Lee Ranaldo

All Music Guide:

Lee Ranaldo, co-founder of avant-garde rock group Sonic Youth, was born in 1956 in East Norwich, New York. In addition to constant touring with Sonic Youth, Ranaldo has been extremely active in the New York music scene for the past 30 years, recording and collaborating with numerous acts, producing discs, and publishing several books of poetry and journal entries.

Ranaldo attended SUNY Binghamton in Binghamton, New York, where he played in an experimental punk outfit called the Fluks (named after the Dadaist art movement, Fluxus). His early influences include many psychedelic California bands from the late '60s, including the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Hot Tuna, as well as early New York City punk units like the Ramones, Television, and Talking Heads.

After moving to New York in 1979, Ranaldo briefly attempted to revive the Fluks before playing in a series of acts including Rhys Chatham and Plus Instruments (with whom he recorded an LP in 1982). Through Chatham, Ranaldo met the charismatic composer Glenn Branca, who created avant-garde pieces for electric guitar ensembles. Through the burbling downtown no wave scene of the early '80s, Ranaldo met future Sonic Youth bandmates Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon.

Throughout the '80s, the band worked hard to sustain themselves, recording and touring constantly. The early years of the band are documented in a book of road journals written by Ranaldo and published by Soft Skull Press in the mid-'90s. In 1987, he released his first solo album, From Here to Infinity, on SST Records, a vinyl release with locking grooves at the end of each track.

By the early '90s, after the completion and subsequent canonization of their seminal Daydream Nation (and probably partially by dint of sheer survival), Sonic Youth were looked up to as elders in the fledgling alternative music scene, acting as mentors to dozens of younger bands (including Nirvana). In this role, Ranaldo has produced albums for Babes in Toyland, You Am I, Deity Guns, and others.

Ranaldo's role in the ever-experimental Sonic Youth has been an important one, acting as a textural axis for Gordon and Moore. Though he typically only contributed a handful of songs to each Sonic Youth recording, Ranaldo quickly developed his own songwriting style -- throbbing beats topped with beat-influenced, half-spoken/half-sung poetry delivered in Ranaldo's reassuring, gently confident voice, such as "Eric's Trip" on Daydream Nation and the title track off of 1999's NYC Ghosts & Flowers.

In addition to releasing a book of his poetry (also published by Soft Skull Press), Ranaldo has also edited a volume of tour journals from the 1995 Lollapalooza Tour written by Moore, Beck, Stephen Malkmus (of Pavement), Courtney Love, and others. Ranaldo also has an ongoing collaboration with jazz drummer William Hooker. The two create dissonant music -- Hooker on drums, Ranaldo on modified guitars, synthesizers, and other electronics -- while taking turns reading and improvising poetry. These collaborations include 1998's heavily edited live album Clouds as well as 2005's Music for Stage and Screen, which featured excerpts of a score Ranaldo produced for Dania Saragovia's film Jealousy, as well as music for plays by Gil Kofman and Michele Salimbeni. Ranaldo continued to collaborate throughout the 2000s with avant luminaries, as on Christian Marclay: Graffiti Composition, which also featured Elliott Sharp and Vernon Reid, and also released solo forays into the fringes of guitar work while also working with Sonic Youth. When that band moved to Matador Records to release The Eternal, Ranaldo also signed on as a solo artist. His debut album for the label, Between the Times and the Tides, featured familiar faces such as Alan Licht, Nels Cline, Steve Shelley, and Jim O'Rourke, and arrived in March 2012.

Wikipedia:

Lee M. Ranaldo (born February 3, 1956) is an American musician, singer-songwriter, guitarist, writer, visual artist and record producer, best known as a co-founder of the alternative rock band Sonic Youth. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked Ranaldo at number 33 on its "Greatest Guitarists of All Time" list. In May 2012, Spin published a staff selected top 100 list, ranking Ranaldo and his Sonic Youth bandmate Thurston Moore together at number 1.Cite error: There are <ref> tags on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist}} template (see the help page).

Biography[edit]

Ranaldo was born in Glen Cove, Long Island, studied art and graduated from Binghamton University. He has three sons, Cody, Sage and Frey, and is married to the experimental artist Leah Singer.

Ranaldo started his career in New York in several bands, and joined the electric guitar orchestra of Glenn Branca. In 1981, he and David Linton briefly joined the band Plus Instruments formed by Truus de Groot. With this line-up they recorded the album February - April 1981, released on the Dutch Kremlin label. After the release of the album, Ranaldo left the band and started Sonic Youth with Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon. In 1987, Ranaldo released his first solo album, From Here to Infinity. This is a one sided album with a series of locked groove tracks. The other side cannot be played and is a scratched image made by Savage Pencil.

