Sonic Youth Delve Into Avant-Garde On New LP
SONIC NET DEC 14, 1999
Staff Writer Chris Nelson reports

On their recently released SYR 4 (Goodbye 20th Century), arty punk band Sonic Youth have upped the experimental ante, performing works by modern avant-garde composers. But Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo has no qualms about the group's creative move.

"Maybe if we had done it six or seven years ago it would have had a different kind of air of pretension about it," Ranaldo, 43, said recently. "At this point in our career, we're solid enough ... not to worry about it. It was going to expand the vocabulary of things we could do."

The two-disc set, the latest in a series of unconventional, mostly instrumental releases on their own Sonic Youth Records label, features the band's interpretations of work by John Cage, Yoko Ono, Christian Wolff, Pauline Oliveros and six others.

Even fans familiar with Sonic Youth's unusual tunings and abrasive sound on rock tracks such as "Expressway to Yr Skull" (RealAudio excerpt) may be unprepared for the challenges of SYR 4, which revolves around silent spaces and spare, random rhythm more than noise.

An unorthodox work such as Takehisa Kosugi's "+-" (RealAudio excerpt) undulates with sounds that seem randomly combined to the uninitiated ear. The score for that piece (available at www.smellslikerecords.com) consists of 10 lines of mostly plus and minus symbols, indicating vaguely when players should build up sounds or come down.

"All these things basically become guidelines for improvisation," said Sonic Youth drummer and SYR label operator Steve Shelley, 37.

"We played it for 10 or 15 minutes and we'd stop," Shelley said. "It was funny that each player was in a totally different place in the score, because there's no meter for that piece. Everyone's going at their own pace. Some people made it through the score three times, and some people hadn't even got down to the fourth line of his pluses and minuses."

The discs include one song composed specifically for the band: "Six for New Time for Sonic Youth" (RealAudio excerpt), by Pauline Oliveros.

Though Kosugi and Wolff joined the band in the studio to help the bandmembers interpret their work, prior commitments kept Oliveros from doing the same. That made "Six for New Time" one of the more formidable pieces, Ranaldo said.

"The most difficult thing for musicians is to really listen to one another," said Oliveros, 67, who teaches composition at Mills College in Oakland, Calif. "The difficulty [in 'Six for New Time'] is not technical in terms of what they can do with their instruments. The difficulty is to really listen to the whole field of sound and to themselves as well, and to negotiate through listening."

Sonic Youth are now writing material for their next Geffen Records release. Though Ranaldo was uncomfortable describing it at this early stage, he predicted it would be more abstract than their last Geffen album, A Thousand Leaves (1998).

Some of the new work's sound reflects influences from SYR 4, he said, but the July theft of many of Sonic Youth's uniquely modified, irreplaceable guitars also had an impact.

The loss hit the band hard, not only because the instruments had sentimental value but also because playing some songs in their catalog depended on particular "hot-rodded" guitars that could not be re-created.

But the band has built up a new store of equipment, Ranaldo said. Some of their new instruments were gifts, some were quick buys after the theft and others have come from particular searches.

Now it seems the crime may have been a blessing in disguise.
"It's allowed us to be a lot freer than we were before," Ranaldo said. "We all had sounds we were very, very happy with. At the moment we're all playing different-sounding rigs and different guitars and it's actually been kind of a fortuitous tragedy in a certain way. At this point I feel almost no regret that it happened."