Alan Licht
Musician and Writer
A musician and writer, Alan Licht’s has appeared on over 100 recordings that range from indie rock to minimalist composition to free improvisation. Recent releases include Currents, a solo acoustic album, and Tomorrow Outside Tomorrow, a collaboration with Tetuzi Akiyama, Rob Mazurek, and Oren Ambarchi. A contributing music editor at BOMB magazine who has written frequently for Artforum, Art Review, Modern Painters, Parkett, and many other publications, he is also the author of Sound Art Revisited (Bloomsbury, 2019) and the editor of Will Oldham on Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy (Faber & Faber/W.W. Norton, 2012).
Appears in
The Golem Rescored
Magic and Mystics
Reviving the 1920s film, The Golem: How He Came Into the World, Reboot reimagined the classic horror film as eight-part episodic series, each segment newly scored by renowned musicians and hosted by leading scholars, composers and film historians. Together, they explored the film’s lasting impact, its haunting music and its rich connections to Jewish history, occultism, Hollywood, tradition and astrology. In this episode, scored by Threshing Floor, we explore the themes of magic and mystics, Jewish folklore, Talmud and philosophy with Dr. Justin Sledge, a professor of philosophy and religion in the Metro-Detroit area. He looks at the mystical spiritual leader Judah Loew ben Bezalel or “Rabbi Lowe” in The Golem film, who, in an effort to protect his people and avoid their expulsion, creates a massive warrior out of clay, using magic to bring him to life. Watch here.
The Golem Rescored: Guests
To celebrate the 100th anniversary of The Golem, Reboot is cutting up the film into eight parts, creating an episodic series with new scores by renowned musicians and hosted by preeminent scholars, composers and film historians discussing the significance of the film and its music and taking a deep dive into the Jewish history, occultism, Hollywoodism, traditions and astrology.
Listen
Threshing Floor
On Shavuot 2020, in the middle of a historic pandemic, a cast of renegade noisemongers created a drone model of the Threshing Floor, offering a respite from the chaos of the eve, a moment to provide shelter from the storm. For 20 minutes, these witches and renegades filled the space with rumbling reverberations and souring sonic outbursts inviting the listener to lay down and be taken away. The album is out and available via Bandcamp. Learn more and listen here!
About Threshing Floor
The Threshing Floor was an experimental experiment, improvising together apart during a time of plague, taking a usual time of togetherness reverberations and mediations and instead finding a unified voice by sharing ideas across currents, many miles apart, and using the time tested accompanist named chance to take the beautiful wandering vibrations and lace them together into the blanket of sound before you.