A few years ago, I picked up Tom Johnson’s The Chord Catalogue. I’d long been a fan of Johnson’s work, both for the playful conceptions underlying much of it as well as for the wonderful music that generally resulted. When I saw he had created a work consisting of all the several thousand possible combinations of chords in an octave from 2 to 12 notes, I thought, ”Well, I’m sure he’s going to somehow manage to make it a fascinating, possibly — who knows how? — transcendent event.” I was wrong. It turned out to be a mind-numbing, brutally monotonous piece (though perhaps that was the point!) that, even after several painful sessions, yielded nothing more than what was indicated in the title.
When I saw the description of the title track on Alan Licht’s double disc (on the same label, XI, as Johnson’s), I mumbled to myself, “Uh oh, here we go again.” Wrong-o. “A New York Minute” is made up, simply, of captures of radio weather reports from January 2001 as broadcast by New York City’s 1010 WINS Accuweather. No more, no less — except that much more somehow manifests. Seamlessly spliced back to back, of varying lengths, with differing announcers, one hears a month’s worth of cold, snowy forecasts, sometimes officious and dire, other times chatty and full of lame attempts at wordplay. It’s a different kind of drone, but a drone still, subtly reinforced by the background whir of teletype machines (itself no doubt a tape of a bygone era, fraudulently intending to convey a hive of news-related activity to the radio listener) and the occasional faint interference of adjacent radio stations. The listener finds himself with a world of variations to contemplate from the formal aspects and cadences of the speech patterns to the relative clarity or fuzziness of the reception to the repetitive though always changing information conveyed. The exposure of the multi-layeredness of such apparently banal and shallow material is a triumph of perception on Licht’s part. About three minutes from the end of the piece, the sound world shifts from radio to an ambient environment, possibly a street or schoolyard scene, with children playing, car noises and an ambiguous high-pitched whine. Again, the effect of this segue rings true, although the reason why this should be so is elusive, which is all well and good.
Most of the remaining pieces are more in line with what one might have expected from Licht. “Freaky Friday” begins with several minutes of soft, controlled feedback emanations that, in tonality, are reminiscent of some of Terry Riley’s early works. This minimalist aesthetic is buttressed when the work shifts into a picked, multi-tracked guitar and bass segment that strongly recalls pieces like Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint, though it closes with a dark bass line that you’d never hear in Reich. "Muhammed Ali and the Crickets” almost comes off as a novelty track in this context, its stratum of insectile chirps supporting various thuds and poundings, but as recordings of prayer chants are interpolated, it effectively takes on a more troubling tone. The first disc ends with a work for solo (again, multi-tracked) organ, “Another Sky,” which is essentially a drone with multiple interior fluctuations, once more recalling Riley, in this case the organ portions of his Poppy Nogood pieces.
Disc one contains all studio works while the second disc is made up of two lengthy live performances, “14, Second, Fifth” and “Remington Khan,” both for solo guitar. The former begins as a strumfest, Licht scrabbling at the strings, producing a fairly thick matrix of interwoven lines, something like the prelude portions of Glenn Branca’s symphonies. There is, among the bubbling patterns, a tendency toward the tonal, as though Licht is always on the verge of breaking into a recognizable song (I could’ve sworn I was picking up vestiges of The Who's “I Can See for Miles” at one point) but he wisely chooses to maintain a taut plateau, never allowing the obvious shoe to drop. It gradually gains in intensity, a simple, three-note, rising figure underpinning the clanging chaos until, inevitably perhaps, it subsides. Even then, the denouement is surprising, devolving into a series of Frith-like string flicks. The whole piece is both exciting and oddly lovely. “Remington Khan” steals in very quietly, a series of cleanly picked, near country-style notes iterated in related but mutating patterns, like a roomful of miniature John Faheys. One at first keening and then chugging line emerges, a seesawing, jaunty little thing, Licht wringing it for all it’s worth before abruptly switching course into an area with a tint of bluegrass. Eventually, two repeated notes serve as the backbone from which Licht emits numerous variations, all of them rewarding, all contributing to the twining, dronish nature of the piece. Along about eight minutes from the end, a raucous, fuzz-drenched roar appears, attempting to wrestle the backbone into submission, ultimately achieving a quick three-count just as time is about to expire.
A New York Minute is a fine document from an important figure in the NYC new music world, one that deserves far more attention than it’s likely to get. So, do yourself a favor and pay attention.
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