Lee Ranaldo


Lee Mark Ranaldo 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 guitarist list, ranking Ranaldo and his Sonic Youth bandmate Thurston Moore together at number 1.

Biography

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 twice, first with Amanda Linn in 1981 but later divorced, and now with experimental artist Leah Singer.
Ranaldo started his career in New York in several bands, and joined the electric guitar orchestra of Glenn Branca. In this orchestra he played mainly electric guitar, but also some of Branca's harmonic guitars Branca had designed and built himself. 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.

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 , 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. Ranaldo has also published Jrnls80s, 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.

After Sonic Youth

After Sonic Youth went on hiatus in 2011, Ranaldo released Between the Times and the Tides in early 2012 on Matador Records. The record was the first under his own name to feature comparatively straightforward, vocal pop rock songs. 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.
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.
In 2012, he performed a solo concert at La Maroquinerie, for which he was photographed by Jean-Pierre Domingue.
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.
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 '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 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. In 2017 there was a large overview exhibition in Menen, Belgium about his visual arts.
In 2019 he was the curator for a concert series in Fondation Feltrinelli in Milan, Italy, under the umbrella name of Natural Disruptors.

Collaborations and side projects

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. 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.
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 and drummers. 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.
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.

Art projects

Visual works

Ranaldo also has had some exhibitions with his visual arts and video works in combination with Sonic Youth related art.
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 ; NSCAD, Halifax, Nova Scotia ; Villa Arson, Nice, France. 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 recording sound 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'. A guitar hanging on a rope from the ceiling feedbacking and being played with a bow, or hitting against de body or the strings. In 2006 he made the sound art piece 'Shibuya Displacement ' for the Hudson Valley Center For Contemporary Art.

Equipment

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. Ranaldo is one of the few popular artists to use the Ovation Viper solid body electric.
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, J Mascis and The Cure's Robert Smith, 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.
In 2013, Ranaldo played a Watcher guitar from the French company Custom77 during his last Lee Ranaldo & The Dust tour throughout Europe.

Printed works

Solo albums
Singles and EPs
Compilations
Collaborations with William Hooker
Collaborations with others
Live recordings
As a band member