Sonic Youth: Classic or Dud/S&D?

Wow. I always forget how well SY's and Thurston's interviews served me as a guide to NYC as a teenager in Manhattan. Appreciate the generosity of their constantly plugging experimental artists in the mainstream press.

Def prefer their records to their interviews as exposition of the conceptual/theoretical stuff. They're a lot more interesting when they talk about the mechanics of it- the screwdriver, the amp turned to 10 with no input signal. Their focus is on the tactile and material is exciting. They def "make guitar music" rather than "make music with guitars".

I love The Well Tuned Piano.

Would read Heetderks but it might be over my head.

can't argue with Daydream Nation and Goo as the top two

lol I would 100% argue with this, but the point is that they made a lot of great records

― thinkmanship (sleeve

The deluxe DN has some cool "guitar music" on the bonus tracks, like Tuff Boyz which is all pick scrapes and input jack noises iirc

but yeah i'm with you.

i mean Goo lol

Also wow @ playing Ratt through their amps between songs

I generally can't stand Thurston interviews, he always came off so pretentious but not necessarily that perceptive or smart. But it's been a while.

The thing about the SY tunings, if I understand correctly, many of them couldn't even be supported by an off the rack guitar, they just couldn't physically handle the tension. Anyway, alternate or weird tunings are cool for the aforementioned, getting new ideas or sounds with often simpler fingerings (see: Keith Richards, or that recent Big Thief video on tunings). Volume/feedback is just one more significant sonic x factor. A lot of alternate tunings are about letting open strings ring out or drone, which I imagine gets some really cool effects when you factor in feedback, as SY demonstrated.

I'm no expert in this stuff, but iirc Pavement uses some absolutely insane tunings, too - maybe call them "alternative-alternative tunings" - though of course not to the same or even similar ends as SY. Malkmus is such a smarty pants I wouldn't be surprised if he knew exactly what he was doing, as opposed to SY, who did it by instinct or feel. I don't know enough about folks like Branca, Chatham or Conrad to know if they used the same approach, or if they were classically trained and knew exactly what they were doing. In the end of course it doesn't matter, it's about the results. I did get to see Chatham live once and Conrad live once, and I honestly felt there was an element of BS to both of them, which again, doesn't matter if you're into it.

And why not retune a piano as well?

Lol because it's a huge pain in the ass!

NYC Ghosts & Flowers is at worst blah, either the end of a manner or the beginning of a new one.

Oh hells yes. V transitional, though maybe the transition began with the similarly hated EJST&NS. The title track of NYC G&F is brilliant, the best of Lee's beat pretentions - the noiseout towards the end, which feels like toxic smoke blacking out the sun, is majestic - and Free City Rhymes, Renegade Princess and Nevermind are all excellent.

Someday I’m gonna do a huge deep dive into Sonic Youth’s catalog, and if I’m feeling adventurous enough I’ll try all the unlistenable avant-garde SYR shit.

You fuckers are convincing me to do a deep dive into Sonic Youth’s back catalog and struggle through all that goddamn SYR shit. SIGH.

― Mr. Snrub, Saturday, December 18, 2021 4:33 PM (two months ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol i’m repeating myself!

First two SYR EPs are really thrilling!

the "guitar music" aspect to sy was an important gateway for me to other people in that tradition who had/have a lot more range. as it is i value sy as a combiner of things, psychedelia, punk, microtonality, emotional rock, feminism, etc. i appreciate that they were always searching for and talking about interesting visual and musical artists with some relation to them. occurs to me they're kind of like golden era rolling stones in that respect.

the "guitar music" aspect to sy was an important gateway for me to other people in that tradition who had/have a lot more range.

