Currents by Alan Licht

"There aren’t many people who could/should follow up their noisiest solo record with their most melodic, but Alan Licht is certainly one of them. Two years after the electric detonations of Four Years Older, Licht offers his first-ever set of acoustic guitar instrumentals – eight well-defined songs with a beguiling combination of precision and momentum. There’s logic to this move, given the tune-building Licht has forged lately in Lee Ranaldo’s band. But still, Currents is a left turn no Licht fan could have predicted – except that every move he’s made in his genre-dissolving career has been a left turn.

Currents also bucks the underground trend of solo acoustic instrumentals that rely primarily on finger-picking. For me there’s never enough finger-picking out there, but straight-up strumming deserves more play, and Licht practically makes up for the dearth himself, basing each tune on strummed chords rather than picked notes. That approach creates a hypnotic minimalism that’s easy to miss on first listen. It surfaces most strongly when his strumming tugs at the melodies, taking them over without losing the structures they launch from. It’s repetition as both means and end – which means Currents also has undercurrents, and on both levels it succeeds immensely."
– Marc Masters

Alan Licht on Currents

Despite initially learning to play on a Yamaha nylon-string guitar, listening to a fair amount of solo acoustic music over the years, and picking up fingerstyle when I toured with David Pajo’s Papa M, I never thought I would make an acoustic LP. Over the last few years I acquired a Taylor acoustic electric and a Guild D-35, and would play those at home now and then. After the Keith Richards book came out, I put the Taylor in a variation on his beloved G tuning, as well as another tuning that I’ve used in Text of Light and on my last solo electric album, Four Years Older, and before I knew it I had come up with some material that was song-like, but didn’t seem to need vocals—the melodies were embedded in the chording. From there I decided to make it a kind of challenge: to see if I could devise an album’s worth of stripped-down acoustic instrumental “songs” that were compelling, and distinct from the post-Fahey/American Primitive style which has become so ubiquitous.

An additional, indirect inspiration came from seeing a few films by Eric Rohmer. They’re talky, with no-frills production values, but Rohmer creates considerable visual interest through means that also happen to be very economical: shooting mostly outdoors in beautiful locations with young, attractive actors who are frequently nonprofessionals. As I would be financing the project myself, I was in a similar situation: trying to make the recording as quick and easy as possible while still bringing a lot of depth to the end result.

The Taylor was the main guitar used on Currents. We miked it acoustically, but it also went through a small amp and straight into the board, so there’s a combination of acoustic and electric tones (“currents” is meant to refer to both electricity and water movement). I’ve been doing solo electric guitar pieces since the late 80s, using extended technique and an ever-expanding pedal board. It had reached the point where almost all of the second side of Four Years Older was pure electronics; in a way, Currents picks up where that left off, by removing the effects instead of the guitar.

Guitarist from Love Child, the Blue Humans, Run On, Text of Light, Lee Ranaldo & the Dust

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