A two day residency for Aki Onda (cassettes) and Alan Licht (guitar). The duo combines the textural dynamism of Onda's 'cassette memories' with Licht's free blues guitar for a sound capable of both intense pressure and delicate interplay. They'll play on the first night as a trio with Michael Snow and present solos on the second night alongside the london premiere of Aki Onda's Cinemage project.

Aki Onda / Alan Licht / Michael Snow by cafeOTO

AKI ONDA

Aki Onda is an electronic musician, composer, and photographer. Onda was born in Japan and currently resides in New York. He is particularly known for his Cassette Memories project – works compiled from a “sound diary” of field-recordings collected by Onda over a span of two decades. Onda’s musical instrument of choice is the cassette Walkman. Not only does he capture field recordings with the Walkman, he also physically manipulates multiple Walkmans with electronics in his performances. In another of his projects, Cinemage, Onda produces slide projections of still photo images set to live guitar improvisation. Onda has collaborated with artists such as Michael Snow, Ken Jacobs, Alan Licht, Loren Connors, Oren Ambarchi, Noël Akchoté, Jac Berrocal, Linda Sharrock, and Shelley Hirsch.

"There’s a feline quality about Aki Onda in performance. He’s one of the big cats, maybe: the stage his lair, as he prowls from a table full of cassette tapes and guitar pedals over to tweak the controls on a glowing bass stack, hair falling across his face and loose shirt cuffs flopping about. He’s constantly moving and manipulating, grasping a cassette player and swinging it away from him, the fingering of the machine’s tiny controls expressed through his whole body. The cassettes contain years of accumulated memories. Like some dilapidated temple in an oriental horror movie, the stage is full of ghosts, and Onda waves his arms like the swordsman who knows his weapons are useless against this invisible onslaught." Clive Bell, The WIRE, 2009.

Aki Onda website

ALAN LICHT

Over the past two decades, guitarist Alan Licht has worked with a veritable who’s who of the experimental world, from Rashied Ali to Fennesz to Michael Snow to Arto Lindsay. He has released five albums of compositions for tape and solo guitar, and his sound and video installations have been exhibited in the U.S. and Europe. 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, Artforum, Modern Painters, Art Review, Film Coment, Sight & Sound, Purple, Village Voice, 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.

An extended conversation with Alan Licht (by Dan Warburton / Paris Transatlantic)
Interview on Perfect Sound Forever

MICHAEL SNOW

Starting as a professional jazz pianist in the 50s, Canadian Michael Snow has since achieved fame as a visual artist, creating the iconic "Walking Woman" image in the 60s as well as the genre-defining structural film Wavelength. He has continued to pursue music as a free improvisor, after arguably mid-wifing the form in the sessions for the soundtrack to his 1964 film New York Eye and Ear Control with Albert Ayler and others. Snow has performed with Evan Parker, Roswell Rudd, Derek Bailey and Tony Conrad as well as being a founding member of the CCMC (Snow, Paul Dutton and John Oswald) and playing frequent solo concerts. His photography, videos, films, paintings, and sculpture continue to be exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide.

Michael Snow info on Wikipedia



AKI ONDA CINEMAGE

"Cinemage refers to “images for cinema” and “homage to cinema.” In this project, I show still photo images by old-fashioned slide projections. At times, with music which is improvised by solo or duo guitarist(s), or without music, silent.

The visual images are snapshots taken from my daily life. I apply similar methods developed from my work as a composer, particularly the ongoing project Cassette Memories, in which I play field-recordings which I keep as a sound diary. By documenting fragments of my personal life, something is revealed in their accumulation. The meaning of the original events are stripped of their significance, exposing the architecture and essence of memory.

Although most photographers slice out a single moment in time to render an image as absolute, my photographic images consist of a moment within a movement. The sensibility is essentially filmic. The photos are more like moving images than stills and the style is similar to Chris Marker's La Jetée. Projected on a screen, the images have the eerie familiarity of an out-of-focus memory and evoke a feeling of déjà vu." -- Aki Onda.

Watch Aki Onda's Cinemage on THE WIRE website

This event is part of the LifeM festival of exploratory music.