Alan Licht - A New York Minute
(XI)
Though Alan Licht's entrance into the national public's music consciousness was made in the indie rock vehicles Love Child and Run On, he's spent his time recently delving more and more into the hypnotic world of minimalism. Long a champion of minimalist work, as both a fan and writer, Licht's delectation in minor permutations has resulted in a small collection of works that take his open-minded views of music to create a new, all-inclusive spin on minimalism's common themes of repetition and microtonality. A New York Minute fills two discs with live and studio work that offers a look at some of the different sides of Licht's more recent work, a welcome and overdue overview.
The first of A New York Minute's two discs is the studio half of the album, and it begins with the collection's title track, a fifteen-minute collage of a New York radio station's weather reports from January, 2001. The multi-tracked reports run almost end-to-end; there's very little overlap in the way they're presented. And while it's true that through the month's usual snowy, cold weather, and the meteorologists' vocal tendencies creates a repetition of sorts; A New York Minute operates almost purely as a conceptual piece, not something that will endear future listenings, as the best conceptual music does. The piece succeeds in its examination of repetition in a mundane, everyday experience, but an explanation of the work, its principles, and its results would almost be just as fulfilling. Luckily, the rest of the disc offers more engaging material. "Freaky Friday" evolves from the mingling of thin slices of what sounds like feedback into a layered landscape of drone and acoustic guitar. The track seems a bit romantic, but it's a beautiful bit of minimalist romance. "Muhammed Ali and the Crickets" returns to Licht's found-sound approach, using a dense field of crickets as a background for loops of musical snippets (from flute to thrash metal) and middle-eastern chanting. Licht's fequent use of chord organ is showcased in "Another Sky," an almost tactile field of woven sound, drone upon drone.
A New York Minute's second CD features two longer live works. Recorded without overdubbing. The first, "Second, Fifth," layers the percussive bouncing of objects on taut guitar strings to create both shimmering, twittering whirring and deeper purring. Ragged distortion eventually breaks its way through the layers of sound before giving way near the end of the track to the original shimmering and a simple guitar line. The end result is a celestial body of sound almost forty minutes long, the album's best work. The piece is followed by a reworking of "Remington Khan," a guitar improvisation from Licht's excellent Plays Well disc. This "'Hearing Test' mix/12-string version" of the piece, after a long fade-in, opens with a slight variation on the simple loop, which makes up the skeleton of the original version of the song. Licht's improvisations over the loop are a bit looser than on the original, and though his guitar delves into some of the same territory as the previous version of the track, there's something a bit more haphazard about this version, something that makes it seem less focused.
A New York Minute, only his fifth solo album, showcases well the different sides of Licht as an experimental composer and improviser, though with inconsistent results. While not as strong as Plays Well or even Rabbi Sky, this two-disc set offers valuable look at the wider scope of Licht's work and should go a long way towards cementing his reputation as an improviser and conceptual artist in the minds of people who can't disconnect his name from his past work.
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