Lee Mark Ranaldo (born February 3, 1956) is an American guitarist, singer and songwriter, best known as a co-founder of the rock band Sonic Youth. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked Ranaldo at number 33 on its "Greatest Guitarists of All Time" list.[1] In May 2012, Spin published a staff-selected top 100 guitarist list, ranking Ranaldo and his Sonic Youth bandmate Thurston Moore together at number 1.[2]
Ranaldo started his career in New York in several bands, including The Flucts,[3] and by playing guitar in Guitar Trio with Rhys Chatham[4] before joining the electric guitar orchestra of Glenn Branca. In Branca's orchestra he played mainly electric guitar, but he also played some of the harmonic guitars Branca designed and built. In 1981, Ranaldo and David Linton briefly joined the band Plus Instruments that had been formed by Truus de Groot. With this line-up they recorded the album February - April 1981, released on the Dutch Kremlin label.[5] After the release of the album, Ranaldo left the band and started Sonic Youth with Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon.
Solo records during Sonic Youth
In 1987, Ranaldo released his first solo album, From Here to Infinity, compositions which ended in locked grooves. The second side of the album also featured an unplayable engraving 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.
Preceded by a 2012 event at Nuit Blanche,[6] 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. In 2012, he performed a solo concert at Parisian music club La Maroquinerie where he was photographed by Jean-Pierre Domingue.[7]
To tour for the album, Ranaldo organized The Dust as his formal group, featuring Licht, Shelley, and bassist Tim Lüntzel. In 2013, his follow-up album Last Night on Earth was released, credited to Lee Ranaldo and the Dust.[8][9]
In 2014 Ranaldo and the Dust spent one week in Barcelona with producer Raül Refree and cut a full-band, all-acoustic album, Acoustic Dust, consisting of songs from Between The Times and the Tides and Last Night On Earth, plus cover songs including Neil Young's Revolution Blues, Sandy Denny's Bushes and Briars, and Mike Nesmith (The Monkee)'s You Just May Be The One.
In September 2017, Ranaldo released Electric Trim, his third proper solo album, made in collaboration with Barcelona Musician/Producer Raül Refree, on Mute records. The album featured 9 songs, many of the lyrics co-written with American author Jonathan Lethem. Musical contributors included Nels Cline, Sharon Van Etten, Alan Licht, Tim Luntzel, Kid Millions and Steve Shelley. A film about the making of the album HELLO HELLO HELLO: LEE RANALDO: ELECTRIC TRIM was directed by Fred Riedel.
Besides working as a guitarist, Ranaldo 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, Inc., Artspace and White Columns in New York. In 2017 there was a large overview exhibition in Menen, Belgium about his visual art.
In 2019 he was the curator for a concert series in Fondation Feltrinelli in Milan, Italy, under the umbrella name of Natural Disruptors.
In 2021, Ranaldo released In Virus Times, an EP of solo acoustic guitar pieces recorded during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In May 2024, Ranaldo received the honorary Doctor of Music degree from his alma mater, Binghamton University.[10]
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.[11]
Drift is a duo with his wife Leah Singer, with whom he has performed many live installation pieces with improvised music. The 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.[12]
Text of Light was founded in 2001 by 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.[13]
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.[14]
Glacial Trio is a band consisting of Ranaldo, Bagpiper David Watson and drummer Tony Buck. In 2010 Ranaldo released the solo album Maelstrom From Drift on Three Lobed Recordings with guest appearances of Buck and Watson. The band released On Jones Beach in 2012.
In 2022 Ranaldo collaborated with CatalanFrench musician Pascal Comelade and drummer Ramon Prats in a concert inspired by Velvet Underground music for the premiere of "Linger On: The Velvet Underground" a book published by Eva and Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace Library by Catalan music journalist Ignasi Julià. The concert was recorded and released as Velvet Serenade.
Art projects
Visual works
Ranaldo also has had some exhibitions with his visual arts and video works in combination with Sonic Youth-related art (posters, flyers, album covers, etc.). This took place as gallery and museum shows in Porto, Halifax, Miami, Tampa, Vienna, Prague, Gent, Bratislava, Auckland, Salt Lake City and in Brooklyn and 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). In October 2017 his first European solo exhibition 'Lost Ideas' by Curator Jan Van Woensel takes place in Cultuurcentrum De Steiger in Menen, Belgium together with a music festival curated by Ranaldo. The festival also features his field recordingsound art piece 'Shibuya Displacement'.
Sound art
In the late 2000s Ranaldo started giving many sound art performances in the US and Europe with his installation 'Suspended Guitar', which involved a guitar hanging on a rope from the ceiling feedbacking and being played with a bow, or hitting against the body or the strings. In 2006 he made the sound art piece 'Shibuya Displacement (a Soundwalk)' for the Hudson Valley Center For Contemporary Art.
