The Text of Light group was formed in NYC, 2001 with the idea to perform improvised music to the films of Stan Brakhage 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: Brakhage’s Text of Light, Dog Star Man, Anticipation of the Night, Songs; Harry Smith’s 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; and have done 2 tours of Europe to date, as well as performing in New York City and other USA club and cinema venues. In 2009, the group performed in Toronto at a major music festival. Plutopia 2011 is proud to have them headline our upcoming sense event.
Lee M. Ranaldo (born February 3, 1956) in Glen Cove, Long Island, New York, and graduated from Binghamton University, is an American singer, guitarist, writer, record producer, and visual artist, best known as a co-founder of one of the world’s best loved rock bands Sonic Youth,.
The band was originally one of the founders of the No Wave art and music scene in New York City., which focused on DIY ethic of the genre rather than its specific sound. Sonic Youth is seen as pivotal in the rise of the alternative rock and indie rock movements. The band has been praised for having “redefined what the rock guitar could do”. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked Ranaldo and Thurston Moore, of Sonic Youth, the 33rd and 34th Greatest Guitarists of All Time, respectively.
Ranaldo started his career in New York in several bands and joining the electric guitar orchestra of Glenn Branca. Among Ranaldo’s solo records are Dirty Windows, a collection of spoken texts with music, Amarillo Ramp (For Robert Smithson), pieces for the guitar, and Scriptures of the Golden Eternity. His books include several with art or photography by Leah Singer, including Drift, Bookstore, Road Movies, and Moroccan Journal: Jajouka excerpt (from a full-length book of writings on Moroccan travels and music). Ranaldo has also published Jrnls80s (published by Soft Skull Press), as well as a book of poems, Lengths & Breaths, with photography by Cynthia Connolly. His most recent book of poetry, Against Refusing, was published by Water Row Press in April 2010 with cover artwork by Leah Singer. His visual+sound works have been shown at galleries and museums in Paris, Toronto, New York, London, Sydney, Los Angeles, Vienna, and elsewhere.
Ranaldo has produced albums for artists including Babes in Toyland, You Am I, Magik Markers, Deity Guns, and Dutch art rock-ensemble Kleg. He has edited a volume of tour journals from the 1995 Lollapalooza Tour written by himself, Thurston Moore, Beck, Stephen Malkmus, Courtney Love, and others.
Ranaldo has also worked with jazz drummer William Hooker on improvised music, and reading and improvising poetry. Plutopian Derek Woodgate’s Fringecore has worked with the Duo and also Lee has also appeared on the Fringecore record label.
His main side projects are Drift with his wife Leah Singer with whom he has performed many live installation pieces with improvised music and Text of Light.
Ulrich Krieger is a composer, performer, improviser and experimental rock musician. His main instruments are saxophones, clarinets, didjeridu and electronics. He calls his style of playing ‘acoustic electronics’, using sounds, that appear to be electronic, but are produced on acoustic instruments and then sometimes electronically treated, blurring the borders between the fields. Krieger transcribed Lou Reed’s (in)famous Metal Machine Music for chamber ensemble.
Ulrich usually works in the nirvana between experimental rock, ambient and contemporary composition. Born 1962, in Freiburg, Germany, he lived in Berlin from 1983-2007 with longer residencies in the USA and Italy from 1991-97. In September 2007 he moved to California, where he is professor for composition and experimental sound practice at the ‘California Institute for the Arts’. He studied classical saxophone, composition, electronic music and musicology at the Manhattan School of Music (NYC), the Universität der Künste (Berlin) and the Freie Universität (Berlin), as well as pursuing independent studies and research in the didjeridu and Australian Aboriginal music and culture.
Krieger has worked with Lou Reed, Lee Ranaldo, Phill Niblock, David First, Thomas Köner, Alan Licht, Michiko Hirayama, Witold Szalonek, Mario Bertoncini, Miriam Marbe, Seth Josel, Zbigniew Karkowski, Merzbow, zeitkratzer and many others performing in Europe, North-America, Asia and Australia.
