A CERTAIN KIND OF ENERGY: LEE RANALDO INTERVIEW
By Stewart Gardiner

 

An in-depth conversation with Sonic Youth co-founder Lee Ranaldo on European touring, new collaborations and what’s next from the archives

I was introduced to Sonic Youth in my late teens via a cassette that my girlfriend at the time had made, with the band’s Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star on one side and Pavement’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain on the other. Experimental Jet Set perhaps wasn’t an obvious gateway drug to my favourite band, but it was their most recent album then, so it makes sense that we would be listening to it repeatedly. The record’s impressionistic and transitional nature has it take tentative steps away from the avant-grunge of Dirty towards the angular experimental rock of Washing Machine. Released in 1994, it feels perfectly in tune with the year that saw the death of Kurt Cobain and alternative music at a crossroads.

Neither did my introduction need to be a Daydream Nation or Dirty, since Experimental Jet Set’s detuned guitars and deconstructed anthems were enough to pull me into a sound world that I have yet to leave (and have no intention of leaving). Sonic Youth are the band I always return to.

In 2003/2004, I wrote a series of Beat-inspired free-form pieces on Sonic Youth (thankfully lost to the dustbin of history) for the Artrocker e-zine and somehow the band were made aware of them. On the basis of those, I was granted an interview with guitarist Lee Ranaldo at their 2004 edition of All Tomorrow’s Parties. By the Sunday when I met Lee, I was hungover, overwhelmed by the festival and nervous about meeting him. It is sometimes okay to meet your heroes though: Lee was absolutely lovely and the interview went well. However, I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that I had been too nervous to actually enjoy speaking to him. I would sometimes wonder in the following years at Plan B magazine whether I would have fared better with more interview experience under my belt…

I caught up with Lee at Cafe Oto this March when he performed as part of the Glacial trio with Tony Buck and David Watson, although we arranged to do the interview once he was back in New York. I’m happy to report that it was a real pleasure to speak to him.

How are you doing?

I’m good. I’m just back from the whole European trip, so just kind of getting acclimated to being back here.

I was going to ask how your European tour went. I saw your Cafe Oto Glacial gig, which was great, but I wonder what material you were playing at the other shows?

It was a pretty varied tour actually, which was kind of interesting. Usually I come over and I’m presenting one thing for the month or the three weeks or whatever. This trip had a lot of different variations. This year I’ve been playing this solo keyboard piece that I wrote, called Hurricane Sandy Transcriptions that was generated from wind sounds I recorded during the hurricane in 2013 or whenever it was. I’ve presented it in a bunch of different configurations before. It was written for a German orchestra string orchestra, then I played it in Australia with a full orchestra. Most recently, I’ve been playing it with this sextet line up here in New York. I play the Fender Rhodes electric piano and there’s an electric guitar quartet in Brooklyn called Dither and they play the guitar parts. Brian Chase from Yeah Yeah Yeahs plays the percussion and the drums. We’ve been presenting it like that, on and off, both pre- and post-pandemic. We’ve recently recorded that and hopefully we’ll make a record out of it at some point. But this year, for the first time, I’ve played it three or four times as a solo piece just on electric piano. So I started by playing that in a museum in Germany. That was the first show. It’s basically just a keyboard piece and I use a couple little handmade instruments made by this guy in Holland called Yuri Landman – I used one at Oto, that thing with the wires.

I was wondering what that was.

He calls it a Kalimba of sorts. He’s an instrument maker and a performer and composer and teacher. He teaches instrument-making and he gives classes in it and things like that. And he teaches about creating a score and what that means and how an ensemble works towards a performance together. I have a bunch of instruments that he’s made for me over the years, and that one in particular has become a staple of almost every performance at this point.

HURRICANE SANDY TRANSCRIPTIONS (original demo)

It made a really great, unique sound at Oto when you were using it.

And it looks cool too! You don’t really know what the hell it is that I’m holding in my hands, which is kind of nice.

After that show, I did about five solo acoustic shows, which is what I’ve been presenting the last year. I did one in Sweden, two in Finland and one at a festival in France, in Brittany. AndI did a final one, a couple days after Cafe Oto in the north of Portugal. That was added while I was already on tour. So I did those shows and then I spent, I don’t know, eight or ten days playing with this group from Belgium called the Wild Classical Music Ensemble. During the pandemic, I met this group and we made a short film together for a museum exhibition. While we were making the film, some recording gear was brought in and we made an album that came out some time recently. The thing with these guys is they’re handicapped players. They’ve got various afflictions, different kinds of mental or physical disabilities, and what started out as a therapeutic thing of getting these guys to play music as a therapy kind of thing turned into a proper group with a couple of the people that work with them year round as their helpers and minders. One of them is the drummer in this group. Another one is off stage as a helper and handler and nurse. They’ve made a few albums in the past and so we made this record together and then to celebrate its release we just did like six shows in Belgium and France. And I have to say, it’s the most punk ensemble I’ve played with in ages. And really quite moving in a lot of ways.