Ranaldo has used many guitars but is associated with the Fender Jazzmaster, Telecaster Deluxeelectric guitars and sometimes Gibson Les Pauls, usually 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. Ranaldo is one of the few popular artists to use the Ovation Viper solid body electric.
Since Ranaldo and Moore are popularizers 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 Moore.[15]
In 2013, Ranaldo played a Watcher guitar from the French company Custom77 during his last Lee Ranaldo & The Dust tour throughout Europe.[16]
Printed works
Bookstore and Others (Paperback) - Lee Ranaldo, Leah Singer, Hozomeen Press (April 1995), ISBN978-1-885175-06-9
Drift (box set with DVD) - Lee Ranaldo, Leah Singer, Gigantic ArtSpace (2005), ISBN978-1-933045-34-4
Ground Zero: New Yorkers Respond (Paperback) - Lee Ranaldo, David Amram, Frank Messina, Wasteland Press (August 15, 2002), ISBN978-0-9715811-7-3
Hello from the American Desert[17] (Paperback) - Lee Ranaldo, Curt Kirkwood, Silver Wonder Press (November 2007)
JRNLS80s (Paperback) - Lee Ranaldo, Soft Skull Press (1998), ISBN978-1-887128-31-5 (Portuguese edition 2017 by Terreno Estranho)
Lengths & Breaths (Paperback) - Lee Ranaldo, Cynthia Connolly, Water Row Press (August 2004), ISBN978-0-934953-79-5
Moroccan Journal (Hardcover) - Lee Ranaldo, Fringecore (1999), ISBN978-90-76207-52-0
Moroccan Journal: Jajouka excerpt (Unknown Binding) - Lee Ranaldo, Leah Singer, Ring Tarigh for the Literary Renaissance (1997), ASIN: B0006RJF80
Online Diaries: the Lollapalooza '95 tour journals (Paperback) - Beck, Courtney Love, Stephen Malkmus, Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, Mike Watt, David Yow, Soft Skull Press (1996), ISBN978-1-887128-20-9
Road Movies (Paperback) - Lee Ranaldo, Leah Singer, Soft Skull Press (November 30, 2004), ISBN978-1-932360-73-8
Against Refusing (Hardcover) - Lee Ranaldo, Water Row Press (April 2010), ISBN978-0-934953-84-9
Burglarproof Wheelbase
Water Days (w/ Leah Singer) (also in French published by Dis Voir under the title 'Jours D'eau')
Sonic Youth was an American rock band based in New York City and formed in 1981. Founding members Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo remained together for the entire history of the band, while Steve Shelley (drums) followed a series of short-term drummers in 1985, rounding out the core line-up. Jim O'Rourke was also a member of the band from 1999 to 2005, and Mark Ibold was a member from 2006 to 2011.
Thurston Joseph Moore is an American guitarist, singer and songwriter best known as a member of the rock band Sonic Youth. He has also participated in many solo and group collaborations outside Sonic Youth, as well as running the Ecstatic Peace! record label. Moore was ranked 34th in Rolling Stone's 2004 edition of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time".
Daydream Nation is the fifth studio album by American alternative rock band Sonic Youth, released on October 18, 1988. The band recorded the album between July and August 1988 at Greene St. Recording in New York City, and it was released by Enigma Records as a double album.
A Thousand Leaves is the tenth studio album by American rock band Sonic Youth, released on CD and cassette on May 12, 1998, by DGC Records. A double-LP vinyl issue had been released three weeks earlier on My So Called Records. It was the band's first album recorded at their own studio in Lower Manhattan, which was built with the money they had made at the 1995 Lollapalooza festival. Since the band had an unlimited amount of time to work in their studio, the album features numerous lengthy and improvisational tracks that were developed unevenly. The highly experimental extended plays Anagrama, Slaapkamers met slagroom, and Invito al ĉielo were recorded simultaneously with the album.
Washing Machine is the ninth studio album by the American experimental rock band Sonic Youth, released on September 26, 1995, by DGC Records. It was recorded at Easley Studios in Memphis, Tennessee, and produced by the band and John Siket, who also engineered the band's previous two albums. The album features more open-ended pieces than its predecessors and contains some of the band's longest songs, including the 20-minute ballad "The Diamond Sea", which is the lengthiest track to feature on any of Sonic Youth's studio albums.
Sonic Youth is the debut EP by American rock band Sonic Youth. It was recorded between December 1981 and January 1982 and released in March 1982 by Glenn Branca's Neutral label. It is the only recording featuring the early Sonic Youth lineup with Richard Edson on drums. Sonic Youth differs stylistically from the band's later work in its greater incorporation of clean guitars, standard tuning, crisp production and a post-punk style.
