where he and Jon Wurster would do these telephone calls to each other before they had “The Best Show” on WFMU.
AL: So that was kind of the connection. He would go see Love Child. He was a fan. He did the fanzine 18 Wheeler and was starting to put out some records. I don’t remember the genesis of it, whether he said, “if you want to do something let me know.” I was kind of fooling around in the rehearsal space with the guitar cable through distortion pedals and getting feedback, but also with the delay pedal getting this rhythm to it too. That’s actually what Tom liked. He said, “It’s got the pulse.” I think Suicide was probably the influence, like Martin Rev’s drum machine.
ML: We were talking about the new record [“Currents,” VDSQ, 2015]. This is the first of yours I’ve heard that is acoustic.
AL: It’s the only one that’s acoustic. I’ve played acoustic in my house a little bit. I started off playing a Yamaha classical guitar and then I didn’t own an acoustic guitar until 2009 or so. It’s a pretty big gap. The guitar I was playing last night, I bought before I had an actual acoustic. It’s an acoustic-electric that I bought in 2005.
It was something I only really did at home. All the stuff I played last night was originally worked up in my bedroom, not really knowing what I would do with it. Over the years I realized I had enough things to make an album. I started thinking about the things I could rework. The third piece I played last night was an example of that, something I wrote towards the end of Run On. I had post-rock in mind when I was writing it, but I never did anything with it then. Then I reworked it as a solo guitar piece for this. Some of the other ones –- I started playing guitar like that more once I started playing in Lee Ranaldo and the Dust. We were touring a lot, and then I would spend more time at home just playing guitar because I was more used to playing guitar everday from touring, and also I wasn’t so concerned about finding other ways to make money in between.
ML: You’ve mentioned Keith Richards as an influence on some of the new songs. I was wondering about Steve Gunn.
AL: I know him. In fact, he toured a little bit on a bill with the Lee Ranaldo band. We did a bunch of shows together and I guess I had met him a little before that. There was one bill with [John] Truscinski – their duo played. Apparently we were both at this talent show at somebody’s house, which I remember doing but don’t really remember him. He’s been up in Brooklyn for a while. He and Steve Shelley and I just played as a trio at this benefit concert for Bruce Langhorne. We did one piece from the soundtrack to the Hired Hand and one from the Dylan soundtrack to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.
The other influence is Michael Hedges. He was on Windham Hill in the 80s. He was one of these guys who would do tapping stuff. There was one record called “Aerial Boundaries,” the second album. I heard that when I was a teenager and really liked it. He was a really great guitarist at that point. I listened to him again and some of the stuff on “Currents” is kind of from listening to Michael Hedges again, and translating that into more of the Steve Reich thing.
ML: The percussive pulse that comes through.
AL: Right, and the piece “Aerial Boundaries” really sounds like Steve Reich. Kristin [Thora Haraldsdottir]’s piece “Currents” is a little like that too. I don’t know if she’s listened to Michael Hedges. I sent the music to Steve Lowenthal from [record label] VDSQ and we met up to talk about doing a release, and he got the Steve Reich influence right away. I was really encouraged by that.
ML: Earlier, we were talking about Will Oldham, which made me think of his frequent collaborator Emmett Kelly. Have you heard the record Emmett put out with Jim White as the Double [“Dawn of the Double”, In the Red, 2016]?
AL: I wrote the liner notes for it! (Laughs.) So I’ve heard it, and heard them play live before I heard the record.
ML: My first thought was it could grab a spot in the next top ten list.
AL: It’s definitely within that. It was amazing to see it live when I didn’t know what to expect. I was talking to Jim beforehand and he said it was dance music. I didn’t really understand what that would mean coming from those two guys. I think they actually did it for a choreographer. Setting a groove, and keeping the groove going as long as possible. I’ve met Emmett a number of times and talked about doing something together, but it hasn’t happened yet. I sat in on one secret show Will was playing with Jim and played a couple of songs. Maybe “Cinnamon Girl”. That was a long time ago, maybe around 2000.
ML: One of the things your writing pointed me to was connecting the blues with minimalism. I was thinking of how you collaborated with Tetuzi Akiyama [“Tomorrow Outside Tomorrow,” Editions Mego, 2016], who really explores those genres on “Don’t Forget to Boogie” [Idea, 2003]. How did you come to collaborate?
AL: There’s probably two parts to that. Tetuzi, I met in New York. He came and played at Tonic and this guy – Toshio Kajiwara – was DJing the basement of Tonic every week, and I guess he knew Tetuzi. He was like, you should really play with this guy, and that was unusual for him – ordinarily he wouldn't suggest people to play with. I took it pretty seriously and saw him play, around 2004. I forget if “Don’t Forget to Boogie” was out then or not. He gave me a CD-R of it, so maybe it hadn’t quite come out yet. There’s one track, “Fast Machine”, and he said, “that track is dedicated to you”. He said that he and Taku Sugimoto used to listen to “Sink the Aging Process” which probably inspired the dedication. On the track he’s just playing one chord for ten minutes.
That record came out, and Oren Ambarchi put out “Triste” [Idea, 2003] on the same label, and the record that became “YMCA” [Family Vineyard, 2009] was also originally going to be on that label before it stopped production. I suggested to the two guys that we do a tour of Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, where we would each organize one country. Both those guys dropped the ball, but I did get a tour of New Zealand together – four shows for the trio, then Oren left and Tetuzi and I did a few other pick-up shows for another week. We got one recording from the tour that was really good, which became a 3” CD called “Willow Weep and Moan” [Antiopic, 2006]. That name, “Blues Deceiver”, that’s Tetuzi’s. I can definitely hear the blues influence in there, but it’s probably a little more his thing than mine.