They’re singing in English or Dutch or French, depending on which guy’s singing. One of them is blind, one of them doesn’t speak at all. But they’re incredible on stage. They have hand built instruments that have been made for them, kind of like that thing from Yuri that I play. They’re really pretty amazing. Although I can’t always understand what they’re saying, because it’s not in my language, the people around me are telling me how moving what they’re singing about is, about their afflictions and their plight in the world. The film we made is called Hellgate, and you can find it online, I think it’s even on my Facebook page. It was shot in a studio of this German sculptor who actually is the guy that brought us together. He had these giant four-metre-high fake white figures, like alien creatures, all around the studio, and we played in amongst that stuff. It was made for an exhibition in this Belgian museum that’s founded by a psychiatrist, but it’s an art museum – it’s got a bent towards psychiatry. So this show was called Blood Test. And it was basically about questions such as, “How do we determine what’s normal?” You know, who’s normal, who’s not normal? Are these people – they function in one way or another in society, they play music, they make records – are they normal? Or are they not normal? So it was examining the kind of strictures and structures around the way we categorise people like that. It was a very interesting show. We played there, like two years ago and that was the only time I’d played in public with them before this last week. And so we did a week of shows celebrating the record. Like I said, it’s so punk and so fierce and so, so fun, really good.

So it was a pretty varied tour between playing with these guys and doing a bunch of solo acoustic shows which would encompass my recent record In Virus Times. That’s kind of what I start with, the long instrumental piece. And then I sing songs, and that show is really at a nicely tuned kind of height at the moment. So I’m really happy with the solo acoustic presentation I’ve got right now, it’s probably the best it’s ever been at the moment. So that’s been fun.

HELL GATE (WILD CLASSICAN ENSEMBLE & LEE RANALDO)

How about Glacial?

I’ve played with those two guys [Tony Buck and David Watson] on and off for quite a long time at this point, but we play rarely. It’s always really special when we do play together. Tony, in particular, is just such an incredible drummer that I feel like we almost never have a bad show together. I think maybe the last performance we did together was also at Oto like four or five years ago. It’s been a while. We’ve only got this one very nice record that came out in a limited format. We’ve been planning to make another one for a while and have lots of recordings of gigs and things, but we just haven’t gotten to it. But I’d love to play some more with them next year or later this year, because it’s such a fun show.

I wasn’t sure what to expect with the bagpipes. I’m Scottish, so I’ve got some sort of cultural…

Aversion? [Laughs]

Yeah! But the sounds he was getting out of the pipes, the drones, were incredible. So I was quickly won over by that.

He’s an interesting guy, I’ve known him forever. He’s from New Zealand, but he’s lived here in New York for thirty years or something like that. The mix of the guitar drones and the bagpipe drones and then all the other little things we’re playing with, the bells and the handmade instruments and all of Tony’s wooden bells and things – it makes for a nice varied set, more so than one might think.

I found it interesting how you wielded the bells at the beginning and end of the set like some cosmic surveyor mapping out the space of the room, bookending your use of more noise-generating instruments.

I never know when I’m swinging them. When I swing them, I’m swinging them because to me, I hear this kind of weird phasing thing going on, you know, and I don’t know if it’s apparent to the audience. But when I’m swinging them, I really hear this almost like a Doppler thing where the sound is kind of coming and going or changing shape with the swings. So it’s partly performative, for sure. But it’s also creating this certain kind of sound effect that I’m never actually sure if it’s only apparent to me, because I’m so close to them.

MAELSTROM FROM DRIFT

I was thinking about how important Cafe Oto is to London. Is there a New York equivalent?

Well, you know, there have been places through the years that have been the equivalent of that place in terms of good places for experimentation with a sort of serious audience, if you will, that’s not just like waiting for pop music or whatever. There was a place in the 90s called The Cooler that was really critical to that kind of situation in New York. And then in the early 2000s, there was another place called Tonic. Actually these days there are a bunch of places, but one of them is a space run by David Watson called 411. The address is 411 Kent in Brooklyn and I always call it 411 Kent, but I think they call it Shift. And it’s a really nice small intimate space – probably holds the same amount of people as Oto would hold. It’s a really nice space for doing experimental stuff – I’ve done some stuff there this past year. There’s a bunch of places around town that are like that – maybe not one that’s right now as visibly there as Cafe Oto is, which is an important space for music, not just for you all in London, but for the international improvisational music community. It’s a space you know about, you know?

You’re just back from tour, but touring has become more economically challenging, particularly since Covid and Brexit. It must be nearly impossible to do it econo these days? What’s your experience?

Well, I think the one thing about touring is first of all these days with, you know, internet, radio, and all that stuff, people don’t really make a lot of money from records. So touring for most musicians is really kind of a lifeblood thing. And at the same time post-Covid, everybody wanted to be out touring. So there was this additional challenge of pulling in an audience when there were ten different shows every night you could go to because of all the touring bands I know. All the agents have been going crazy trying to place bands in a venue where they’re not competing every night with someone else across town or whatever. Last year, in 2022, I think I came to Europe five times across the year and I toured almost, if not more than pre-Covid, at least as much as pre-Covid. I really toured a lot last year, and I guess part of it was just chomping at the bit to get out there after Covid. You know, I had one record quashed at the beginning of Covid that never got to be performed, and then In Virus Times came out during Covid – I only got to play that almost a year after it was released. But I found touring to be pretty good when I’d managed to do it.

