Alan Licht

Alan Licht

Over the past two decades, guitarist Alan Licht has worked with a veritable who’s who of the experimental world, from free jazz legends (Rashied Ali, Derek Bailey) and electronic wizards (Fennesz, Jim O’Rourke) 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. With Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, he founded Text of Light, an ongoing ensemble which performs freely improvised concerts alongside screenings of classic avant garde cinema.

Licht was curator at the famed New York experimental music venue Tonic from 2000 until its closing in 2007, and has written extensively about the arts for the WIRE, Modern Painters, Premiere, Village Voice, New York Sun, 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 2007.

In 2010 he started a project called Title TK with media artist Cory Archangel and curator Howie Chen.

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).

Photo: Young Ha Kim

Abigail Toll

Abigail Toll is an English, Berlin-based sound artist and composer who makes a beguiling concoction of abstract minimalism, pensive drone and thrumming electronics (Boomkat). Her artistic research  explores interspecies resonance through folk music, field recordings, and countermapping.   Her live shows melt psychoacoustics and noise with the trance-inducing ambience of neolithic temples which she evokes to terrifying and divine effect in a live performance that combines flute, droning metal singing bowls  & electronics with hypnotic vocal  mantras. An immersive sensory experience, the piece evolves through each live performance, with Toll  sculpting the sound to each room’s resonant character (and vice-versa). Driven by experiential psychoacoustic  research, these ritual communal acts of performance will ultimately shape her next recorded album’s final compositions.