Born in 1968 and raised in New Jersey, I took guitar lessons at the age of ten and went on to play
in typical high school cover bands and to study jazz guitar privately with Buck Brown. In my late
teens, as my interests expanded to the avant-garde, I attended a seminar on improvisation given
by noted west coast guitarist Henry Kaiser. Enrolling at Vassar College, I studied electronic music
with Linda Fisher and composition with Annea Lockwood and Richard Wilson. By the time I
graduated in 1990, I had already published articles on Minimalist composers La Monte Young,
Tony Conrad, Rhys Chatham, and Charlemagne Palestine, and had recorded with former John
Coltrane drummer Rashied Ali (on Rudolph Grey's Mask of Light LP).
Relocating to New York City, I focused on pursuing free improvisation (with Rudolph Grey's group
the Blue Humans and guitarist Loren Mazzacane Connors) as well as indie rock (the bands Love
Child and Run On, as well as a brief stint with legendary 60s psychedelic rock band Arthur Lee &
Love). I also began developing a repertoire of structured improvisation pieces for solo electric
guitar, documented on a series of albums starting with 1994's Sink the Aging Process. These
brought together my interests in reharmonization (from jazz and classical music), process,
repetition, and extended duration (from Minimalism), and the textural vocabularies of rock and
noise music. The albums also include tape pieces and organ works. In 1998 I began writing
frequently for the British experimental music magazine The WIRE, doing several cover stories and
other features. In 2000 I started handling bookings at Tonic, the estimable New York venue
dedicated to showcasing a wide range of alternative music, from free improvisation to
underground rock to electronica to the jazz and classical avant-gardes. This brought me into
contact with numerous musicians, and I performed at Tonic myself countless times.
In 2001 I co-founded the ensemble Text of Light with Sonic Youth guitarist Lee
Ranaldo, a project that brings together free improvisation with screenings of
historic examples of experimental cinema. Text of Light emphasizes the chance
correspondences between what is happening onscreen and what is happening in the
music, as a kind of live, real-time mixed-media collage. Subsequently I have made
audiovisual collaborations with video artist and long-time Merce Cunningham
associate Charles Atlas and Emmy-winning painter, designer and comics artist Gary
Panter, which operated under similar principles. 2002 saw the publication of my
first book, An Emotional Memoir of Martha Quinn, an extended personal essay about
coming of age as a rock fan and musician. In 2007 my second book, Sound Art:
Beyond Music, Between Categories was published - significant as the first full-length
study of sound installations and sound sculpture to be published in English, and the
first to examine the genre mainly from an art historical, rather than a quasi-philosophical, viewpoint.
Any free improviser is also an audience member, as he or she is hearing the music for the first
time. I brought this idea to performances I organized under the name the Digger Choir at Issue
Project Room in 2003-2004 that conflated the roles of audience member and performer. Everyone
who attended was responsible for performing the music-singing John Stevens' Sustained Piece
and Yoko Ono's John Let's Hope For Piece as well as my own pieces like Subway Piece, in which
they were instructed to read a magazine or book they would ordinarily read to themselves in
transit out loud. The idea of speaking texts aloud that are meant to be read silently also occurs in
two of my recent sound installations: On Deaf Ears (2009), in which an article about the possible
hearing loss incurred by listening to music on iPod earbuds at high volume was recorded being
read aloud, and played as a loop on AVA Gallery's outdoor speakers; and Cross Promotion
(2010), in which the proprietors of both AVA and Diapason read aloud their press releases for
coming exhibitions, the recordings were then installed in each other's gallery space. These pieces
play not only on sound art's investigations of latent sounds, but on my dual work practice as a
musician and a writer.
In 2010 I started a project called Title TK with media artist Cory Archangel and curator Howie Chen. Cory, Howie and I are all guitarists. Considering ourselves a band, in live appearances we
walk onstage with guitars but never plug them in or play; instead we simply talk to each other (mostly about music). These talks are improvised, and to me represent a negotiation between
spoken and musical languages, underlining the linguistic implications of musical vocabularies and
the conversational aspects of group improvisation. They also represent an application of "post-
studio art" ideas to music, in removing what would be expected as essential content from the rock
band format. Finally, they build upon my personal history, making a conceptual accommodation
between my parallel existences in the 90s as a rock band member and free improviser.
More recent activities include recording and touring with Lee Ranaldo & the Dust, an improv trio
with Aki Onda and artist/filmmaker Michael Snow, a duo with Yeah Yeah Yeahs drummer Brian
Chase, and a book-length interview with Will Oldham, Will Oldham on Bonnie "Prince" Billy (Faber
& Faber (UK), W.W. Norton (US), Contra (Spain), 2012).
"Licht composes like the writer that he is. Ideas - simply stated and highly effective - emerge from
a collage of everything from loops of raw guitar to radio weather reports." -- Christian Marclay on
AL's double CD A New York Minute in Best of 2003, ARTFORUM, December 2003.
"Be it in indie rock groups, improv ensembles, or his solo compositions, guitarist and writer Alan
Licht has spent his career smuggling ideas across the obscured bridge between harmony and
noise." -- Matthew Wuethrich, the WIRE, June 2008