I try and work in a balance of, I’m not playing every single night and I’ve got days off. Like the last [time] I was in Europe in November and I played a London show with my solo acoustic set at a place called Bush Hall in Shepherds Bush and now again in London. Both of these trips I’ve had little apartments in Paris where I’ve stayed for a bunch of days and I’ve just been able to hang out and ride around the city on a bicycle and see friends and stuff – make it a little more tolerable. So touring has been good. I’m touring in a more limited way at the moment and this year in particular, especially after last year touring so much. I’m trying not to tour as much as possible this year, because I’ve got all these projects that are in midstream that I’m trying to finish up. So having just come back from that month away, Leah and I are going to Australia in June to play this Dark Mofo festival. But otherwise, I’m trying as much as possible this year to stay home. And I’ve just built myself a new sound studio to work in, and we’ve got a bunch of things to mix in and organise. And I’m working on a new record also. You know, trying to keep home and get it done.

IN VIRUS TIMES

Not to dwell on Covid, but how did that affect your creative output? Did it make you reconsider collaborations?

A few days before lockdown started here, and I think everywhere, my record with Raül Refree came out, Names of North End Women. We had just worked a year, an intensive year on creating this record. It’s a very different record for me, a lot of electronic elements, a lot of studio work to make it happen. And we had a very ambitious plan for touring, we really worked hard on this set, where we tried to recreate the songs from that record, just as a duo without bringing on additional musicians, even though some of the pieces are pretty complex. And we really had something we thought was quite special. Then obviously, it all got shut down. So that record got its life expectancy kind of nullified by Covid. When Covid hit and we were locked down, I was really confused about what to do. We’d just spent this intensive year making this record and all of a sudden, we didn’t know if we were going to be locked down for three weeks, or three months, or three years. Nobody knew what was going to happen. We didn’t know if we were going to actually die or get seriously sick. It was a very strange time. So I didn’t even pick up a guitar and strum a guitar for, I don’t know, six months after Covid started, everything was too close. I mean, after having worked so hard on this record, the idea of like, “Well, maybe I should write some new songs while I’m sitting here at home,” it just didn’t gel.

So I worked on other projects, I did a lot of drawing and painting, especially in that first year of Covid. I’ve always kind of fooled around with watercolours, but I decided to really dive in and teach myself more about watercolour painting. And I was doing all these paintings of bouquets of flowers and things like that that Leah was bringing home from the store, when we rarely ventured out to try and brighten the apartment since we were pretty much just locked inside. Then by the late summer of that year of 2020, like August/September, I finally did start to think I wanted to pick up the guitar again, and I felt like I was approaching it as a complete rank beginner, I hadn’t played it so long. I didn’t have any expectations, I was just kind of starting to put my fingers down on the frets and see what happened. And that led to recording In Virus Times, sitting right here in my living room in the late afternoon as the sun was sort of fading out without. Just set up some microphones and played in the dark for a few days, recording the tracks that then I worked on at the computer for a couple of months to shape it. So it did change things a lot.

And it made me really value playing in front of people when that finally started to be possible again. Right from the beginning of playing again, I think one of the first things I did was a trio with David on the bagpipes in a small club called Union Pool here in Brooklyn. And the idea of collaborations again, after all this time and after the fact that I’d been doing a lot of solo work with acoustic guitar, just kind of playing by myself, either in the studio or out on tour, it really made me value the notion of collaboration again. So last year when I said I came to Europe a lot, a lot of that was for different collaborative efforts with a group of musicians in the south of France. This guitar player Jean-Marc Montera, an experimental guitar player that’s been a friend of Sonic Youth for a long time and these weirdos from Italy, called My Cat Is an Alien, who play strange instruments that they put together on their own. So we did a two week residency in Marseille, where we built up this piece based on text by Antonin Artaud and then presented a piece there. Then on a similar note, I did another trip elsewhere in Europe with a different set of collaborators, and this year with these Belgian guys. So the notion of collaboration and bringing that back into my live experience has been really important and just the fact that we can get out and play with other people again has been really important.

The other collaborative thing I did last year was just outside of Barcelona in Girona, Spain with this interesting French piano player called Pascal Comelade, who’s been around forever. We’d met once before, but we’d never worked together. But a friend of Sonic Youth called Ignacio Julià just put out this book on The Velvet Underground that Thurston published [via Ecstatic Peace Library] called Linger On, a compendium of all his interviews with the band. He was very close to Lou Reed and pretty close to the rest of the band as well. So to celebrate the launch of the book, he put together this little group with Pascal and me kind of reflecting this idea of an American guitar player and a European piano player working together, you know, the way John and Lou did in the Velvets. And we did sort of an hour-long concert that was based on thematic material from the Velvet Underground songs. One or two with vocals, but mostly just exploring the textures and tonalities of those chord progressions and doing our own interpretation of them. That was a really interesting project, both because it kind of was about this touchstone band for me and Pascal, you know, the Velvets. And it involved this book Thurston’s putting out and our dear friend from Spain, the writer and editor of a music magazine there called Ruta 66. So collaborations have been good.

