Alan Licht

(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)

Guitarist Alan Licht began his avant-garde career in Love Child. The group debuted with two unusual singles, Love Child (Trash Flow, 1990) and Love Child Plays Moondog (Forced Exposure, 1990), followed by the album Okay? (Homestead, 1991), two more singles, Six of One (Homestead, 1992) and Stumbling Block (City Slang, 1992), and finally the album Witchcraft (Homestead, 1992).

The trio recording Okay? (Homestead, 1991), i.e. Will Baum, Rebecca Odes, and Alan Licht, drew inspiration from UT, who swapped instruments from song to song. The album features 21 tracks averaging around two minutes each, built on simple choruses and rhythms but suddenly detonated by disjointed dissonances. The attitude is sarcastic, more like provocative street jesters than basement-dwelling intellectuals.
Baum is the primary composer: the outrageous nursery rhyme of Sofa, sung by Odes in a childlike register; the power-pop of He's So Sensitive and Nice Toes; Telegram in the style of the Modern Lovers; and Things I Noticed, a playful B-52's-style tune. He also contributes a philosophical ballad, End Of The World, which closes the album complete with a brass fanfare.
Odes contributes the poetic ballad Cigarette Ash, the childlike ring-around-the-rosie of Church Of Satan (acoustic guitar only), and Willpower, transformed into a driving rock and roll piece by the guitar riffs.
Licht, with his forceful and spectacular guitar style, embodies the band’s punk edge. He wrote Start To Smile and What It Breeds, epileptic rock and roll in the style of the Heartbreakers, seared with the fiery riffs of his guitar. Equally raucous, Ain't That So even incorporates an organ. He also contributes a neurotic Neil Young-style ballad, Slow Me Down. In the instrumental 2, he demonstrates his skill on the strings. The sheer quantity of ideas—if not always their execution—is impressive.

Baum was ousted (for leaning too much toward pop, a tendency he would later indulge with 9-Iron), and Love Child underwent a change in personality. The adolescent, minimal pop of Witchcraft recalls Beat Happening. On the album, one can detect hints of Blake Babies in childlike nursery rhymes such as Obsessive Compulsive, but the central focus is a very disorderly form of psychedelia, expressed in Stumbling Block in a “shoegazer” style—that is, with violent, prominently modulated distortion—and in the sprawling instrumental jam of The Rose Is A Thorn (nine minutes), which brushes against the cacophonous excesses of Red Crayola. Odes blends the two personalities (the intimate/adolescent and the wild/psychedelic) in the martial crescendo of Six Of One, climbing the notes like a shy Grace Slick. When Licht takes the microphone, he leans toward more focused energy, as in the driving garage rock of Permission and the catchier—but no less noisy and relentless—Something Cruel. The group displays both pyrotechnic skill in crafting unpredictable, anarchic instrumental arrangements and melodic talent in composing infectious ditties.

Meanwhile, Licht had already recorded Mask Of The Light (Ecstatic Peace, 1991) and Clear To Higher Time (Ecstatic Peace, 1993) with the Blue Humans (formed in 1988 by jazz guitarist Rudolph Grey, saxophonist Arthur Doyle, and drummer Beaver Harris, who had already released a live album in 1990). The first album also featured percussionist Rashied Ali and Jim Sauter of Borbetomagus.

The second album with Licht, recorded live in 1991, is a tour de force that fully reveals his stature as a guitarist. Grey and Licht, accompanied only by drummer Tom Surgal, unleash full-volume free-jazz sarabands. The most piercing feedback dominates the bacchanal of Movement (a cosmic whirlwind of dissonance), the frantic strumming of Lightning (supersonic hard-rock à la Helios Creed) and Finally (an Hendrix-ian orgy of fractured glissandos and riffs), and the electric shock of Under Power (a prolonged dirty droning of distorted guitars). The twenty-minute Clear To The Higher Time (a free-form maelstrom of violent guitar noise at random tempos) tempers the intensity of the sound but not the obstinacy of the dissonances. All compositions are by Grey.

Later, Licht also helped Tara Key record Bourbon County (Homestead, 1993). Under his own name, he released the singles Calvin Johnson Has Ruined Rock For an Entire Generation (18 Wheeler, 1994) and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Crank Auto, 1994), the latter being part of Betty Page, a preview of the two long solos collected on Sink The Aging Process (Siltbreeze, 1994). The second piece, Betty Page, previously released in provisional form on the compilation Breathe on the Living (Locust, 1990), is a geometric composition immersed in an apparently anarchic cacophony (achieved by moving a screwdriver among the strings). The other track, Polarity, is a “cover” of a Minutemen song, but little of the original remains.

In 1994, Licht joined Rick Brown and Sue Garner’s Run On, with whom he produced a couple of noise-rock masterpieces.

Licht also played with the Max Factory, recording Tudor City (Ecstatic Yod, 1995) with them.

His most significant period began with Evan Dando Of Noise (Corpus Hermeticum, 1997), as well as the duets with Loren Mazzacane Connors on Live In New York (New World Of Sound, 1996), recorded in February 1994, and the albums Two Nights (Road Cone, 1996) and Mercury (Road Cone, 1997).

On Hoffman Estates (Drag City, 1998), producer Jim O'Rourke assembled a group of rock and jazz avant-garde veterans (Rob Mazurek of Isotope 217, Josh Abrams and Darin Gray of Brise Glace, Rick Rizzo of Eleventh Dream Day). The result is an album that oscillates between jazz-rock and free jazz, unusually “professional” for the anarchic Licht.

Our Lips Are Sealed (Pure/RRR, 1997), with saxophonist Tamio Shiraishi, and Gerry Miles (Atavistic, 1997), with Haino Keiji, are other collaborations among experimentalists. The latter is a Gothic-medieval work that belongs more to classical music than to rock.