A Symphony Strikes the Moment You Arrive
From Alan Licht
“A Symphony Strikes the Moment You Arrive” was a live performance at PA’s Lounge in Cambridge, on a bill with Major Stars and a short-lived trio of Chris Brokaw, Doug McCombs, and Elliott Dicks. I think Chris invited me to play on the bill. I’m not sure why I chose to do a full set of shortwave radio; the radio belonged to my partner, Angela Jaeger. I had used it before in a duo performance with Kenneth Goldsmith; it was a touchy object but it worked really well for this set. Keith Fullerton Whitman recorded it, and he told me the next day that there had been a call within “the scene” for a boycott of the show since some people felt that Major Stars should never play a venue that had an actual stage. Never mind that PA’s Lounge’s stage was only about 3 inches high…this was also full-circle for me in a way since Love Child’s first gig in a proper venue was at the Middle East in Cambridge, also on a bill that Wayne and Kate played on, with Crystallized Movements, almost exactly twenty years before.
“Room for Storms” came about when the video artist Birgit Rathsmann contacted me out of the blue to ask about playing a live accompaniment to a video she was doing based on satellite footage of hurricanes. I immediately liked the idea since I’d used radio weather reports for my piece “A New York Minute.” We did a fifteen minute performance at the East River Park Bandshell, I worked up a short guitar piece that was partially improvised. Ben Manley did the recording. There’s more information at her website: birgitrathsmann.com/RoomForStorms.html