Sonic Youth Co-Founder Lee Ranaldo, Itasca
Lee Ronaldo
Lee’s new album ELECTRIC TRIM will be released September 15, 2017 on Mute Records. Nine new songs recorded in collaboration with Barcelona producer Raul ‘Refree’ Fernandez in New York City and Barcelona between April 2015 and April 2016, with help from many of the players associated with Lee’s recent music, and some new friends: The Dust - Alan Licht, Steve Shelley, Tim Luntzel - Nels Cline, Kid Millions, and Sharon Van Etten, who sings on 6 songs including a duet with Lee on ‘Last Looks,’. Six of the nine lyrics on the record were written in collaboration with American author Jonathan Lethem. Cover and album art by Richard Prince. This album extends the work of Lee’s previous two ‘song’ albums and moves into some rich new sonic territories and production techniques, experimenting with electronic beats and samples alongside the live players.
A feature documentary, HELLO HELLO HELLO : LEE RANALDO : ELECTRIC TRIM, on the year-long making of the album by filmmaker Fred Riedel (who did Lee’s Blackt Out video from Last Night On Earth) is now screening at film festivals.
Continued works with partner Leah Singer (Sight Unseen; Contre Jour) have been large scale, multi projection, often quadraphonic sound + light events, w Lee performing ‘suspended guitar phenomena’ in various locations around the world (recently: China, Australia, Iceland, Greece).
Orchestral Composition “Hurricane Transcriptions” based on wind sounds recorded during Hurricane Sandy Oct 2013 performed by Kaleidoskop Ensemble (Berlin) at Holland Festival (June 2013) and by Ensemble Offspring (Sydney) at Sydney Festival (January 2014). A newly-realized quartet version of this work will be performed with Dither Quartet (Brooklyn) in 2015. Also continued work with Glacial Trio (with David Watson and Tony Buck) and Text of Light Group (with Alan Licht and Ulrich Krieger), which improvises to films by Stan Brakhage.
Leeʼs artworks and videos have been on view in the past couple years in gallery and museum shows in Porto, Halifax, Miami, Tampa, Vienna, Prague, Gent, Bratislava, Auckland, Salt Lake City and in Brooklyn and most recently at the VOLTA fair in Manhattan in 2015. Artist-in-Residence: CNEAI, Paris (2007, 2008); NSCAD, Halifax, Nova Scotia (2013); Villa Arson, Nice, France (2014).
RECENT DISCOGRAPHY:
AMBIENT LOOP FOR VANCOUVER • [Important Records 2015]
Acoustic Dust • Lee Ranaldo & The Dust [El Segell, 2014]
Last Night on Earth • Lee Ranaldo & The Dust [Matador, 2013]
Between The Times and The Tides • Lee Ranaldo [Matador, 2012]
more info:
www.leeranaldo.com
www.sonicyouth.com
Itasca
Itasca (Los Angeles) - Itasca is the musical identity of Los Angeles-based guitarist, singer, and songwriter Kayla Cohen. Just as the name itself is ambiguous—a 19th-century pseudo-Ojibwe place name and portmanteau of the Latin words for “truth” (veritas) and “head” (caput)—so too is Cohen’s musical project mutable and multivalent: fundamentally unconcerned with genre, but richly allusive of the hermetic worlds of private-press canyon-cult mystics and East Coast noiseniks alike. Though deeply informed by the mythology and iconography of the modern American desert West, Cohen likewise finds kinship with a lineage of English iconoclasts such as Michael Chapman and Bridget St John. Her adept fingerstyle guitar work—nimble but unshowy, always at the service of framing her plaintively unspooling modal progressions and gorgeous, moonlit voice—centers Itasca’s melancholy pastorales in a hazy, heat-mirage space equally suggestive of familiarity and distance.