I’d forgotten about Pascal Comelade.

A few friends of ours from Switzerland have been close friends with him for thirty years or something and they’re always talking to us about him. And other people we know have worked with him. So it was fun to finally meet him and spend a week or two with him and work up this Velvets set, which they made a movie of. There’s a film of it that came out really nicely called Velvet Suite. It played at a theatre here in New York one night to celebrate the launch of the book and then I think they did the same in London. There’s a record of that performance called Velvet Serenade.

VELVET SERENADE

You’ve talked about non-ideal music-making conditions with Covid, so what are your ideal conditions? Do you have any rituals that you follow in the studio or otherwise?

I don’t know. Ideal conditions are just having some time free and instruments laying about more than anything else. I mean, I can write music in a hotel room or sitting here in my living room or in my little studio across the river here in Hoboken. And I think ideal conditions are just kind of getting everything else out of the way, getting ordinary life or answering the phone and paying bills or whatever else. It is just kind of clearing mental space to sit and play and I find a lot of time to do that on the creative level of generating new material. Then there’s a secondary process of corralling it into something more organised and presentable, you know. I forget what the second half of your question was.

If you have any music-making rituals.

Oh, yeah. You know, for me it’s usually a matter of, I tend to work kind of slowly, I build up things, I start by recording simple stuff on my iPhone, and listening to the things back and then sort of stepping up to better recordings. Then I tend to do a lot of structural work in the computer, after the things are done, like moving things around, and really organising it the way I want it to appear. So more than anything else, it’s really about having the time and sort of the quietude to work on stuff like that.

The opposite is the projects that I’ve done these last years that have been more ensemble based, just kind of finding a studio, clearing a few days and then you’re working in a much more feverish way. Or like taping music for three or four days with a group of people and then sorting through it later. So I’ve got like, three or four different projects like that right now that are in process. A duo record with a young guitar player from Chicago named Michael Valera that we actually recorded for four or five days in that space I was telling you about, 411 Kent that David Watson oversees. We set up in there for three or four days with some recording equipment, just played like two sets a day and recorded them and kind of hung out – it’s a really nice space to hang out in – and got to know each other, both personally and musically. So that’s one of these projects that’s actually near completion right now. We took the six or eight hour long recordings we’ve made and we’ve edited it down to two sides of an album that we’re almost finished with. I’ve got three or four other projects like that with different ensembles where it’s really just a matter now of wading through the tapes and figuring out what’s presentable.

Could you talk about your early interest in 1960s and 1970s rock – Crosby, Stills and Nash and others – and how that music has continued to permeate your work? Between the Times and the Tide was particularly pleasing in that regard. I sometimes think I’ve got the classic rock thing all back to front, I mean I was a Sonic Youth fan long before I got into Bruce Springsteen…

That just kind of happens, you stumble into different periods of someone’s work. I myself went through a really intensive Springsteen period. At some point, after totally not being very interested in his music early on or through most of the first ten or fifteen years of Sonic Youth, I guess. There was finally a period where some of those records really grabbed me and remain important records to me to this day. You know, Born to Run and through The River and Darkness, that period in there for those really just incredible, incredible records. And I saw him a bunch of times in that period, but I’m not as interested in what he’s doing these days. I think the last record I fully enjoyed was the Tom Joad record, which I thought was really good. I saw him present that at a solo acoustic tour and it was phenomenal. Really, really incredible. You know, in my early college days, I had a brief girlfriend, who was really into Springsteen at a time when that was the last thing on my mind. And it really led to me not being able to be in a relationship with her! So into Springsteen at a point where I was like, “No, that’s not for me.”

Even though I’ve been playing acoustic guitar in my sets, either with my trio or quartet, or solo, it’s always been with an amplifier and the bank of effects pedals and stuff. After In Virus Times came out and I was able to tour again, I wanted to go out and play some really pure acoustic shows with no amplification or effects modelling. Just put some microphones in front of the guitar, old style. I mean, I spend a lot of time sitting here, in this room. I’m looking at one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine [counts quickly], like ten guitars that you can’t see just spread out around the room. And just picking up guitars and just playing and really just listening to the beauty of what a wooden instrument sounds like and that’s really what led to In Virus Times and a lot of the performances I’ve done over the last couple of years that have been more purely acoustic performances. That definitely takes me back to CSNY or, you know, Fahey and Leo Kottke and all that real pure acoustic music – and Joni Mitchell of course, with all the great tunings and whatnot. So I’ve kind of gone back to that inspiration, especially since Times and Tides, where the songwriting is a little bit more of that kind of personal singer songwriter stuff, at points it has been anyway. So that stuff is still important touchstones. I find that those touchstones from all different periods remain.

I’m constantly discovering new stuff or discovering, for me, something that’s new. During the pandemic, my big discovery or my big deep dive was the composer Morton Feldman, a cohort of John Cage. His pieces are really slow and kind of empty and spacious. They had a lot to do with the way In Virus Times came out. I was listening to his music during the pandemic, for some weeks or months, when we were locked in here. I mean, a lot of his pieces are already two hours or four hours or five hours long. And I just had his music on repeat, so it was playing in the house all day long. Like I said, it’s really sparse, like something will happen – a chord, and then there’ll be just silence and then another something will happen. I just had that on as an ambience for weeks at a time and it really made a big impact on me.

