It's been seven years since Sonic Youth released Murray Street, an album that was adored equally by their noise fans, their rock fans, and their noise-rock fans. But their last three studio albums, including their latest The Eternal (TMT Review), have been polarizing to say the least. While some have praised the band for reclaiming the alternative rock sound of their early-90s work, others have accused them of abandoning their experimental tendencies in favor of a more streamlined approach.
But it really doesn't make any sense to accuse a band as diverse and prolific as Sonic Youth of going too far in any particular direction. In fact, it's pretty much impossible when they sandwich a self-released live record like Andre Sider Af Sonic Youth – probably their harshest, most chaotic effort yet – between Rather Ripped and The Eternal. TMT met up with Sonic Youth guitarist/vocalist Lee Ranaldo backstage before a show to talk about some of their older experimental releases, their approaches to live improvisation and composition, multimedia projects and collaborations, and what to records to expect in the future.
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Did you ever give anything to Geffen that they didn't want to release because it was too weird?
I don't think we ever gave them anything that they refused to put out. Am I forgetting some particular incident? I don't really have a good memory of it. Our relationship with them was pretty good, and we knew what kind of things they wouldn't know how to work with. There must have been something we gave them that was a little peculiar, but it's slipping my mind right now. They proposed some stuff to us, like they had – I'm not even supposed to talk about this because nobody's ever supposed to hear these mixes – but they had this rap producer do some remixes of a song off Dirty or off Goo, and they were the most awful, embarrassing mixes ever. We still have them, we haven't burned the tapes, but we've definitely suppressed them.
Did they want to use them as B-sides?
No, as like a remix single. That was the era, that was what people were doing back then. But in general they didn't have a problem with anything. That's kind of why we started SYR, as a place for putting stuff we knew Geffen wasn't going to deal with. It was that and the fact that after Lollapalooza we bought all this serious studio gear. That was the start of our real studio, and suddenly we were recording stuff in really high quality. We've always recorded stuff when we were just messing around, just extrapolating or improvising and not trying to write songs, and all of a sudden that stuff sounded so great that we thought we would start releasing some of it. And then we started creating a couple pieces in the studio that we knew we weren't really going to play live or add lyrics, like “Anagrama” off the first SYR record. It was definitely an outgrowth of having a better studio, and having all this Sonic Youth material around made us think we shouldn't be limited to one song-ish album every year-and-a-half or 2 years when we obviously go out and do other stuff, both as the group and separately.
You released Silver Session before you had SYR. How did that come about?
We were asked if we would do some sort of charity record for the San Francisco Suicide Prevention hotline and dedicate it to this kid Jason Knuth who killed himself and was a big Sonic Youth fan. We actually had this music around that we didn't know what to do with, so we cut it up and made the Silver Sessions record out of it. The music itself – maybe it says it in the record, I'm not sure – but we had these awful neighbors upstairs that would play country-western or classic rock or whatever it was, and we just wanted to get them out of there. So we turned up all the amps and leaned the guitars against the amps and just filled the room underneath these guys so full of sound to the point where everything was feeding back. It was like a constant steady state in there, but if you walked across the room your body would physically be changing the waves and you'd hear shifts in sound in the room, like sending ripples through the force, that kind of thing.
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"We were asking Saccharine Trust or Firehose or whoever to open for us. And then Laughing Hyenas and Die Kreuzen after that, and then Nirvana and Mudhoney after that."
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So how much of that record is just walking around?
There's no playing at all. There's no touching of instruments on that one. The studio lends itself to experimentation like that, and it especially did back then since we were spending tons and tons of time there.
What kind of releases can we look forward to seeing soon from SYR?
We've got planned a couple volumes of film soundtrack material, and maybe at some point a live series, like whole gigs from different periods – an '83 live gig, a '93 live gig, something like that. That's what we're working toward at this point.
When you play noise or experimental shows these days they tend to be one-offs…
Yeah, they tend to be specialized things, like this one we just did with Merce Cunningham for his 90th birthday celebration in New York. It was all abstract music that we kind of made verbal scores for, eight or 10 pieces that were certain set lengths, so they were kind of in line with the Goodbye 20th Century methodology. That was a one-off that was four nights long, but usually that kind of stuff is more unique, like the Other Sides show with Mats and Masami.
When you released Goodbye 20th Century you went on tour playing pieces from that record. Do you plan on another experimental tour in the future?
Well, I don't know. It's likely at some point I would imagine. But something exactly like that again, who knows? We made that record in the studio over two or three weeks, or maybe not even that long. We got all those people in there – we flew Willie Winant out and Jim was in New York at the time – and did it all in this one period of time. And the tour for that record was only 30 days long with 12 shows or something, and that was it. We did one show in New York and a month of shows in Europe playing in concert halls and that sort of thing, and we never really did any more than that.
Obviously you have a lot of experience playing graphical scores and indeterminate pieces written by other composers. Have you composed something along those lines for someone else to play?
I've done a bunch of graphical scores since that period that have been played by a few different ensembles here and in Europe. I just wrote a piece for the New York new music group Bang On A Can and Thurston had also written a piece for them. I've written pieces for this group in Europe called Zeitkratzer, the ones who did Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music. And I've got a couple others like that floating around. I have one for 12 musicians called All Work and No Play that someone in Spain just performed, and it's been performed by another group in Holland. There's a couple things like that, just a completely abstract color-score kinda thing. So it happens every once in a while. Any little doodle can turn into a score if you need a score at that moment.