Confusion Is Sex is the debut studio album by American noise rock band Sonic Youth. It was released in 1983 by Neutral Records. It has been referred to as an important example of the no wave genre. AllMusic called it "lo-fi to the point of tonal drabness, as the instruments seem to ring out in only one tone, that of screechy noise".
EVOL is the third full-length studio album by the American alternative rock band Sonic Youth. Released in May 1986, EVOL was Sonic Youth’s first album on SST Records, and also the first album to feature then-new drummer Steve Shelley who had just replaced Bob Bert.
SYR4: Goodbye 20th Century is an album by American alternative rock band Sonic Youth. It is a double album of versions of pieces by avant-garde composers, performed by Sonic Youth and collaborators.
Rather Ripped is the fourteenth studio album by American rock band Sonic Youth, released on June 13, 2006, by Geffen Records. It was the band's first album following the departure of multi-instrumentalist Jim O'Rourke, who had joined as a fifth member in 1999. Unlike its immediate predecessors, the album was produced by John Agnello and recorded at Sear Sound in New York City, the same studio where the band's 1994 album, Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star, was recorded. It also completed Sonic Youth's contract with Geffen, which released the band's previous eight records.
Alan Licht is an American guitarist and composer, whose work combines elements of pop, noise, free jazz and minimalism. He is also a writer and journalist.
"Silver Rocket" is both the second track and second single from Sonic Youth's 1988 album Daydream Nation. Like all the tracks on the album, the Daydream Nation version of “Silver Rocket” was recorded in the studio, whereas all editions of the single featured a live version of the song with alternate lyrics and were pressed in small runs by independent fanzines. The studio album version also appeared on the B-side of the 12” edition of the band's previous single, “Teen Age Riot.” A video was also produced for “Silver Rocket,” featuring a recording of the song different from any of those appearing on any of the band's singles or albums.
My Cat Is An Alien (MCIAA) is an Italian musical duo and outsider audiovisual artist consisting of brothers Maurizio and Roberto Opalio, formed in Torino, Italy, in late 1997. The band releases avant garde / experimental music in a form of improvisation that MCIAA themselves define 'instantaneous composition'.
Italy's MY CAT IS AN ALIEN is the finest two-brother band from Italy since the end of the Great War.
Lesson No. 1 is the debut solo EP by American avant-garde musician Glenn Branca. It was released in March 1980 on 99 Records.
Leah Singer is a photographer and multimedia artist. She is the long-time artistic collaborator and wife of Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth. Singer performs with multiple modified film projectors that allow her to improvise and manipulate the film projections by adjusting the frame rate. She has likened what she does with film as similar to DJs who scratch with records.
Bad Moon Rising is the second studio album by American rock band Sonic Youth, released on March 29, 1985, by Blast First and Homestead Records. The album is loosely themed around the dark side of America, including references to obsession, insanity, Charles Manson, heavy metal, Satanism, and early European settlers' encounters with Native Americans.
The Eternal is the fifteenth and final studio album by American alternative rock band Sonic Youth, released on June 9, 2009, by Matador Records, their first and only on that label. It was their first studio album in three years, making it the band's longest delay between studio albums.
Between the Times and the Tides is the ninth studio album by the American alternative rock musician Lee Ranaldo, released on March 20, 2012 on Matador Records. His first release on Matador Records and since Sonic Youth's indefinite hiatus, the album features a more straightforward songwriting approach to his prior material and includes guest musicians such as Nels Cline, John Medeski and Leah Singer. The album was originally intended to be a minimalist acoustic album but its sound was developed by Ranaldo during its recording at Echo Canyon West in Hoboken, New Jersey during a seven-month period in early 2011.
Last Night on Earth is the tenth studio album by the American alternative rock musician Lee Ranaldo, released on October 7, 2013 on Matador Records. Recorded over a nine-month period at Echo Canyon West in Hoboken, New Jersey, the album features Ranaldo's backing band The Dust which comprises former Sonic Youth bandmate Steve Shelley, guitarist Alan Licht and bassist Tim Lüntzel. In addition to studio recordings, Last Night on Earth incorporates field recordings of Ranaldo in Berlin, Germany and Valeggio sul Mincio, Italy.
Electric Trim is the twelfth studio album by American musician Lee Ranaldo, the former Sonic Youth guitarist, released on September 15, 2017, on Mute Records, marking his first solo album to be released on the label. The album was produced by Ranaldo along with Spanish musician Raül Refree. The album features several musicians, including Sharon Van Etten, Steve Shelley, Alan Licht, and Nels Cline.
↑ Hall, Glen (2009). "Text of Light". Musicworks. #103 (Spring 2009). Musicworks Society of Ontario: 18–24. Archived from the original on August 15, 2009. Retrieved October 31, 2012.
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