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. Lee Ranaldo, Alan Licht, DJ Olive & William Hooker will be performing at ISSUE.
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.
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 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 premiere 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.
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 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 the Agriculture 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 Francisco, 1997. “Square Root of Negative One”, Asphodel, San Francisco, 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 Desert, 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 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 category, 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.
Slouching Towards Gomorrah
Matt Heyner of No Neck Blues Band, Malkuth and bassist for Thurston Moore teams up with Jim Thomson drummer of Bio Ritmo, Gwar, Carcinogenic Static Carnival and Super Human Happiness Orchestra to bring you Slouching Toward Gomorrah, short attention span musical theater.