Thurston Moore of art rockers Sonic Youth has stepped away from the avant garde by making an acoustic solo album, he tells Jim Carroll
When Thurston Moore's Trees Outside the Academy was released a few months ago, many listeners did a double-take. Was this really the Sonic Youth kingpin? How could Moore possibly do an album without putting blood in the music? Did someone put the wrong vinyl in the album sleeve at the factory? From his home in Northampton, Massachusetts, Moore chuckles when he recalls the bemused reaction in some quarters to his album of beautifully assured songs, minimalist arrangements and fairly conventional verse-chorus-verse structure.
"When I first played this album live, someone told a friend of mine that they were glad it wasn't one of those experimental shows I do." He knows himself that this is a significant step away from the avant-garde, out-there noise that his solo releases normally explored - and indeed, the usual Sonic Youth palette.
"A lot of my solo stuff could be classed as improvised music, pure noise music. I've played with different kinds of improvised musicians, like avant-garde jazz musicians or really strict underground noise people. They've all informed how I work and I suppose I've concentrated as a result on the improvised stuff." But Moore had a hankering to try something new. "I wanted to make a record where I was playing acoustic guitar," he explains. "I only started writing songs on the acoustic guitar about 10 years ago because I didn't actually own one before then.
"What I find is that the acoustic is good for creating or sketching a very basic outline. With Sonic Youth, I can bring in the idea and the rest of the band will put it into a Sonic Youth grinder and I'll pick up the electric guitar and play the song on that, which changes it quite a bit."
This time around, Moore wanted to leave the electric guitar to one side and see what happened. "The first idea was to record the album with just acoustic guitar and vocals, but as I went on I kept hearing more ideas I wanted to try out.
"I brought in a violin player, I tried out different tunings and I found these performances I was doing in small spaces and basement clubs very inspiring. I wanted to see what happened if I didn't go through the usual acoustic to electric process."
The results on Trees Outside the Academy are inspiring. Between bursts of ambient misshapes and found sound fragments, songs such as Honest James and Fri/End stick in your head. Sure, there are a couple of oddities in the mix (Thurston@13, for instance, is a recording of the then 13-year-old artist making noise with a disinfectant can), but it's Moore's robust and striking songwriting that will impact most strongly on the listener.
"I got a lot of encouragement to make a record like this but I never got the time before now," Moore says about why it's taken him this long to have an acoustic fling. "Sonic Youth are a priority and family life is a priority so finding time to go into studio to record something is hard. I don't have a home studio set-up, I'm not a studio or Pro Tools guy. I just get a cheap tape-recorder and jam out on that, that's as far as I can take it."
MOORE HAS MANY strings to his bow. Besides his pivotal role in veteran New York avant-rockers Sonic Youth and his solo releases, Moore is also an enthusiastic champion of many underground acts, musicians and movements. He sees his Ecstatic Peace label as an intrinsic part of this role.
"The label has become quite a big deal in the last three or four years and I can do stuff with the recordings I get. Most of the people who come to the label expect subterranean avant-garde music. I put out a few more straightforward rock records and I'm of the mind now that people don't want that from the label, however good those albums may be. They want music from the margins, stuff that's not available elsewhere in the market."
His involvment with the label, as well as Sonic Youth's continuing deal with Universal Music, means Moore is well versed in the current trials and tribulations of the label process.
"The record industry is caving in on itself. It's in a total shambles because the labels are cutting costs everywhere, except when it comes to the size of the pay-cheques they're paying themselves. That's going to be the big problem."
Moore still thinks physical releases have a future and remains unconvinced about the move to digital. "I see myself and Ecstatic Peace getting more involved in the actual artefact of the recording," he says. "That was always very important for me, the actual aesthetic art object, because it delivered both a visual art piece and an audio art piece to the consumer. That has not been replaced in the digital realm at all.
"I still think there's a place for analogue vinyl and that cassette recordings still sound great. I still archive the underground noise and avant-garde music scene which exists on really interesting cassette labels. LPs are still a big part of the underground music scene and I don't think that's going to change."
He considers Radiohead's recent decision to allow fans set the price for their new album to be interesting, especially in terms of the reaction of their peers to it. "Radiohead could do it because they had the privilege of being a band with a fanbase already. It was like when downloading became a problem for a lot of bands. Those who complained the loudest were bands like Metallica because they were losing millions and millions of dollars. But I found it very hard to be sympathetic because they had so much money anyway.
"For me, making records was never about becoming a rich person, although it did happen. Sonic Youth's sales have always been modest, we've never had a huge, best-selling record. The name Sonic Youth is better known than our music."
LAST SUMMER, SONIC Youth did a series of Don't Look Back shows where they played their seminal 1988 album, Daydream Nation in its entirety. "Playing it live from start to finish in order like that was odd because we would never write a set-list with that kind of dynamic to it," notes Moore.
Before embarking on the tour, Moore had to overcome many apprehensions about going back to the old days. "I don't like nostalgia because it keeps you away from new work. I really thought it would have been better to do something new and progressive than redig the past.
"But it made me remember how innocent those times were and how inspiring and informative it all was. When we made that record, it was at a time when the idea of making a double-album was so audacious. The only other bands who'd done it were Minutemen and Hüsker Dü so it was not something which people normally did. So yeah, it felt good to remember a time when we were that loose and wired."
Thurston Moore plays Tripod, Dublin, on Tues. Trees Outside The Academy is out now