Aki Onda + Alan Licht : Two Day Residency PASS

Event information

A discounted pass for both nights of the Aki Onda (cassettes) / Alan Licht (guitar) residency at Cafe OTO.

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.

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.