Label: Smells Like Records Format: 2CD
The century may still have about a year left to run through, but Sonic Youth have decided to take time to consider and pay tribute to their ancestral experimental roots on this double CD of less-than rock music. Built in earnestly engaged (but obviously joyful too) collaboration with old and new friends and musical relations Jim O’Rourke, William Winant, turntablizer Christian Marclay, and composers Takehisa Kosugi and Christian Wolff (and lovingly recorded by the estimable Wharton Tiers), there’s much interpreting of pieces by luminaries of the (predominently American) avant-garde including Nicolas Slominsky, John Cage, Cornelius Cardew and Steve Reich.
Pauline Oliveros‘ specially-composed “Six For new Time” is rendered with a combination of gusto and simple hypnotic bliss developed from the pleasures of transforming repetition into an electric mantra, perhaps unsurprisingly the piece which resembles more familiar SY territory. George Maciunas‘ “Piano Piece #13” (also included on the Enhanced CD in Quicktime Movie format to get the full benefit of what fun modern music can be for the well-informed eternal musical youth of New York) echoes rhythmically to the slap and tinkle sound of an instrument in distress and imminent danger of collapcking blasts of stadium-friendly feedback noise – they’re just not the ones which pull the punters to Lollapalooza, more the stadia of imagination over commerce.
Sonic Youth were always thus and so in their presentation on stage and record, whether blasting out a glorius post-NEU! riff or riding the lateral waves of sound wrenched from a screwdriver skewering the guts of their favourite Pollock-sprayed $12 guitar – a veritable chink (among and influencing many) in the walls between art music and pop music. This record Rocks for sure, but perhaps at ninety-three degrees to the usual strait-laced expectation of what that really means.
-Linus Tossio-