La Monte always talks about the blues being a big influence in this kind of thing -– like the dominant seventh, which is an interval he favors, comes out of the blues, to him. A lot of his pieces from the early sixties are called “Sunday Morning Blues”, “Tuesday Morning Blues”, which he claims are extremely slow moving blues chord progressions. It’s a little hard to actually ascertain when you listen to them, but I'll take his word for it. I know he did one sound installation where he had a chords made with sine tones in the room. It was a twelve-day thing that was structured as a twelve bar blues, and each day was equivalent to one bar-- the chord only changed (or not) each day. A mind-blowing idea.
Maybe I mentioned Junior Kimbrough [in the Minimalist Top Ten lists]. There was a movie of the book “Deep Blues”, a documentary. That was, I think, before he had records out, but he’s in the movie. It’s a ten-minute drone thing. I remember seeing it and thinking, wow, who was that guy? I realized he was the same guy when his records started to come out.
ML: Now, Taku Sugimoto -- I love some of his recordings, like “Saritote” [Saritote Disk, 2007] and “Opposite” [hatNOIR, 1998].
AL: I don’t know his records very well, but I saw him play live in Switzerland with [trombonist] Radu Malfatti. It was this venue where I was playing the next night. I was hanging out backstage and Taku and Radu were playing a game of chess. One of them would make a move, and five minutes later the other would make a move. Then, they go out on stage, and of course, one guy would play one note, and five minutes later the other guy would play one note. I was like, okay, I get it now. It was almost like the Cage 4’33” piece, where the focus shifts from what’s going on onstage to becoming more conscious of every other sound in the room.
ML: And then as far as New Zealand…
AL: Bruce Russell put out that CD of mine, “The Evan Dando of Noise?” [Corpus Hermeticum, 1997]. I contacted him and got the names of people to set things up. The first show was in Auckland on a bill with the Dead C. They were amazing. I had seen them in the US but they were so incredible down there, in their element, using their own amps. Lawrence English was on that bill, who at that point was starting out, but has since become a big figure in that music scene. I’ve played with Bruce a little bit. Maybe he sat in on one show with the trio. We did at least one duo thing at this funny bar near his house. He lives in a small town on the South Island.
ML: So many of your works have been collaborations. Is there anyone who’s still on your list?
AL: There’s people like Emmett [Kelly] where we talk about trying to do something someday, and who knows where it’ll go. Now, the CD I did with Henry [Kaiser], “Skip to the Solo” [Public Eyesore, 2016], which came out last year – I studied with him. He did a summer workshop in improvisation guitar when I was about nineteen. I’d been a fan of his from reading this article he did in Guitar Player. They had this whole column called “Essential Listening” where guitarists would talk about records that were significant to them. Henry did a pretty long article and a lot of it was non-guitar stuff, and I probably wouldn’t have paid attention except I noticed he had “Trout Mask Replica” and “Live/Dead,” and I liked those. His list had Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Terry Riley, Masayuki Takayanagi, all the stuff that has since become pretty crucial to my development. I went and bought his current record “It’s a Wonderful Life” [Metalanguage, 1984]. The first side is this sidelong improvisation that he says is inspired by Terry Riley and Evan Parker. That in turn became a big inspiration to me.
In that course he really showed me how to listen to free improvisation. Then I could start to think about doing it as a musician. That was extremely valuable and I’ve stayed in touch with him ever since. Jim O’Rourke met Henry at the same time and had a similar mentor/mentee relationship with him, and that was common ground I had when I met Jim. Once Jim produced “Hoffman Estates” [Drag City, 1998] with Loren [Connors] – it might have been around that time that Henry called me up and proposed doing a record together. We talked about it from time to time for years after that.
We did a gig at the Stone in New York as a duo. At one point, he said, “play two chords so I can fuzz solo over them”. I remembered on this other record of his, “Outside Pleasure” [Metalanguage, 1980], there’s one section where he’s doing a fuzz solo over two chords he has looped behind him, just A minor and G – a rock move in the middle of free improv. So I said, I’ll play the two chords from “Outside Pleasure”. After the show he told me it was the chords from [the Seeds’] “Pushing Too Hard” which I’d never realized.
A record I really like is “Shut Up ‘n Play Yer Guitar” [1977-1980] by [Frank] Zappa, that series where he takes out guitar solos from some of his songs, gives them a new name, and calls them a new composition. I suggested doing a record like that to Henry, I booked the plane ticket, and we did it in two days – one of recording and one of mixing. But that’s an example of someone I really wanted to do a record with for a long time and finally got around to doing it two years ago. I didn’t want to just to a guitar duo record, since he’s done that with other people. I wanted to go deeper because I had this longstanding relationship with him and wanted the full Henry treatment, with him producing, designing the cover – things I would ordinarily want to control myself.
Because most of it is rock-oriented, it’s also the path not taken, in a way. This is the road I was on until I discovered this article that Henry wrote in Guitar Player and discovered Derek Bailey. Who knows what would have happened if I hadn’t. Would I have been a famous rock guitarist or just lost interest after I was out of my teens?
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