The Grateful Dead are another one of those influences from the early days that when all the new music started in the late 70s – Television and Voidoids and Talking Heads and Ramones and everything and, you know, Minutemen and Black Flag – I put all that stuff away for a long period of time. But over the last decade or so that music has crept back into my life and the importance of it, and the meaningfulness of it has, you know, kind of come back around in a certain way. So, sometimes you leave certain musics for a while, sometimes when they come back, you’re not interested anymore, but sometimes they have just as much meaning as before. It depends on where you dip your toe in at any moment. Sometimes I’m all about stuff that’s only been created in the last couple of years. And sometimes I’m looking more for that kind of roots stuff in terms of where my roots come from, how I got to where I am now.

I like returning to an artist that you’re familiar with and then it leads you down new paths. I’ve been listening to a lot of Jim O’Rourke again recently and that’s led me to Oren Ambarchi and Eiko Ishibashi.

That’s exactly how it is. You know, we met Oren when he was just a seventeen or eighteen year old kid. He played in a band in Australia called the Menstruation Sisters, a noisy weirdo duo. They wrote to us – they heard we were coming to Australia and they wrote and asked us if they could open the show. We liked what we heard and we said yeah. I mean, they were really just two young kids. But with him in particular, you could tell that there was something special already at that point going on in his work, and it’s been amazing to see the progression of his work over time. And we’ve remained friends. We’ve got a couple of weird things in common. My wife is from Winnipeg and he married a girl from Winnipeg, and spends time there, which is weird. So his music is amazing. I really like a lot of what he does.

SONIC YOUTH LIVE AT CABARET METRO, CHICAGO 2002

Speaking of Jim O’Rourke, I wanted to ask about when he joined Sonic Youth. Given the distance of time that has passed, I feel that the trilogy of Sonic Youth albums made with Jim are some of the band’s finest moments and indeed some of the best records of the 2000s. Could you talk about when Jim was in the band? Do you think of Sonic Youth in terms of different periods?

I kind of break it into three. You know, we worked together for thirty years. The first ten years is like our indie years and SST and all that. Then pretty much signing with Geffen started the second period. And bringing Jim in began the third decade in a way – even though he dropped out halfway through it. But it kind of breaks down like that. Jim joined in 99/2000. We signed with Geffen in 89/90. So it kind of breaks down into three periods for me.

I always think of it as a testament to how open we were as a band that when Jim came into the picture, we didn’t just utilise him as a producer or as a hired member, but immediately took him in as an equal member, equal, you know, sharing songwriting member of the band for those years. And, you know, this band that was an iconic quartet all of a sudden became a quintet. I mean, that was a really lovely period for us, because Jim is, you know, he’s amazing, as a musician and producer and recording engineer, and all that stuff. But he’s also just a really fun guy to hang around. So he came into the band at a moment when maybe we were looking for a certain kind of energy to give us a new phase or a new boost. And it just worked out really well for us. It was a really cool experience.

I had met Jim ages before that. In the mid 90s we played together on this festival in Victoriaville in Canada, in like 1993 or 94. I was playing with a drummer named William Hooker. And Jim ended up sitting in on our set, along with a sax horn player from Italy called Gianni Gebbia. And we made a record as a quartet from that concert. So Jim and I had kept in touch. Then in the late 90s, he was looking to get out of Chicago and started hanging around New York more, and started sleeping on the couch in our studio for a while. And then he worked with Kim on that SYR5 record, I think is the one that she did. She really loved working with him and it kind of just rolled on from there. He started helping us out on New York City Ghosts & Flowers. We were at a stuck point with the mixing and he took over. And he started adding parts to the music, because that was also at a point where Kim wasn’t playing very much bass, she was playing more guitar. So Jim would start putting some bass and some synth parts. And, you know, we started joking with him at the time – I said, “Well Jim, now you’re gonna have to join the band, because you’re on the songs.” And it actually came to pass. It happened, which was really, really cool. It was a really cool period for us making those three records with him.

Do you ever get the opportunity to hang out with him these days?

I just saw him. Maybe it’s close to a year ago now. But he came with Eiko to New York when she was doing some shows here and he said it was the first time he’d left Japan in seventeen years. When he left Sonic Youth – the last year of Sonic Youth, when we were touring around on tour buses and stuff, he sat in his seat on the tour bus with his Japanese flashcards, studying the language. And he was saying, “After this tour, I’m leaving the band, I’m going to move to Japan. And I’m never going to leave Japan again.” You know, that was his statement. And as a side like, “Well, I’m certainly never going to go to France again. That’s for sure.” – a little Jim-talking. And indeed, he went to Japan and it took seventeen years before he left the country again, which is pretty unbelievable. So it was great to see him. We’ve obviously kept in touch over all these years. If I’ve gone to Japan, I’ve seen him, but even that hasn’t been for a while now.