This is kinda where I fall these days. What I like about SY isn't their songs, because I am not a song-oriented person. What I liked once upon a time was the way their multiple guitar lines intertwined in "weird" / "wrong" ways (relative to the RAWK I was listening to more of at the time); the first thing I ever heard by them was Sister, in 1987 or '88 — Daydream Nation wasn't out yet — and at the time it sounded like the strings were falling off. (The semi-half-assed, wavering way they sang contributed to the something's-not-quite-right-here effect.) I was fascinated back then. But now I can hear the same slipping-out-of-control effect in, say, Mary Halvorson's work, and I prefer it in that context.

Here is the Heetderks analytical article: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cfkMJ1Bhm8BHNFRRViFXYv6BkLLw27Td/view?usp=sharing

I'm no expert in this stuff, but iirc Pavement uses some absolutely insane tunings, too - maybe call them "alternative-alternative tunings" - though of course not to the same or even similar ends as SY. Malkmus is such a smarty pants I wouldn't be surprised if he knew exactly what he was doing, as opposed to SY, who did it by instinct or feel. I don't know enough about folks like Branca, Chatham or Conrad to know if they used the same approach, or if they were classically trained and knew exactly what they were doing. In the end of course it doesn't matter, it's about the results. I did get to see Chatham live once and Conrad live once, and I honestly felt there was an element of BS to both of them, which again, doesn't matter if you're into it.

Branca didn't have formal musical training, although he might have got some later on (?). He came from iirc more of a theatre background and was into the no wave/punk scene before moving to instrumental composition. He independently studied LaMonte Young as well as Penderecki, Ligeti, and Stockhausen. He was even more methodical and mathematical than SY when writing the 80s symphonies, designing instruments and precisely tuning in just intonation, using intervals from the harmonic series or selecting frequencies for sum and difference tones based on mathematics and acoustics, not just by ear/feel like I think SY were more likely to. By the time of the Symphony 13 premiere, though, I think he had loosened up his approach - guitarists were just supposed to tune all our strings to octaves of the same note but to avoid tuning too precisely, in order to generate the same kinds of beating effects but in a more intuitive way. (Honestly, classical training is not really that essential if these sorts of effects are your primary interest.)

I honestly highly doubt Malkmus is more studied in this stuff than Moore or Ranaldo? I'm not a Pavement/Malkmus scholar but I thought his background was in literature?

Halvorson and Cline definitely take these sorts of ideas further out in an instrumental, improvisational guitar playing context, incorporated with more development and variation in harmony, melody, and rhythm, but I still like listening to SY's songs.

I don't think Malkmus has any particular background in that stuff. Here he is in the Rob Jovanovic book, talking about his early days playing w/Kannberg in Bag O'Bones:

"I didn't even know about distortion pedals yet. I was just learning about guitars. It had reverb so I would turn that on and try to sound like Will Sergeant (from Echo and the Bunnymen)."

re "guitar music" i guess i was referring to this post from deflatormouse

They're a lot more interesting when they talk about the mechanics of it- the screwdriver, the amp turned to 10 with no input signal. Their focus is on the tactile and material is exciting. They def "make guitar music" rather than "make music with guitars".

and then thinking of people like loren mazzacane connors, tetuzi akiyama, bill orcut, us maple, keith rowe,

I thought I’d read somewhere around the time of maybe Murray/Sonic that Malkmus’s guitar tuning, or a variant based off of it, had become Thurston’s “standard” tuning when playing.

may have even been on SY’s extensive liner notes/song breakdown section they have(had?).

C G D G B B

How to tune: Ed4 Ad2 Ds Gs Bs Ed5

Used by Thurston on: Anagrama, Slaapkamers, Stil, Sunday, Wildflower,
Hoarfrost, French Tickler, Karen Koltrane, The Ineffable Me,
Snare, Girl, Heather Angel, Free City Rhymes, Renegade Princess, and
Sympathy for the Strawberry.

NOTES: tuning stolen from pavement. also used on the majority of thurston's
'psychic hearts' record. the pavement tuning was actually just CGDGBE, but thurston
gave it a little sonic alteration w/ the unison Bs on top...

