Rich Seymour's stochastic statements.

Ok Fender first.

They got back to me and are hooking me up with some replacement parts. Good on them, thanks Ed! Hopefully they will not make the pickups so weird too. Badly mounted. I didn’t fret too much about it because I’m getting them redone anyway.

So… ah yes, I’m spending money I don’t have (nb: I don’t have any money.) to get Curtis Novak to rewind/rebuild my pickups to honest to gosh vintage style. The pickup shipped with the guitar is quite different from the original Seth Glover Wide-Range Humbucker. I will be sure to review the pickups when I get them back and installed.

Ok, now onto the Text of Light review. I went to the Text of Light site and saw that Text of Light (or these folks playing along with Brakhage films) has been going on since 1999 or 2001 depending on which story you read. During 1997-2001 I would pretty much try and go to anything involving any sonic youth member in nyc… that eventually branched out into Christian Marclay and DJ\Olive (with the entire We(TM) / Subtonic (can’t recall the night) … etc etc.) … but yeah… the first Text of Light shows had Marclay and Olive and others… but regardless, last night it was Lee Ranaldo, Ulrich Krieger and Alan Licht.

Stan Brakhage… Trey Stone and Matt Parker were his students. That alone should be enough to codify/canonize/whatever else into history, but no… the guy essentially founded good experimental film. I have seen a bit of terrible experimental film. It’s sort of like the difference between what a guy who looks at Jackson Pollack and says “anyone could do that” would produce and what Pollack produced. Yeah… he’s nuts. Like… lush colors you simply cannot see on a computer screen… amazing waves of movement, at once the rotation of the film itself and at other times the … gosh I can’t explain it, I’m not into film enough to know the lingo.

So… gear and music and noise I know enough about. Lee Ranaldo was playing his real Fender Jazzmaster (which looks like his custom one that I have, but with a natural headstock and… real vintage pickups), Ulrich Krieger played sax and Alan Licht played a Burns guitar… I wish I was in the plush front row so I could’ve seen their gear, but whatever. They probably all had loopers, Lee & Alan both had fuzz, Alan may have had a tone generator, but it was probably just a memory man… Alan also used an ebow I think. Lee broke out drumsticks, a bow and bells. He also busted out a cell phone and played back perhaps a voicemail through his microphonic vintage pickups (aka one of the reasons I’m getting mine rewound)… Kind of reminiscent of “Providence” from Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation.

The whole event was a great wash of sound… never too loud (well some people left, but that’s a sign of a good noise show imho)… You could still hear some pedals get clicked on… Ulrich used his amplified sax loud enough to feedback and use the clicking of the keys rhythmically.

Alan provided a nice baseline of hums and … haunting hills of tones… as in volume wise.

As it was I really wish I’d went up just to gawk at what gear they were using, but I just went out and loitered around. Kinda hoping to talk with Lee about gear, his signature model fender, how his band mate is doing a split 7″ with TMIAF, etc etc. But he was doing some lame video interview between the two shows… so he never came out before I got booted by this greasy cinefamily guy. I say greasy because his hair was greased back.

But, I did get to tell Alan that it was a good set and then almost get into a conversation about contemporary composition with Ulrich, but that got cut short. C’est la vie.

So yeah, it was a good show… it felt like hanging at Tonic again when I was ~21… except I’m 31 and yeah it still ruled.