So he kind of opened the door to that last phase of Sonic Youth and once he left we recorded the next record as a quartet – Rather Ripped – and did some touring like that. But we pretty quickly brought in Mark Ibold as a fifth member again, both because Kim was having more fun on stage being able to not play sometimes and we’d grown used to having a fifth member at that point. So, although our relationship with Mark was different than it was with Jim, again, he’s a really wonderful guy just to have around when you’re spending a month or two on the road. It led to our last period being much more collaborative, which was nice. The period with Jim also coincided with the period – we’d already had our studio set up and running, our Echo Canyon studio, for, I don’t know, four or five years by the time Jim entered the picture. But it really became part of that period when we established that SYR label and we were releasing lots of other stuff besides the sort of big label records.

It was a period when we were getting back in touch with the indie community again. You know, there was all the stuff that was interesting that was happening kind of post-Nirvana and Kurt’s death. All the stuff that we found interest in suddenly was happening underground, you know, little groups and amalgams of people that were citing Stockhausen and Varèse as influences rather than Nirvana and Mudhoney or whatever. And we just found that really interesting. It kind of tugged at earlier influences that we had and we just kind of slowly seeped our way back into that community. It was also a time when a lot of indie record labels were releasing records. Thurston and I, in particular, were on tons of records on different smaller labels. And it was the impetus for us founding our own label, because at that point we had our own studio and we were taping a lot of stuff that was not useful for the once-every-two-years Geffen Records that we were making. So we just started releasing some of that more abstract stuff under the SYR imprint. And that opened up a lot of doors too and Jim helped engineer a lot of that stuff. We had our studio, so it was easy to invite people in to do sessions together. You know, we’ve got sessions with other people, Nels Cline being one, Mats Gustafson being another, that have not seen the light of day yet. But we spent a long time in that period just inviting people in for a day or two and multitrack taping our sessions. Some of them came out very nicely and some of them are still in our vaults waiting to be dealt with.

Could there be more SYR releases then?

Yeah, there could. I mean, I don’t know if they’d come out under that imprint or whatever. But there’s definitely a few more in the can. There’s one really nice one in the can that we collaborated with the French singer Brigitte Fontaine at one point while Jim was in the band. We did a couple of tracks with her that were released on the record she did at the time, like 2002/2003/2004, something like that. We worked with her in a studio in Paris for a number of days. And then we did a concert together at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, with Brigitte and Areski, who was also on those studio recordings, and the five of us. And we have a great release set up with the two tracks we did from her record, plus three more tracks that we did around that same time with her that never were released, and a DVD of that concert at the Pompidou. Her record label is preventing it from happening basically, or prevented it from happening at the time. This was Virgin Records at the time, I don’t even know if she’s still on Virgin. But in the last year or two, I’ve been kind of anxious to revisit it and see if there’s any chance we could release it, because it’s a really beautiful product, and it’s got this great DVD of us playing it at the Pompidou, plus all this music that nobody’s ever heard that we did together. She was an important figure for us.

You know, we were lucky enough to collaborate with a lot of different people that influenced us, like working with Neil Young for a period of time on tour or Yoko or Iggy, you know, and Brigitte was one of those. She meant a lot to us, her records, and so having a chance to work collaboratively with her was a big deal for us. And I’d like to see those records come out while we’re all still alive, let’s put it that way! It’s been in the back of my mind for the last year or so to try and revisit with that one in particular. That would be, I guess, SYR number ten, if it came out?

SONIC YOUTH: IN/OUT/IN

I think that things are even more open these days in terms of genre and there’d be a real appetite for that record.

You know, we put out that record a few months ago, called In/Out/In. And it was the first kind of new vinyl release we’ve done for a while and we didn’t do it on our label, we did it on a label that we admire, this label from North Carolina, Three Lobed. It’s pretty abstract stuff, you know, there’s no singing on that record, or anything like that, for the most part. And we were completely blown away by the amount of affection that was shown towards that record and towards the band, in retrospect. We weren’t expecting that at all, that it would be received so favourably and it really meant a lot to all of us to see that the band still has meaning for a lot of people.

What do you see as Sonic Youth’s legacy? We’ve talked about different periods of the band and Sonic Youth already had a legacy in the early 90s. Are there multiple legacies?

Well, there may be and I could probably postulate some of them, but it’s hard to talk about that with your own work. What the legacy is and who knows, if twenty/thirty/forty years from now, it’s going to be remembered as significant or not. It’s kind of hard to say. I mean, I think from our inception until now, there’s been some clear bits of legacy that just have to deal with, you know, even though we signed to a big label, you know, tilling our own row or whatever, not really selling out to market forces. Not to say that we could have written pop hits, if we’d wanted to, it wasn’t like that. But I think part of our legacy is just having gone through our own career and stayed true to our initial intentions, which were keeping our focus centred on the music, rather than fame and fortune or any other things like that.