USED ON ALL OF "PSYCHIC HEARTS" and "CHELSEA LIGHT MOVING" LPs, plus "No Go" "Sunday Stage" "The Ecstasy" from CLM tour

The tuning he used on Murray Street and a lot of Sonic Nurse is CGDGCD, another variation. Tbc, though, if I'm reading it right, the first four strings in the original Pavement tuning would be in standard tuning, with the 5th and 6th strings dropped so that strings 6, 5, and 4 are in fifths rather than fourths. So altering the first two strings actually seems significant.

Source: http://www.sonicyouth.com/mustang/tab/tunings.txt

Interesting – I really like the 'psychic hearts' record (and I'm a Pavement fan, not so much an SY fan). Wonder if it's all down to the tunings, lol

Here's the same thing, but with easier to read formatting:

http://www.sonicyouth.com/mustang/tab/tuning.html

Looks like the only SY release entirely in standard is the first EP. "Bad Moon" and beyond, it's off to the races. Looks like "A Thousand Leaves" to "Murray Street" is the closest Lee and Thurston come to sticking with one (weird) tuning each for the whole record? Coincidence probably, but that's generally the streak where (at the time) I just lost interest in the band, my enthusiasm picking up a bit more when they released "Sonic Nurse." I should go back and revisit all of them.

When did they get their instruments stolen? Around that same period, right?

iirc their instruments were stolen some time between A Thousand Leaves and NYC Ghosts & Flowers

Yep, summer of 1999.

When instruments like that get stolen, how easy is it to trace them? I'm guessing they're usually just re-sold somewhere, right?

Or I guess I should say, how could one trace them if they're really, really wanted to search for them or put a call out, like a tweet or something saying "we're looking for a guitar with such-and-such carved inside" etc.

*if they

"This machine plays 'youth against fascism'"

Meantime, good new piece on the various archival efforts of recent years, Ranaldo and Shelley are interviewed.

https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/sonic-youth-and-the-business-of-keeping-a-dead-band-alive/

xpost birdistheword - there are some details specific to SY's case in this article

https://pitchfork.com/news/47906-sonic-youth-recover-stolen-guitars-after-13-years/

a surprisingly happy delayed ending, at least in part

SYR3 is also dope, but you have to be cool with abstraction, Jim O’Rourke, wordless ululations (as I am)

SYR4 I think I listened to just once, when my copy arrived.

At the time the things they were covering and the guest players occupied a realm too far from my interests to excite me. 22 years later I’m a bit nearer…

xxxp Oh wow, nice! Even if it's only a fraction of what was stolen and it took about 13 years, seven recovered guitars is pretty good. Kind of a sad story there behind the robbery - obviously only a fragment but it's enough to understand why the band simply gave those kids a few hundred for every one they still had.

Funny you should mention Keith Rowe, map- because I've thought of him as someone who's adapted ideas from the visual arts (Pollock, Rauschenberg) in a very literal way, almost comically so, compared to SY. But prob no more literal than playing Ratt through an amplifier between songs and def not as brazen!

I got to Rowe before ever hearing SY, just b/c I'd read about AMM as an important influence on early Floyd and was *that* obsessed with Syd Barrett then. And i've been drawn back into AMM for different reasons, over the years. Ultimately what I like about it is that it aims to be kind of an ambient sound, or to create a penetrable environment, and that's a really weird position to put yourself in as a guitar player. With Sonic Youth, there's a lot more interest in "references" and "symbols" and their use of guitars points to a kind of "embodied meaning" as i described. So I see them as comparable in a way but don't think I'd place them in a similar tradition, re: "guitar music". I would probably sooner put them in a tradition of someone like Jim O'Rourke who uses references to construct (and negate, and undermine) meaning. It makes good sense that they hooked up with him.

i value sy as a combiner of things, psychedelia, punk, microtonality, emotional rock, feminism, etc.