His works are being performed by the California EAR Unit, zeitkratzer, KontraTrio, Soldier String Quartet, Wandelweiser Ensemble, and many others. Krieger received grants from the German DAAD program, the Darmstadter Summer Courses for New Music, the city of Berlin and many others and was a Composer-In-Residence at Villa Aurora (Los Angeles), Villa Serpentara (Rome), German Research Centre Venice (Italy), University of East Anglia (England), the City of Bologna (Italy) and the Music Centre North Queensland (Australia). He has released over 50 CDs of his original compositions, improvisations, with his groups and as a collaborator with many musicians.
Alan Licht’s music draws on a wide range of different styles, from tape-loops, to noisy guitar (sometimes using a prepared instrument), to pure pop music. His musical trajectory was set when his guitar teacher gave him a copy of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, which would lead to his discovery of other minimalist music.
Licht has released five albums of pieces for solo and multiple guitars, and has worked and recorded with the bands Lovechild, Run On and The Pacific Ocean and with other avant-garde musicians including Jim O’Rourke, Rudolph Grey, and Loren Mazzacane Connors.
Licht was born in New Jersey in 1968, and majored in Film Studies at Vassar College in New York. Recorded and performed as an improvisor with: Rashied Ali, Jim O’Rourke, Lee Ranaldo, Christian Marclay, Thurston Moore, Arto Lindsay, John Zorn, Zeena Parkins, Ikue Mori, Lukas Ligeti, Derek Bailey, Dean Roberts, Charles Curtis, Ulrich Krieger, Loren Mazzacane Connors, Nihilist Spasm Band, Fred Lonberg-Holm, William Hooker, Michael Snow, Keiji Haino, DJ Olive, Rudolph Grey, Fennesz, DJ Spooky (1990-present). Licht has performed at various festivals in the U.S. & Europe.
Founding member of several bands. Toured and recorded albums of original material. Toured as a guitarist with Tom Verlaine (2001), Brokeback (2001), Papa M (1999-present), Royal Trux (1999) & Plush (1999). Also performed Phill Niblock’s work regularly. Two sound installations: ‘Today I Am A Fountain Pen’, Studio Five Beekman, NYC (1998) and ‘The Downsizing of Don Dokken’, part of ‘Constrictions’ exhibition at Pierogi 2000, Brooklyn (1996). Also works as a writer (An EmotionaMemoir of Martha Quinn (Drag City Press, 2001)), and curator.
Tim Barnes, the percussionist is important in three ways: as an expansive experimental percussionist (and producer/engineer on the side) who had one foot in the downtown New York avant-jazz community while contributing to more traditional indie rock projects.
As the owner of the Quakebasket label, distributors of limited-edition and broader releases of work by contemporary experimenters as well as careful reissues; and, finally, via his day job, where he helped bridge the worlds of indie rock and music licensing for advertising.
Barnes emerged in the late 1990s, contributing to indie rock staples like the Silver Jews and the Elephant 6-affiliated Essex Green, as well as pop-fancying avant-garde mainstay Jim O’Rourke. Barnes found a kindred spirit in another O’Rourke pal, drummer Glenn Kotche, with whom he tandem-drummed on O’Rourke’s Halfway to a Threeway and his classic Insignificance. Like Kotche, who went on to drum for Wilco, Barnes used the drum kit as a melodic tool, filling rock rhythms with textures pulled from an innate knowledge of his kits’ textures (demonstrated on Barnes’ almost puritanically drummy solo debut, All Acoustics).
Barnes contributed frequently to the recordings of New England hippie noise guitarist Matt Valentine, including Tower Recordings and MV & EE. He hovered on the edge of Sonic Youth’s world, as well, joining the band for their deeply psychedelic Koncertas Stan Brakhage Prisiminimui release and serving as occasional member in Lee Ranaldo’s Text of Light. Established in 1999 to reissue a pair of albums of founding Velvet Underground drummer (and legendary drone technician in his own right) Angus MacLise, Barnes’ Quakebasket imprint became an outlet for himself and other drummers, including numerous projects with Kotche (who returned the favor by bringing Barnes along for Wilco’s 2004 Ghost Is Born sessions).
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