The week before Xmas Sonic Youth completed work on music for the soundtrack to a new movie by Allison Anders titled "Things Behind the Sun". You may know some of her other movies like "Gas, Food, Lodging" and "Mi Vida Loca". We covered a bunch of musical territory, from some out there jams to a few tasty acoustic numbers. Also, a mysterious boogie group called "Low Priority" weighed in with warped southern workout which was frighteningly accurate. Audiences at Sundance have already checked it out (maybe?) Furthermore, Thurston, Jim, and perhaps other band members have been working in Northhampton on music for the new Larry Clark movie "Bully". Word from Thurston is that the film is a misanthropic tale of sex, drugs, and danger.

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NYC GHOSTS & FLOWERS RELEASED
/ WEBSITE LAUNCHED
A Year and a Day

Hello and welcome to the SY wwwsite. At last, we are up and running. We promise this site will get more activated as it truly gets going, but for now, welcome, and here's some news of the last year:

As some of you may have heard, almost exactly a year ago on the night of July 3 1999 we had a touring truck full of all our equipment stolen from a parking lot in Orange Country California during a small run of shows we were doing. This was a major bummer at the time, as the truck included all of our hot rodded guitars, amps, pedals, all the things weâd been using to make our music for most of the 1990s (None of it has been seen again, to this day, in case you were wondering). Thanks to the good graces of many friends and hard work from our crew we were able to complete our dates without missing one.

We returned to NYC with plans to write and record the basic trax for our new LP during the month of August. Not having all that gear force us to dust off old gtrs which hadn't seen the light of day since Daydream Nation or earlier, find new and exotic foot pedals (or old and beat up stuff), and generally scramble a bit to find some things with which we could begin making noise again. We found a bunch of stuff we really didn't know too much about, and set out to write the music which would become NYC Ghosts and Flowers, with our friend Wharton Tiers sitting behind the recording desk.

What we discovered over the next few months was that contrary to the bummer it had seemed at the time, having lost all that gear was actually about the best thing that could have happened to us right about then. It forced us in so many ways to explore new avenues, try new and sometimes unfamiliar instruments and amps, and basically allowed us some new passports to freakoutsville. I mean, Thurston playing a Les Paul! It never woulda happened otherwise.

During that sweaty month of August we wrote and recorded what would become the basic tracks for the record, as planned, gear or no gear. And we had a brainstorm of sorts: we would ask our good friend Jim O'Rourke if he wanted to share his prodigious studio talents with us (to say nothing of his huge collection of Hong Kong action flicks on DVD) and come spend some months in NYC to finish the recording and to mix the record. We'd seen quite a lot of him recently, dating back to the March 1999 sessions for the SYR4: Goodbye 20th Century record and earlier. Since those sessions he'd done some mixing work with Kim for her SYR5 trio record with Ikue Mori and DJ Olive (coming in August), so he'd been around the city quite a bit, and hanging out in our studio a lot.

The sessions were a blast! Working with Jim was great, and between October 1999 and March 2000 we completed the record, which is out this very week on May 16. In fact, we liked working with Jim so much we asked him to join the band, and he's agreed, at least for the rest of the year, to make us a quintet for the first time in 19 years! Should be a pretty cool touring season. Jim will be playing some bass (now that Kim is playing even more gtr than ever), some synth, a little of this and that, maybe a powerbook move here or there, who knows? Of course we all hope to see some of you at the shows to check out what's going to happen.

The site is in its infant stages here, but it promises to grow by leaps and bounds, so check around for tour dates and info, and all sorts of other stuff.

Regards,
LR/SY May 2000

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