Yes, for me the pop art/postmodern/
"trash" aspect of SY is very important, and not necessarily something i find in the more out players.

I liked that post, btw.

Will read the Heetderks in a bit, thx.

Re the stolen instruments I think Lee got a Mustang back as well, I’m a regular at Offset and think I recall such a thread about 4 years ago.

https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/sonic-youth-and-the-business-of-keeping-a-dead-band-alive/

Here is the Heetderks analytical article: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cfkMJ1Bhm8BHNFRRViFXYv6BkLLw27Td/view?usp=sharing

this was good, maybe errs on the side of overexplaining some of the simpler passages but extremely helpful if you want to understand how the impact of some SY songs is achieved in musical terms.

Cool to see Theo Cateforis cited, he was the drummer in my favorite local band when i was in high school. Being much older than the other members, he split to earn a doctorate in rock n roll history and was thereafter known to us as Dr. Rock. He's a real sweetheart, never read his stuff but this was a nice reminder.

btw, I think Malkmus's main tuning in Pavement was CGDABE. Their songs don't register to me as obviously in weird tunings (detuned or imprecise, sure) for a number of reasons, one of which is that a lot of the guitar sound comes from the other guy who seems to always play in standard.

Also wow @ playing Ratt through their amps between songs

― The 25 Best Songs Ever Ranked In Order (Deflatormouse),

Are there recordings of these shows in circulation? Seems likely that there are?

I'm imagining this as something like Andy Kaufman's perfect, hip-shaking Elvis impersonations after in his anti-comedy sets, like the joyous release following a big 'No'.

Are there recordings of these shows in circulation? Seems likely that there are?

I dunno, sounds like bullshit to me. Reminds me of something I read once about the making of "Murmur" and Mitch Easter or someone was boasting about the anything-goes atmosphere, which allegedly involved even James Brown samples (?) at some point, and I remember reading that and thinking, nah, that never happened.

I do bet it sometimes *felt* like SY was taking five minutes to tune sometimes, but I saw them on the Neil Young tour (which Thurston specifically cites), and no, I don't remember them taking five minutes to tune, nor do I recall them blasting anything by anyone through the PA while they did so. Maybe it just didn't make an impression? But it was a pretty tight opening set, so I somehow doubt they wasted so much of it tuning.

In fact, I just found this full set of theirs from 1991!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PF_hItUAksQ

By 91, they had loads of guitars for all their different tunings. They were talking more about the Confusion Is Sex/Bad Moon Rising era. They actually did include some samples of "Not Right" between songs on BMR.

xpost - From Wikipedia:

Sonic Youth's use of transitional pieces in (Bad Moon Rising) was inspired by their live shows, which featured either Moore or Ranaldo tuning guitars for up to five minutes while the other played slow transitory guitar riffs or prerecorded sound collages

Also a Metal Machine Music sample xp

Yeah, there's boots and live albums from the 80s with them playing cut-up Madonna tracks and Beach Boys stuff over the PA. P sure there's some of that on the infamous Walls Have Ears semi-boot.

OK, I stand semi-corrected, especially if a couple of them were making noise themselves while another tuned, or if they used prerecorded collages. But in the Gore piece Moore does specifically mention the Neil Young tour, where they supposedly used "War Pigs," "Rico Suave," Karen Carpenter and a Ligeti piece.

This set list from Sacramento from that tour lists those samples.
http://www.sonicyouth.com/mustang/cc/040791.html

Interesting! Maybe that clip I posted has them in it, too? I honestly just skipped around.

BTW, that AVClub piece, rankings aside, is otm when it comes to "100%." What a ton of fun that song is. I remember seeing the Thermals open with it (for some reason) at the Pitchfork Fest, and the crowd response was, well, 100%.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LQPQLd9v2c

Lol the Orlando clip begins with a Carpenters sample! Around 0:30.

I just figured it was their intro music, lol.