Sonic Youth brings order to the chaos

  The band Sonic Youth will be curating the All Tomorrow’s
Parties festival at UCLA. Sonic Youth has assembled its "wish list"
of 53 bands that will play throughout the weekend.

By Andrew Lee
Daily Bruin Contributor

It’s April 10, 2000, at East Sussex, England’s
Camber Sands Holiday village ““ the site of the U.K.’s
first All Tomorrow’s Parties festival, curated by
Scotland’s Mogwai. Hordes of sweaty Englanders roam the
site’s beaches, saunas and chalets, enjoying the
resort’s offerings in between bands’ sets.

Saturday night rolls in, and the audience watches as the
day’s headliners take the stage. New York City’s Sonic
Youth, made up of guitarists Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo,
bassist Kim Gordon and drummer Steve Shelley, ease into their first
song, labeled on the set list simply as “new
drone.”

The song had been written specifically for the festival. It
offers the audience a slow, sprawling two-chord drone interjected
with Gordon’s characteristically meandering vocals. The
build-up is slow, repetitious and languid, not to mention epic
““ five minutes turn into 10 minutes, 10 to 15.

A full half hour later, a sigh of relief comes out of the
bewildered audience. Sonic Youth had finally finished the first
song of the night.

“We were very hated,” Moore said with a laugh.
“The audience was just really confounded. Plus, NME and
Melody Maker critics were going, “˜That was crap! How dare
this band come over here and waste our time with this foolish
garbage?’

“And I was like, “˜What the fuck?’ I remember
listening to the tape and going, “˜This is one of the coolest
things we’ve ever done.'”

Sonic Youth has always been about sophisticated experimentation
steeped in a strong sense of naïve adventurism, and often
times it’s left to the listener to decide which element wins
out. The band has made a career out of breeding chaos in an attempt
to emerge through the mist with a dreamlike sense of beauty ““
yet that songwriting approach requires a sense of ambition that
permits the occasional aural blunder. It also takes the punk-rock
principle of making music that doesn’t always mesh with the
public’s tastes and expectations.

“I thought everybody was coming over to do experimental
music, and I guess not,” Moore said. “Everybody
didn’t. All these bands were just sort of playing their sets,
which is fine, I guess I was just a little put off.

“Maybe I was misguided,” he said with a laugh.

Imagine Moore’s surprise, then, when organizer Barry Hogan
approached the band and asked them to curate the first U.S. version
of All Tomorrow’s Parties.

“Basically, Barry came up to us and said, “˜All you
have to do is make a wish list of bands you would like to have play
at a festival,'” Moore said. “That sounded easy
enough, but our wish list consisted of over 3,000 bands.”

Luckily, Sonic Youth was able to whittle the bill down to 53
acts, spread out over four days, in what could very well be any
indie-rock fan’s aural wet dream. It’s a bill that only
Sonic Youth could have concocted, combining some of the most
notable and engaging acts in the current music scene with
’70s legends like Big Star and Television and progressive
noise-art experimenters like the Boredoms and Merzbow, not to
mention ever-elusive IDM superstar Aphex Twin.

“The thing is (this type of festival) has never been done
in America before,” Moore said. “There is no selection
process made by management or agents or record labels, it’s
just musicians dealing with musicians. It’s basically Sonic
Youth asking a bunch of friends to gather around and have some good
times.”

The festival, originally slated for October, felt the effects of
the events of the preceding month. This put Sonic Youth in the
awkward position of having to decide whether to proceed with the
event or delay it.

“It was a really intense time because we really
didn’t know what the near future was going to be like,”
Moore said. “This was a good 30 days away from the original
event, so we decided, “˜Let’s do this in the springtime.
And hopefully, if we’re all still here, we can
play.'”

In addition to the psychological fallout, Moore notes the
complete halt of ticket sales as a sign that an October version of
the festival would have lead to an especially morose affair. Now,
aside from a few lineup changes, the same festival is set to go
down as originally planned, combining music with film presentations
and poetry readings. But in spite of the bands who had dropped out
due to the rescheduled date, Sonic Youth still struggled to
accommodate everything.

“There have been all these opportunities to include just
one more really cool thing,” Ranaldo said. “But
we’d gotten to a point where we were really overburdening the
thing, so that was frustrating.”

Ranaldo is talking on the phone from Sonic Youth’s NYC
studio, working on final mixes for the band’s next
full-length album, entitled “Murray Street,” a
reference to The Beatles’ “Abbey Road.” With
newest bandmember, studio wizard Jim O’Rourke, helping out
with the writing, performing and mixing of the album, the band is
ready to unleash its new work, described by Ranaldo as their
“classic rock record.”

But Sonic Youth’s own interpretation of “classic
rock” is anyone’s guess.

“Our sound is pretty recognizable just because of all the
guitar tunings and stuff like that,” Ranaldo said. “And
for us it kind of shifts over time. Some aspects have stayed
exactly the same since the first time we played together 20 years
ago. Some things change over every couple of months.”

Sonic Youth is often pegged as an offshoot of New York’s
No Wave scene of the late ’70s, a genre focused more on the
primal sonic capabilities of a guitar rather than the traditional
melodic line or blues-based structure. Disregarding familiar
blues-based chords and chord changes, guitarists Moore and Ranaldo
were able to craft a sound both familiar and new. As the band
progressed, however, the free-form experimentalism gave way to more
structured songs, allowing them to walk the fine line between the
traditional rock band and the experimental noise makers.

Sonic Youth still finds itself alternating between both
extremes. The band found an outlet for its most experimental
projects with its own SYR label, which allows it to release albums
without worrying about major label backing. It lets the band record
with collaborators like percussionist Ikue Morie and, in a sense,
to let out all of its creative ambitions. But that doesn’t
make the projects any less significant than official LPs, according
to Ranaldo.

“We see them as completely equal,” Ranaldo said.
“It’s just as vital to us as spending months working on
three-minute pop songs.”

Now that longtime collaborator O’Rourke has been fully
incorporated into the band’s creative process, Moore shows
his anticipation for releasing a record with someone he deems a
“future child.”

“He’s somebody who has a very highly formed musical
sense,” Moore said. “He knows music theory inside and
out. He also knows that some of us in Sonic Youth are
non-musicians. He’s not judgmental about it, in fact he
recognizes it as an integral part of the band. It’s rare to
find somebody who has such a knowledge of music, being able to deal
with people who are not standard technicians of the
craft.”

So has this new addition reflected the sound of the new
album?

“It’s kind of grown up,” Moore said.
“We’re kind of 21 years old this year. We’re
legal. There’s a song on the record called “Radical
Adults,” and that’s kind of what it’s
about.”

With every successive Sonic Youth album, there’s an urge
to point to their ages and number of children as a reaffirmation of
their “elder statesmen” status in the rock music arena.
However, the relentless progressive experimentalism always
contradicted that notion. But now, as festival curators and classic
rock embracers, that term bears slightly more validity. And Moore
is eager to emphasize their new dichotomous perspective.

“We’re trying to send the word out to everybody that
we’re gonna be in a radical mode, but at the same time
we’re going to try and impress upon everybody a sense of
responsibility,” Moore said just before the end of the
interview. “I want people to know that if they litter, that
Sonic Youth has to pick it up. I don’t want to have to go
around with one of those litter sticks Monday morning, picking up
cigarette butts.”