YMCA by Alan Licht

YMCA is guitarist Alan Licht's first solo release since 2003's A New York Minute double CD (on XI), and his first solo vinyl outing since 1994's long out-of-print Sink the Aging Process (on Siltbreeze). Largely recorded at a 2004 concert at a Cambridge Massachusetts YMCA , the album documents Licht's solo guitar set of the time -- a three-part structured improvisation that moves from mournful, layered sustained tones that sound more like a reed organ than a guitar, to a gently plucked middle section, to a final firestorm of loop processing that is a tour de force of "the changing same."

Inspired by his friends Oren Ambarchi and Tetuzi Akiyama's then-current albums (Triste and Don't Forget To Boogie), Licht proposed YMCA to Idea Records to form a kind of trilogy with those releases. With Idea's subsequent demise, Family Vineyard has stepped in to bring this peak performance out as a special limited edition vinyl release, exactly as the artist originally conceived it.

LP version limited to 500 copies. The digital version adds "Macy" -- an extended coda to YMCA that eschews string play for a shifting wave of timbres, recorded live at The Stone.

Tracklist

1.	YMCA, part I	19:48

2.	YMCA, part II	24:10

3.	Macy (digital bonus)	21:30

Credits

released March 10, 2009

Recorded live at Durrell Hall, YMCA Cambridge, MA by Keith Fullerton Whitman, March 22, 2004 and live at Theatre Arsenic, Lausanne, Switzerland by Rudy Deceliere, March 13, 2004

Edited at Ruff Riddim, NYC with Raz Mesinai
Mastered by Paul Gold at Salt Mastering, Brooklyn

Photo by Catherine Ceresole

License