Alan Licht and Charles Curtis

presents an intimate musical evening with avant garde luminaries Alan Licht and Charles Curtis at our private location in Mission Hills.

has released several albums of his own structured improvisations for solo guitar and tape pieces and appears on over 70 other commercially released recordings. He has played with figures in the worlds of jazz, rock and the avant-garde, ranging from Rashied Ali to Tom Verlaine to Michael Snow. He works frequently with sound installation, and has made intermedia collaborations with such artists as Charles Atlas and Gary Panter. He co-founded Text of Light, an ongoing ensemble which performs freely improvised concerts alongside screenings of classic avant-garde cinema, with Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo in 2001.

Alan has written extensively about the arts for Artforum, Modern Painters, Rhizome, the WIRE, Film Comment, Sight & Sound, Village Voice, Time Out New York, and other publications. His books include Common Tones: Selected interviews with artists and musicians (Blank Forms), Sound Art Revisited (Bloomsbury) and Will Oldham on Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy (Faber & Faber/W.W. Norton). Licht was curator at the famed New York experimental music venue Tonic from 2000 until its closing in 2007.

Alan’s new album Havens (released by VDSQ) is a sprawling double-disc set of exploratory guitar-based compositions forged from the myriad possibilities arising when strings collide with electricity & space. Licht is masterful and relentless in his negotiation of the often-unknowable intersections that exist between juxtaposing strands of sound. His work is marked by contrast & contradiction: maximalism versus minimalism; rockist inclinations versus avant, expanded-field expression; loose improvisation versus considered performance. What these dichotomies shouldn’t obscure, however, is the simple pleasure that transpires in his refracting of idiom, conjuring expansive pieces that collapse, stratify & convolve competing schools of music to wholly singular ends.

Licht and Curtis have a history of collaborating together. As a trio along with Dean Roberts, their recordings from a European tour in 1999 were released as an album, May 99, by Blank Forms.

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Called by ArtForum "one of the great cellists" as well as "spellbinding and minimal," Charles Curtis has woven a unique career through the worlds of classical performance and musical experimentation.

For more than thirty years Curtis has been closely associated with the legendary avant garde composer La Monte Young. As soloist and as director of Young's Theatre of Eternal Music String Ensemble, Curtis has participated in more performances and premieres of Young's music than any other musician.

Over the last two decades Curtis has developed a unique repertoire of major works created expressly for the distinctive qualities of his cello-playing. In addition to Young, Curtis has regularly performed and recorded works by composers such as Alvin Lucier, Eliane Radigue, Allison Knowles, and Morton Feldman. He is Distinguished Professor of Music at UC San Diego.

Recent recordings include the three-CD set "Performances and Recordings 1998-2018" on the Saltern label, as well as the 80-minute world premiere recording of Terry Jennings' "Piece for Cello and Saxophone" in a new setting in just intonation for cello with pre-recorded cellos, likewise on Saltern. Curtis also writes on music for Blank Forms magazine, the Oxford Handbook on Spectral and Post-spectral music (on Eliane Radigue), in Artforum magazine, as well as in museum catalogs and specialist publications.

Map directions and parking info included with RSVP.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Intervals Room at Crescent House, 631 North Crescent Court, San Diego, United States