RES Columns: Q & A

Sonic Youth: The Road to Murray Street

Jan Hilmer

Words: Jesse Ashlock

For Sonic Youth, 2002 began with the group hunkered in their lower Manhattan Echo Canyon studio, working to finish their 16th album while trucks rumbled outside, transporting debris from the site of the fallen World Trade Center. In March, the group headed to Los Angeles for the rescheduled All Tomorrow's Parties festival, an eclectic and successful four-day event curated and headlined by the band. In June, the group released the concise and graceful LP Murray Street, named after the beleaguered block on which it was recorded, with reviewers hailing it as one of the better efforts of their distinguished two-decade career. SY then spent most of the summer touring Europe and the States, entertaining audiences with their newly crystallized "damaged Edgar Winter sound," thanks to the addition of fifth member Jim O'Rourke. According to Thurston Moore, the group will perform at an East Coast ATP curated by Stephen Malkmus early next year. Re-issues of all of their classic albums with bonus discs filled with B-sides and unreleased material are also in the works. In the midst of the group's travels, we caught up with Moore to find out what still inspires the Youth after all these years.

What kind of film, visual art and/or new media projects has Sonic Youth undertaken in the past, and do you have plans for any such projects in the future?

Some of our earliest music and performance was in collaboration with Richard Kern -- a photographer/filmmaker shooting incredible takes on the last vestiges of '70s/'80s NYC grime and crime and sleaze (all cleaned up these days). It was ugly/beauty raunch--n-roll with Lydia Lunch and Lung Leg and a cast of insane street-wave intellects -- crazy and wonderful. We did some music for a Hollywood road movie called Made in USA which started out looking dark and interesting but was lightened up by too many "producers" as usual. The band scored Richard Linklater's SubUrbia, Allison Anders' Things Behind the Sun and Olivier Assayas' Demonlover. I did some music for James Mangold's Heavy, Larry Clark's Bully and the films How to Draw a Bunny and Manic. We are totally prepared to rock cinema sound anytime, anywhere -- just send us yer dailies.

How did Jim O'Rourke come to be an official fifth member of the band? How has his presence affected your direction?

Yeah, he's bringing in a very crazy glam/trash element more informed by the deranged diction of Sparks as opposed to that of the New York Dolls, which was our jumping off point. So those two monolithic models of rock-n-roll animalism are very conspired in our attack. He also knows how to mix our record as if it's going to be Roxy Music's Stranded -- street rock glam, which was pretty much avant-garde rock-n-roll experimentation and which is obviously for the most part what we've always been about, regardless of our librarian looks. That and green tea leaf with score notations for [John] Cage and [Merce] Cunningham.

Much of Murray Street trades on some of the most intricate and graceful extended instrumental passages anywhere in the Sonic Youth discography. What kind of record did you all set out to make and do you think you succeeded?

We're in the position Fleetwood Mac were in after spending their formative years as an experimental blues rock outfit. By divine invitation Jim O. has entered pretty much a hybrid of Buckingham/Nicks and is hypnotically suggesting us towards full-on classic pop gold. The whole platinum sales thing is going to be kinda new to us.

What's life like on the southern tip of Manhattan these days?

The area was so desolated while we recorded through the winter. Our soundtrack was the streets, particularly Murray Street, being torn up and patched down a hundred times -- and the rigs hauling off destroyed building relentlessly through the night. We were of the mind to create music as a holistic, positive activity amidst the wreckage. Right now things are contained and daily life is on course throughout the streets of lower Manhattan but the scene will always be charged by its history.

After making music together for more than 20 years, where do you see Sonic Youth five or 10 years down the road?

The future will be a product of hope, creating hopefulness as a model for youth culture -- not to breed hopelessness -- turning the grim reality of so many people's existence into a creative measure which elevates art to the level of truth, what so many young artists seem to want to do through gestures of bewilderment and grief -- but the music has to shine outside and beyond the humility of media. It has to howl through to heaven. Maybe that's what we see as the future.