I saw something online the other day, somebody had posted a picture of a bunch of our records, or maybe all of our albums. And somebody was commenting about having seen us either during the Jim period or just after that, and talking about those records – like Sonic Nurse and Murray Street and Rather Ripped – and talking about how they were among their favourites of our catalogue and how they’d seen us in that period and we were still really, really good. One of my strongest takeaways is that from the very last couple of years we played together, touring The Eternal basically – writing and touring The Eternal – and feeling like, wow, we’ve been together for 30 years, and the live shows were still just as incredible as far as I was concerned, standing on the stage, as they were when we started. And we were still playing shows that had a very high level of quality as far as I could tell, and that it never trailed off. It’s always sad to see a band that you’ve really loved go through a period where they’re kind of trailing off. Well, that happens and it’s always a little bit sad. But I felt like we maintained a pretty high level of everything we did right through to the end, so that’s part of the legacy that I would cite. You know, a band like the Velvet Underground, in their time they didn’t sell many records at all. And who would have guessed that at this point in time, they’d be seen as these mythic, monumental figures. So it’s really hard to tell what happens with Sonic Youth. Certainly in terms of fame and fortune, all these bands that came in the wake of Nirvana far eclipsed what we did in terms of record sales or reaching a huge amount of people, but obviously that’s not what legacies are built on as much as a bunch of other kind of ineffable factors, I guess you would say.

SONIC YOUTH: DAYDREAM NATION

My nine-year-old son is really taken with “The Diamond Sea”. I was playing it in the car and he was fascinated when he found out it was twenty minutes long. He was asking questions and I started trying to explain what the song was doing, but realised I didn’t need to – he instinctively got it. The thing is, your work stands the test of time and is appealing to new generations. What are your thoughts about younger folks getting into Sonic Youth today?

I mean, people of all ages come up to me and talk about it. The interesting thing is, with a career as long as ours, people come up and say like, “Oh, Sister meant so much to me” or Daydream Nation, but other people will come up and say, like, Murray Street or a different period of our music. So there’s people that have dropped in at various periods in our career and that’s really interesting to see. For some people it’s Goo or early 90s and for some people it’s early 2000s. That’s a really cool thing for me.

The ways in which Sonic Youth engaged with and adapted pop culture remains unique. I don’t think something similar could occur in relation to today’s pop culture landscape.

We sort of straddled the internet age in a way. I mean, we spent half of our career in a period where the internet was really a minor thing, if it was there at all. Our early years, you got gigs by sending postcards to people in other cities where we could play or by reading the backs of fanzines, or whatever. In that period, a lot of bands were able to be nurtured in a different way over a different timescale. Sonic Youth played for four or five years before anybody really sat up and took notice outside of New York. I don’t know if it’d be as easy to do that these days. The landscape has totally been changed by the internet, that’s for sure. And I don’t know whether, if we were starting out now, things would have been…. The pop landscape in particular is so different now, it’s just another world.

The idea of a local scene feels to be of the past in some ways.

You can be a little band anywhere in the world right now and gain an audience, just online. But back, then you had to go out and prove yourself. In America that meant doing those SST style tours, like thirty-five shows in thirty-three days kind of thing, to keep econo and make money, make a little bit of money to bring home. We really cut our teeth playing shows like that and it wasn’t like, oh, we just want to play Top of the Pops, and have everyone see us and collect our cheque and go home. We were a live band, we wanted to go out and blow people’s heads off on a nightly basis. And that was a good work ethic to have.

I might normally ask about the creative freedoms of solo work after being in an established band for many years, but Sonic Youth were a band with a lot of creative freedoms.

We were, we definitely were. The thing that’s interesting to me about the last decade, when we’ve all been doing our own stuff, is that when you’re in a band, especially a band like ours, it’s really where every member is kind of integral to what went on, what became the band – your personal role is subsumed under the umbrella of the band, you know? So it’s been interesting to me to see all of us go off and do our own things over the last ten years. And in some ways, we would not have had the opportunity to do those things or to explore each of us as an individual creative person, rather than just as a member of this quartet or whatever. That’s been incredibly rewarding, I think for all of us. And so, you can’t really complain about a band’s demise after thirty years, even if the circumstances under which it happened weren’t the most fortuitous. But we wouldn’t have the records that we’ve each made on our own if we hadn’t stopped working together. So I don’t really have regrets about anything that happened. We had an amazing career and went out on a high note and have had really interesting careers individually since then.

And I don’t think many bands or artists can say that.

Yeah, yeah. That’s true.

SONIC YOUTH: WORLD TRADE CENTER BENEFIT 2001

Just to finish up, you’ve talked about some of the archives you’d like to see released. Are there any other Sonic Youth archives on the way?

There’s a few things in the works right now. Like I said, we were really enthused about that In/Out/In reception and also about turning the record over to somebody else’s hands, so we didn’t have to do all the mechanical physical stuff – which mostly would come down to Steve doing a lot of that stuff. We’re working on one right now, what I call ‘the last concert’, which is the last concert we played in Brooklyn in 2011 before we announced that we were splitting up. We subsequently played five more shows in South America, like three months later or something like that, because we’d already committed to those shows and we honoured them. But at that point, we were clearly just doing them because we were obligated to do them. We knew we were stopping. So the one in Brooklyn, fittingly enough, here in our hometown, is to me our last show. And that’s about to come out on a double LP, not through our label, but through some other label here in the States. And I think there’ll be more info coming out about that soon. But it’s coming out like a pseudo bootleg, modelled on the Great White Wonder, Dylan’s early bootleg, and all those bootleg labels that were issuing stuff in the 70s and 60s, that were not official releases by artists.

