Alan Licht

The collection of previously unpublished interviews and extended versions of Alan Licht's famous conversations with figures in the American art and musicscene.

For the past thirty years, Alan Licht has been a performer, programmer, and chronicler of New York's art and music scenes. His dry wit, deep erudition, and unique perspective—informed by decades of experience as a touring and recording guitarist in the worlds of experimental music and underground rock—have distinguished him as the go-to writer for profiles of adventurous artists across genres. A precocious scholar and improvisor, by the time he graduated from Vassar College in 1990 Licht had already authored important articles on minimalist composers La Monte Young, Tony Conrad, and Charlemagne Palestine, and recorded with luminaries such as Rashied Ali and Thurston Moore. In 1999 he became a regular contributor to the British experimental music magazine The Wirewhile continuing to publish in a wide array of periodicals, ranging from the artworld glossies to underground fanzines. 

Common Tones gathers a selection of never-beforepublished interviews, many conducted during the writing of Licht's groundbreaking profiles, alongside extended versions of his celebrated conversations with artists, previously untranscribed public exchanges, and new dialogues held on the occasion of this collection. Even Lou Reed, a notoriously difficult interviewee also included here, was suitably impressed.

An overview of Phill Niblock's work since the 60's, through about twenty essays and interviews by musicologists, art critics and historians, various documents, scores, and more than 8 hours of videos on 2 double layer DVDs.
With a career spanning more than 40 years, Phill Niblock has not only proven himself as one of the most preeminent composers of the American musical avantgarde, but also an accomplished filmmaker and performer. He is also revered as an events producer through his Experimental Intermedia Foundation, providing a venue and a label that has been of great assistance to numerous other artists and musicians in helping to make their work known.

This bilingual book (French / English) provides an in-depth look at all these activities, through various essays and interviews, either newly written, previously unpublished, or that have never been available in French before. These were written by very different people—from musicians who have played Niblock's music, to fellow composers, from long-time friends to specialized musicologists and art historians. They discuss such various matters as musical and cinematographic aesthetics, psychoacoustic processes, historical background, philosophical insights and technical advice for playing the music, or just give their personal recollections of time spent together with Niblock.

The book is accompanied by 2 double-sided DVDs of atypical videos: Remo Osaka, a continuation of The Movement of People Working series, with a quite peculiar soundtrack; two separate DVDs of the Anecdotes from Childhood, best viewed together as an installation; and Katherine Liberovskaya's 70 for 70 (+1), Seventy (one) Sides of Phill Niblock, realized in 2003/2004 on the occasion of his 70th birthday, which portrays the composer through memories recounted by friends and relatives.

With writings by Phill Niblock, Rich Housh, Erika King, Guy de Bièvre, Volker Straebel, Richard Glover, Alan Licht, Seth Nehil, Rob Forman, Johannes Knesl, Arthur Stidfole, Juan Carlos Kase, Raphael Smarzoch, Jens Brand, Bob Gilmore, Ulrich Krieger, Richard Lainhart, Bernard Gendron, Susan Stenger, Mathieu Copeland, and liner notes from the first two LPs.

The seventh entry in an ongoing series of anthologies, this book features rare poems alongside new essays and interviews that engage the artists and themes explored elsewhere in Blank Forms' public programming.

Where most of prior entries, including Aspirations of Madness (2020), Intelligent Life (2019), and Music From The World Tomorrow (2018), have foregrounded little-seen or newly translated archival materials, this iteration privileges new texts produced specifically for the publication. These include an in-depth retrospective interview with the idiosyncratic Texan singer-songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen conducted by ICA Philadelphia chief curator Anthony Elms; a conversation between multidisciplinary writers—and longtime friends—Thulani Davis and Jessica Hagedorn on the occasion of Davis's latest poetry collection, Nothing but the Music, recently published by Blank Forms Editions; a recent discussion between composer Sarah Hennies and cellist Judith Hamann about their recent collaboration, which is included on Hamann's Music for Cello and Humming; and a conversation with composer-performers Tashi Wada and Charles Curtis, on the heels of a recent compilation of Curtis's work, Performances & Recordings 1998– 2018, produced by Wada. Each of these interviews shed light on the particularities of the artists' careers and methods in terms both formal and casual, practical and theoretical. 

In addition to these dialogues, this book features new critical reflections on three artists whose work Blank Forms has presented: the legendary jazz percussionist and healer Milford Graves, by Ciarán Finlayson; English multimedia artist Graham Lambkin and his beguiling 2011 album Amateur Doubles, by Alan Licht; and the UK-based experimental music trio Still House Plants, by Joe Bucciero. These articles mine historical, social, and theoretical contexts, filling gaps in the existing literature on the given artist-subjects. New and archival poems and writing about poetry complement these interviews and essays, including rare texts by Davis, Hagedorn, and René Daumal—the latter translated by Louise Landes Levi—and a suite of Auto-Mythological writings commissioned from Chicago-based composer and musician Angel Bat Dawid.