December 9th: Alan Licht in Conversation with Mathieu Copeland
Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, Alan Licht will discuss his new book Common Tones: Selected Interviews with Artists and Musicians 1995-2020 with Mathieu Copeland.
The live event will stream directly on this page on Thursday, December 9th at 6pm EST. There is no login or rsvp required. A recording will be archived and posted shortly afterwards.
Common Tones: Selected Interviews with Artists and Musicians 1995-2020
(Blank Forms Editions, distributed by D.A.P, 2021)
For the past 30 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.
Common Tones gathers a selection of never-before-published 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, was impressed.
Included in the collection are interviews by Alan Licht with Vito Acconci, ANOHNI, Cory Arcangel, Matthew Barney, Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham, Tony Conrad, the Dream Syndicate’s Karl Precoda, Richard Foreman, Henry Flynt, Milford Graves, Adris Hoyos, Ken Jacobs, Jutta Koether, Christian Marclay, Phill Niblock, Alessandra Novaga, Tony Oursler, Lou Reed, Kelly Reichardt, The Sea and Cake, Suicide, Michael Snow, Greg Tate, Tom Verlaine, Rudy Wurlitzer and Yo La Tengo’s Georgia Hubley and Ira Kaplan.
Alan Licht is a writer, musician, and curator based in New York City. He is equally known for his guitar work in the underground rock bands Run On and Love Child and in the experimental groups the Blue Humans and Text of Light. He has released eight solo guitar albums and more than a dozen duo and trio records of improvised music. Licht is a contributing music editor at BOMB magazine and his essays and reviews have appeared in Artforum, Parkett, the Wire, the Believer, Sight & Sound, and many other publications. He is the author of An Emotional Memoir of Martha Quinn, an extended personal essay about coming of age as a rock fan and musician; Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories, the first full-length study of sound installations and sound sculpture to appear in English; and Sound Art Revisited, an updated version of the latter, published last year; and he is a co-author of Will Oldham on Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, a collection of interviews with Will Oldham, and Title TK 2010–2014, a compilation of concert transcriptions, with Cory Arcangel and Howie Chen.
Mathieu Copeland has been developing a curatorial practice that seeks to subvert the traditional role of exhibitions and renew our perceptions of them. Copeland curated, among many others, A Staged Exhibition that premiered in September 2021, A Retrospective of closed exhibitions (2016), the exhibition of a film (an exhibition as a feature film for cinemas, 2015), Phill Niblock’s retrospective (2011), VOIDS. A Retrospective (2009), and Soundtrack for an Exhibition (2006).Copeland edited over twenty-five books, notably Gustav Metzger: Writings (1953-2016) (2019), The Anti-Museum (2017), and Choreographing Exhibitions (2013). His work was the subject in 2021 of the film The Anti-Museum: An Anti-Documentary, narrated by Henry Rollins to a soundtrack by FM Einheit