We’ve gotten enthusiastic to do some more stuff like that. We have a massive archive and we’ve continued to grow that archive anytime we find recordings or photos or videos of us. It’s massive and I would say 60% of it is catalogued in a database. So we’ve been combing through the archives looking for different projects to work on. One project that’s been long standing that I’ve wanted to see happen is a live song-for-song record that follows the New York City Ghosts & Flowers record, because that record was made under strange circumstances. It was right after we’d had all our equipment stolen, Jim came in halfway through and helped us complete it. A lot of those songs were done on either borrowed or brand new equipment that we didn’t really know so well. And I really like that record. It’s had a chequered history of what other people think of it.

I was looking up something about it and found that Pitchfork review…

0.0. Yeah! And if you look, that same guy that wrote that review, wrote a retraction like fifteen years later, where he said he didn’t understand it at the time. He was a young kid at the time, but it was funny that he wrote a retraction of it. Those songs really took on this incredible life live that that record doesn’t reflect and I always thought it would be cool to do a record that followed the same order of those songs and was a live version of that.

We’re working on a Washing Machine Deluxe now. It’s going to be pretty sprawling – we have lots and lots of demos of that record, 8-track demos. It’s getting towards completion. And we wanted to do something with “Diamond Sea” from that record. I don’t know if you ever heard of this record by this artist called John Olsen. He’s a Canadian sound artist and that – his name is not John Olsen, he’s the Wolf Eyes guy. Oh my god, I’m mixing up his name. Let me look up his name here. [Checks iPhone.] John Oswald, a Canadian sound artist. He did a record where he took versions of the Grateful Dead’s “Dark Star” and he made this record called “Grayfolded”. It’s an eighty-minute-long CD, where he took like twenty different versions of “Dark Star” and made this massive mega-mix of “Dark Star” for eighty minutes. And we had the idea to do something similar with “Diamond Sea”. We’re either going to do something where we put four very different versions of performances of that song on a single CD, or do something like that where we try and strip them all together and make something. So that’s one thing that’s in process for that Washing Machine release.

It’ll be interesting trying to explain that one to my son!

But you know that that song, even though it’s twenty or twenty-five minutes long, I think twenty minutes on Washing Machine and twenty-five minutes – we added the end of it on the 12 inch single that came out with, I forget what’s on the other side, “Little Trouble Girl” or something. But that song had a structure that really ran all the way through the song, so that when we played it, we didn’t just play the head and then go off into space. We had a lot of touchstones along the way. But we’re listening back to recordings there, it took so many different characters over the couple of years when we were seriously playing it. Like we played it on Lollapalooza every night that summer, and then for the next couple of years. We found four or five versions that we thought would be fun to listen to back-to-back because they each go to such a different place. So that might be part of that Washing Machine box.

I actually first saw Sonic Youth live at Glasgow Barrowlands on the 1996 Washing Machine tour and remember being blown away by “The Diamond Sea.”

We liked playing that place. We played there two or three times, I think. Actually, there’s a film of us playing Daydream Nation when we revisited it in like 2008 or 2009, that was shot in Glasgow [at the ABC].

“Diamond Sea” would have been in its prime when you saw us then.

Are there any reissues of your solo work imminent? I was looking to see if I could get a copy of Between the Times on vinyl and was surprised to find it wasn’t currently available.

I think Matador still considers it in print. I don’t know if it’s in print this very second, but I got vinyl copies of it from them not long ago.

It does seem that things go in and out of print at the moment. I was speaking to someone at Drag City recently and they were telling me that a couple of represses were six months out or so.

Partly it’s down to the pressing plants are insane at this point. And with the resurgence of vinyl, I think record labels, even smaller ones, are prioritising getting their new records pressed, which can take nine months from the time you turn it in. So the older stuff gets a little bit slower to be repressed. And you know, those numbers are usually much smaller when they’re repressing older stuff. But yeah, I don’t know about reissues. There’s one record – and it’s actually my first collaboration with Raül Refree – we made this record in Spain for the label of the Primavera Sound organisation. That’s called Acoustic Dust. It’s acoustic versions of some of the songs that I played with my band The Dust, and some covers, including a really nice cover of “Revolution Blues” [Neil Young] that I still play in that arrangement to this day. That record has been very unseen, just because it only came out on a small Spanish label. And I’d like to see that record reissued at some point. Otherwise, I don’t know, I’m kind of preoccupied with getting some new projects released. This project with this young Chicago guitar player and this sextet version of my hurricane piece and working towards a new record. So I’m still more thinking of that stuff.

Will any of those be released in 2023?

I’m hoping at least one or two of those will be this year. It really depends on how much time I get to stay home and do work at this point versus being out on the road.

We exchange goodbyes and I tell Lee that I’ll make sure to come and see him the next time he plays London. “It’ll be something probably completely different,” he tells me.

I would expect nothing less.

SONIC YOUTH: LIVE AT BRIXTON ACADEMY 1992