Among Ranaldo's solo records are Dirty Windows, a collection of spoken texts with music, Amarillo Ramp (For Robert Smithson), pieces for the guitar, and Scriptures of the Golden Eternity. His books include several with art or photography by Leah Singer, including Drift, Bookstore, Road Movies, and Moroccan Journal: Jajouka excerpt (from a full-length book of writings on Moroccan travels and music). Ranaldo has also published Jrnls80s (published by Soft Skull Press), as well as a book of poems, Lengths & Breaths, with photography by Cynthia Connolly. His most recent book of poetry, Against Refusing, was published by Water Row Press in April 2010 with cover artwork by Leah Singer. His visual and sound works have been shown at galleries and museums in Paris, Toronto, New York, London, Sydney, Los Angeles, Vienna, and elsewhere.

Ranaldo has produced albums for artists including Babes in Toyland, You Am I, Magik Markers, Deity Guns, and Dutch art rock-ensemble Kleg. He has edited a volume of tour journals from the 1995 Lollapalooza tour written by himself, Thurston Moore, Beck, Stephen Malkmus, Courtney Love, and others.

Ranaldo has worked with jazz drummer William Hooker on improvised music, and reading and improvising poetry and released several records together.

His main side projects are Drift and Text of Light.

Drift is a duo with his wife Leah Singer, with whom he has performed many live installation pieces with improvised music. This collaboration, utilizing live manipulated 16mm film projections, electric guitar and recited texts, occupied the duo from the early 1990s until late 2005, when they re-created the performance as an art installation at Gigantic Art Space, a gallery in New York City. Since then the pair have been performing a new piece entitled "iloveyouihateyou", a combination installation and performance work that has been presented in the US and Europe. In 2005 Drift released a box set with a DVD and a book.

Text of Light was founded in 2001 by Lee Ranaldo, Alan Licht, Ulrich Krieger, Christian Marclay and William Hooker. The core group is Ranaldo, Licht and Krieger with changing DJs (Marclay, DJ Olive, Marina Rosenfeld) and drummers (Hooker, Tim Barnes, Steve Shelley). The music is free improvised and mostly played along with, but not really referencing, films by Stan Brakhage. The name for the band comes from Brakhage's film The Text of Light.

In 2007 Ranaldo collaborated with British rock band The Cribs on their third album Men's Needs, Women's Needs, Whatever. Ranaldo performs a spoken word piece against the track "Be Safe". Ranaldo made an appearance in the 2008 feature documentary by Nik Sheehan about Brion Gysin and the Dreamachine entitled FLicKer.

Besides working as a guitarist he has frequently produced sound, performance and visual art independently of Sonic Youth. He has released over fifty solo, band and collaborative recordings, and a dozen books, including travel journals, poetry and artists’ books. His work has been exhibited at numerous galleries and museums, including the Hayward Gallery in London, the Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art, NSCAD in Halifax, the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Mercer Union in Toronto, and Printed Matter, Artspace and White Columns in New York.

Preceded by a 2012 event at Nuit Blanche, on October 21, 2011, the Music Gallery, InterAccess and the Images Festival presented the North American premiere of Ranaldo’s Contre Jour, a performance piece for swinging guitar, with visuals by longtime partner and collaborator Leah Singer. This performance was also done in Paris, Rotterdam, during IFFR, and Madrid afterwards.

Shortly after the hiatus of Sonic Youth in November 2011 Ranaldo released his first solo album with acoustic songs Between the Times and the Tides in early 2012 on Matador Records. Contributors to the record include Jim O'Rourke, Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley, former Sonic Youth drummer Bob Bert, Wilco's Nels Cline, Alan Licht, John Medeski, and bassist Irwin Menken.

Glacial is a band consisting of Ranaldo, guitarist David Watson and drummer Tony Buck. In 2010 Ranaldo released the solo album Maelstrom From Drift on Three Lobed Recordings with guest appearances of Tony Buck and David Watson. The band released On Jones Beach In 2012.Cite error: There are <ref> tags on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist}} template (see the help page).

Equipment[edit]

Ranaldo usually uses Fender Jazzmaster, Telecaster Deluxe electric guitars and sometimes Gibson Les Pauls, with radically alternative tunings, and modifications. One of his Jazzmasters has a single coil pickup installed between the bridge and the tailpiece to exploit the resonating chiming sounds on that area of string at these so-called tailed bridge guitars.

In 2007 Yuri Landman built for Ranaldo the Moonlander, a biheaded electric guitar with 18 strings: 6 normal strings and 12 sympathetic strings.

Since Ranaldo and Moore, together with Elvis Costello and J. Mascis, are known for being key figures in the popularisation and resurrection of the Fender Jazzmaster, Fender introduced in 2009 a special Lee Ranaldo signature edition of a transparent blue version, together with a transparent green one for Thurston.Cite error: There are <ref> tags on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist}} template (see the help page).

Printed works[edit]

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