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"We haven't burned the tapes, but we've definitely suppressed them."
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When you do collaborative performances, how often do you usually practice with the other performers beforehand?
It all depends. Sometimes none! Sometimes the first time you're meeting someone you're onstage with them, and sometimes it's people you've done a lot of stuff with, both in rehearsal rooms and in live situations. Someone like Michael Morley from the Dead C, who I've done a lot of collaborations with – we've done a fair amount of playing in both settings. And Mats from the Other Sides record, we've done a lot of stuff with him. But often times you'll hear a recording of a first meeting. I played with Hans Bennink like that. I'd never played with him before and we did a duet in New York. He'd seen me play and I'd seen him play, and we just did it. It's kind of fun because it's like flying by the seat of your pants – you never know what's going to happen. And those are really the times that the improvisers are separated from the non-improvisers, because when you're doing that kind of playing the idea is to be open and responsive to what's going on in that very moment and not just bringing your established vocabulary and cycling through the different things you do. So they can be very challenging situations. I recently played a show in New York with this Chicagoan Rob Lowe, who goes by the name Lichens. We'd never played together before, but we kind of knew each other a bit and had seen each other play, so we just decided to book a gig as a duo – just the two of us in this room with projections – and it was great, it was really fun.
I have a vague idea of what was going on during the performance of Hidros 3, but can you tell me more about that experience?
It was in an art gallery in this little town in the south of Sweden where we were doing a two-week residency with a company of people. Sonic Youth was a core part of it, but Mats was involved along with a number of other players. O'Rourke was involved before he was officially a member of the group. Or maybe he was, maybe we were doing Ghosts and Flowers right then. There were also a couple dancers, and some of us were doing visual art while we were there. There were just so many things going on. But every night a different person would lead the company in a concept that was completely made up on that day. Two nights Sonic Youth played more traditional concerts in a theater, and the other nights were in this art space or in a museum. Some nights were variety shows where everyone played a solo and some nights were group compositions. The night I led was a group score for the ensemble with different people playing duets with films going by my wife, Leah. And Mats made this composition where he had a score for each person, and the idea was that everyone was going to be in different rooms so we would all be in eye contact with each other but couldn't hear what everyone else was doing. There was one main room and all these smaller rooms off it, and the audience could just wander around wherever they wanted. So I was the only one in my room, and I was looking at the clock and looking at my score and at certain points I'd be playing, kind of hearing a little bit of what was coming out of the other rooms. And it the main room, O'Rourke was taking all the signals and pulling them into a mixing desk and reducing it to a stereo transcription that was playing in there. Some people were just staying in there, listening to it as a live broadcast, and other people were walking around the museum and going in different rooms. It was a really fun piece to do. Each of us only experienced the room that we were in, really.
Do you think it was harder to play that way?
No, it wasn't hard at all! It was super fun, super easy. Super open and easy. It was just like, “Start playing here, stop playing here, here are some parameters of quietness or loudness or whatever.” It was really easy. That kind of music is really easy to play. And that piece in particular was very experiential. I can't really imagine listening to it.
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"It was like a constant steady state in there, but if you walked across the room your body would physically be changing the waves and you'd hear shifts in sound in the room, like sending ripples through the force, that kind of thing."
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[Thurston comes in the room.]
LR: Here's a question, Thurston. Did we ever give Geffen something they refused to put out because it was too weird?
TM: No.
LR: No, it didn't happen. Was there something we wanted to put out that Paul refused to release?
TM: Um, Master=Dik.
LR: Oh, right, Master=Dik! But that was pre-Geffen.
[Thurston leaves.]
You've always had fantastic opening bands playing with you. Do you usually have control over that?
Totally. We've had control of that since the mid '80s when we started doing our own shows. We were asking Saccharine Trust or Firehose or whoever to open for us. And then Laughing Hyenas and Die Kreuzen after that, and then Nirvana and Mudhoney after that. And for a while in the mid-to-later '90s we got into having weird improvisors open for us. Sure, that's a super-important thing to us, to bring the community along.
So there's no pressure from Matador these days to tour with someone from the label?
No. There's more pressure from Ecstatic Peace to tour with their artists! Did you hear about our art show?
No, where is it?
It's in Sweden at the moment. It's a show called Sensational Fix. For the last 3 or 4 years we've been organizing this art show with a curator who's traveling around museums in Europe. It's been in France and Italy and Germany and Sweden, and now it's in Spain. We're still hoping it's going to come to the U.S. It's this huge, sprawling art show of stuff we did and stuff we did with collaborators like Mike Kelley, Raymond Pettibon, and Tony Oursler, people who have done album covers and things like that for us, and like a hundred other artists. It's really a cool show. And we put out this giant catalog with some 7-inch records in it. The first printing was so small it sold out almost immediately, so I don't even think it went into bookstores here. It's been really low-level news over here, but it's something we've worked on a lot over the last 3 or 4 years, organizing this thing and finally getting it off the ground, but it's pretty cool.
Well speaking of album covers, how did it work out getting the John Fahey painting for The Eternal?
We already owned it! Thurston owned that one, but between us we have a lot of his work. When we were getting to know him toward the end of his life we were trading paintings and buying paintings from him, and there's some of that stuff in the art show too, including that piece. And we just chose it in a five-minute session of thinking about what the cover should be. Thurston just said, “How about this?” and we were like “Yeah, that's cool. Okay, we're done.”