Alan Licht is a musician, author, and curator based in New York.
1
BILL ORCUTT, A MECHANICAL JOEY (Fake Estates)
Orcutt built this whole album from a sample of Joey Ramone counting off “One, two, three, four, five, six,” relentlessly looping and permutating it for thirty-five phantasmagoric minutes. A conceptual masterstroke, it pinpoints and illuminates the Ramones’ inner minimalism.
2
75 DOLLAR BILL (People’s Pavilion, Columbus Park, New York, August 29)
The sound clash that wasn’t: An expanded version of this percussion-and-guitar duo inadvertently faced off against a nearby troupe of Chinese musicians who regularly play in the park, initially deferring to the home team’s tonal center before flowing into their own modal jam.
3
MICHAEL FLEMMER UNBOXING LOS ANGELES FREE MUSIC SOCIETY, 1974~1983+ (Vinyl-on-Demand)
Posting in nine one-minute segments on Instagram, Flemmer literally unpacks a staggeringly lavish compendium of archival work by the long-running free-improv collective. In the age of streaming, I’m cheered to see the continued existence of album releases that constitute art objects unto themselves.
4
NORMA TANEGA, WALKIN’ MY CAT NAMED DOG (Real Gone Music)/“INTERNAL LANDSCAPES: PAINTINGS 1967–2005” (White Columns, New York)
Tanega, best known for her 1966 novelty hit “Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog,” with her debut album of the same name showcases her marvelously idiosyncratic songwriting and guitar playing, while the revelatory retrospective at White Columns displayed her equally singular vision as a painter.
5
REISSUES FROM CRAMPS RECORDS NOVA MUSICHA SERIES (Dialogo)
This reissue of six of the Italian label’s original eighteen new-music releases was long overdue, particularly for its inclusion of Horacio Vaggione’s spectacular La Maquina de Cantar (1978) and Costin Miereanu’s Luna Cinese (1975).
6
MEMPHIS ’69 (Joe LaMattina) A heretofore lost artifact, this film documents a three-day blues festival in Memphis staged in June 1969 that predated both Woodstock and the similarly forgotten summerlong Harlem concert series revisited by Questlove in his more widely seen Summer of Soul (2021).
7
STARE KITS, LIVE AT TIER 3 1979 (self-released)
Previously only whispered about by No Wave scholars, a recording of this short-lived East Village band finally surfaced on Bandcamp, providing yet another piece in the puzzle of New York’s great post-punk explosion.
8
PETER REHBERG
Formidable electronic musician and Editions Mego proprietor Rehberg’s untimely death from a heart attack in August robbed the experimental-music world of one of its most vital contributors and vibrant personalities.
9
DON & CAMILLE DIETRICH (Zoom, April 9)
One of the highlights of QuaranTunes, the livestreamed concert series hosted by label and record store Feeding Tube, was this father-daughter sax-cello living-room duet, a beautifully executed blast that conjured visions of a parallel universe where the patriarch of the Shaggs expertly tutored his daughters in the finer points of pure aleatory music making.
10
PINK FLOYD’S 1967 VIDEO ARNOLD LAYNE/THE CHILLS, “PINK FROST,” LIVE AT THE RHUMBA CLUB (CHRISTCHURCH, NEW ZEALAND, 1982) (Cinephobe.tv)
I’ve known both these songs since the late ’80s, but hearing them back-to-back in two clips I’d never seen before made it mind-bendingly clear how unexpectedly similar they are.