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audioMER is happy to announce the release of a new LP; Lost City by Aki Onda (US/JP) with music by Loren Connors (US) and Alan Licht (US).



The images were shot in New York between 2001 and 2002. It was during the time when we were still in shock from 9.11. The stars and stripes suddenly became visible everywhere in the city. Soon after, the invasion of Afghanistan started. Everybody was living under an indefinable fear - not knowing what would happen in the future. (Aki Onda).



Lost City project started as a series of photographs shot by visual artist and composer Aki Onda in New York starting right after 9.11 in 2001. A decisively introspective response to the major world event taking place, his pictures were devoid of direct references, but documented his immediate surroundings, focusing on how what happened resonated on a personal micro-level.

Since 2005, Onda has been presenting this series as slide projections, which function as a visual score for improvisation, and performing with NYC avant-garde musicians Loren Connors and Alan Licht. Two improvisations on this LP were recorded at Anthology Film Archives in NYC in 2007.

Lost City contains the vinyl, a folded 20 x 30 inch poster with the complete photograph series and an A4 risoprinted booklet containing the accompanying text written by NYC based curator/writer Niels Van Tomme.

The record's A side is a duo piece between Connors and Licht that consists of wandering, buzzing guitar drones with occasional noisy eruptions. It highlights the almost twin-like connection between the longtime collaborators, with telepathic intersecting guitar lines and a sense of unease seeping through. The B side is Connors solo and is a very lyrical and atmospheric ambient piece that is equally sparse and spacious. The LP is limited to 350 copies and distributed by N.E.W.S.



BIO's

Aki Onda is an electronic musician, composer, and visual artist. He is particularly known for his Cassette Memories project – works compiled from a “sound diary” of field-recordings collected by Onda over a span of two decades. Onda’s musical instrument of choice is the cassette Walkman. Not only does he capture field recordings with the Walkman, he also physically manipulates multiple Walkmans with electronics in his performances. In another of his projects, Cinemage, Onda shows slide projections of still photo images, shot by himself, as a performance or installation. Onda often works in interdisciplinary fields and collaborates with filmmakers and visual artists. His on-going collaborations include “Nervous Magic Lantern” with Ken Jacobs, improv trio with Michael Snow and Alan Licht, site-specific happening with Akio Suzuki, and audio-visual installation/performance with Raha Raissnia.



Guitarist Loren Connors was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1949. Best known as a composer and improviser, Connors has issued over 50 guitar records on his own imprints (Daggett, St. Joan, Black Label) since the late 1970s and over two dozen on other labels across the globe. He has recorded under the names Guitar Roberts, Loren Mattei, Loren MazzaCane Connors and other variations. Connors' singular adapation of the blues is a distinct personal vision combining the Delta bottleneck sound and the ancestral blues voice (appearing as distortion, baying hounds or multi-tracked guitar), with hauntingly unexpected sounds. Outside of Connors' three decades of solo work, he has collaborated with Suzanne Langille, Jim O'Rourke, Darin Gray, Alan Licht, Christina Carter, Keiji Haino, San Agustin, Jandek and many others, as well as leading the group Haunted House. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.



Alan Licht is a guitarist and composer whose work merges minimalism, rock, free jazz, noise and improv. Since 1990, he has recorded and performed with a diverse array of musicians, including Jim O'Rourke, Phill Niblock,, Arthur Lee, and Peter Brotzmann. He’s also collaborated with visual artists, such as Gary Panter and Charles Atlas. Licht is currently the lead guitarist of Lee Ranaldo and the Dust and one-third of the “talk rock” group Title TK. Several solo albums of his extended solo guitar pieces have appeared on labels like Siltbreeze, Family Vineyard, and Editions Mego. A frequent contributor to Artforum and other publications, Licht is also the author of Sound Art: Beyond Music Between Categories (Rizzoli, 2007) and the editor of Will Oldham on Bonnie Prince Billy (Faber & Faber/W.W. Norton, 2012). He has also created many sound installations and curated exhibitions of sound art.