Over the past two decades, guitarist Alan Licht has worked with a veritable who’s who of the experimental world, from Rashied Ali and Derek Bailey to Fennesz to Christian Marclay to Rhys Chatham and Phill Niblock. Licht is also renown in the indie rock scene as a bandleader (Run On, Love Child) and supporting player to cult legends like Yoko Ono, 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 avantgarde 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 books include Common Tones: Selected interviews with artists and musicians 1995-2020 (Blank Forms, 2021), Sound Art Revisited (Bloomsbury, 2019), and Will Oldham on Bonnie Prince Billy (Faber & Faber/W.W. Norton, 2012).