False Harmonics #25: Nels Cline’s 70 is the New 70

False Harmonics #25 kicks off the year with 70 Is the New 70: an ecstatic 70th birthday celebration and concert for American guitarist, composer, and Wilco member Nels Cline with a guitar trio featuring Jimmy Rip and Lee Ranaldo. The concert begins with an opening performance from EUCADEMIX, the electronic solo project of Yuka Honda, a Japanese composer, producer, and instrumentalist famous for co-founding the influential band Cibo Matto.

About the artists

Nels Cline (b. Los Angeles, CA, 1956) has been messing around with the guitar since he was 12, so he’s been at it for 57 years. His zig-zag path has seen him in the stylistic and aesthetic realms of rock, jazz, exploratory improvised music, and psych, with some leaning into country and ambient areas now and again. Best known for his presence in the band Wilco the last 21 years, Nels also leads his two groups The Nels Cline Singers and Consentrik Quartet and collaborates with many improvisers when he’s not out with Wilco. He has also played on an ungodly number of recordings in the last four decades.

Jimmy Rip (b. New York, NY, 1956) is a guitarist, singer-songwriter, composer, musical director, arranger, producer, and solo artist whose career spans decades and continents. Rip has shared his talents with an extraordinary roster of artists, including Mick Jagger, Jerry Lee Lewis, Television, Willie Nelson, Rod Stewart, Hall & Oates, Deborah Harry, Jack Bruce, Mariah Carey, and Yoko Ono, among many others.

A constant thread throughout Rip’s journey has been his deep musical partnership with guitar icon Tom Verlaine. Beginning in 1981, Rip performed and recorded with Verlaine throughout his entire solo career. In 2007, he joined Television, remaining with the band until Verlaine’s passing in 2023. In 2009, Rip reloaded to Buenos Aires, Argentina—wherein he produced 17 albums for Argentine artists, many achieving gold and platinum status, and released three solo albums with his band Jimmy Rip & The Trip. In 2025, Jimmy Rip returned to live in the United States and looks forward to new and unexpected musical adventures.

Lee Ranaldo (b. Glen Cove, NY, 1956) is a musician, visual artist, writer, and co-founded Sonic Youth in 1981. He has been active both in New York’s downtown community and internationally since then as composer, performer and producer. His recent live performances with partner Leah Singer, Contre Jour, have been large scale, multi-projection sound and light events with suspended electric guitar phenomena that challenge the usual performer-audience relationship. Recent music projects also include In Virus Times, a solo acoustic composition released in November 2021 on Mute Records, and Sonic Youth’s Walls Have Ears in February 2024 on Goofin’ Records. Most recently, he presented work in a visual exhibition entitled (Again) Across the River at Nodenaysteen Gallery, Gent, Belgium in October 2025. He lives and works in New York City.

Yuka Honda is a composer, producer, and sonic innovator whose work defies genre and convention. Co-founder of the trailblazing duo Cibo Matto, she has since forged a solo path that blends electronic experimentation, improvisational depth, infectious rhythm, and abstract storytelling. She describes her music as quantum, continuum, and sensory—a fluid exploration of sound as both narrative and experience. Like a book or a film, her compositions invite the listener into a story: shifting through contrasting emotions, spaces, and textures to create an unfolding journey.