Sonic Youth: still saying yes to adventure and no to compromise

"What's that sound?" Thurston Moore asks of his band co-founder and co-parent, Kim Gordon, intrigued by the curious, somewhat atonal chimes ringing from the back bedroom of their cozy downtown New York loft (they also reside in Massachusetts). Turns out their seven-year-old daughter, Coco, is watching kids' cartoons on TV; an alternative sonic youth, you might say, that oddly echoes the clangorous slashes, grinds and tingles of their compelling new album, Murray Street (DGC).

Much is happening now, as ever, for Sonic Youth, whose indie roots mark them as self-starters. Talk of their 20-year history as lords and ladies of the underground takes a back seat to tomorrow. Kim displays one of her new artworks for an imminent exhibition, a sinuous flash of pink on fat silver laminate that evokes 1950s hot rods gleaming in the desert sun. In many media, Sonic Youth still rock on.

VIVIEN GOLDMAN: We're gathered together today because you have a new release, Murray Street.

THURSTON MOORE: It's not necessarily to promote the record. I don't want to talk about promoting the record. But I guess that's why we're doing it. I would like to do this at any time.

VG: That's the spirit.

TM: Do you think Interview magazine would want to talk to us about nothing?

KIM GORDON: Maybe if we were Jean Paul Sartre.

VG: Murray Street is where you have your studio, right by the World Trade Center site. Was 9/11 an important factor in the record?

TM: We were working on it beforehand, but it had a lot of resonance for us, working creatively in an environment that had been [destroyed].

KG: It was strange to go down there to work and be huddled in that studio, and there was nothing, just these empty buildings all around. But it's comforting that when something like that happens, you can still feel good about your work.

TM: Concurrent with us making this record, they would dig up the street, then they would patch it; then they would dig it up again and they would patch it. They kept changing and rearranging conduits of water and electricity. To me, it was like they were working on their own record. [laughs]

KG: And we were also recording a soundtrack for a French movie, Demonlover, by Olivier Assayas. He wanted us to do a lot of sound and noise to run parallel with his narrative.

TM: So we put the mikes out the window. When you see Demonlover, you're going to literally hear Murray Street.

VG: That's really rock musique concrete!

TM: We do a lot of musical work outside of Sonic Youth, obviously. We had been living in downtown New York since 1977. Back then bands existed as an interdisciplinary kind of activity with filmmakers and visual artists, and that certainly came out of Andy Warhol's world.

VG: What made New York great back then?

TM: I remember living here in the '70s, on 13th Street and Avenue A. There was a lot of filth and grime then. Homeless people were sleeping in the street. It was such a zone of literal lawlessness! But you could live on the cheap. It was a totally great breeding ground for anybody who could survive as a creative person.

VG: What about now?

KG: I think the music scene is still very uncommercial and vital. But the art world has certainly changed, because it's always been aligned, or evolved with, real estate in some way. It's very hard to find anyone doing really interesting experimental stuff in the art world today.

TM: It's not that solid a theory, but in the late '60s and early '70s you really had this divided line in the culture where youth was radical and adults were square. But now there are radical adults, from Neil Young to Yoko Ono. That's what the song "Radical Adults Lick Godhead Style" is about. Radical youth culture is huge but completely hidden from the mainstream. There is another demographic that is an alternate to MTV, which is totally corny and square. And it's really exciting to me, because I love all these great new bands like Lightning Bolt, Black Dice, Erase Errata and Quixotic.

VG: And you still feed off that energy. After 20 years. what keeps the group fresh?

KG: It's fun to sing when Thurston writes for my point of view. It really fools people.

TM: I like writing lyrics for Kim. Sometimes I write as if I was Bush Tetras' singer Pat Place in 1978. A lot of their lyrics were "No-no, no-no-no," this kind of pop nihilism thing. It had a real effect on me as an 18-year-old. There's always this image I have of Pat Place playing live. All she played was slide, grrwwwhhhii, grrwwhhiii, on this guitar. With this ripped crotch, and she had blue panties on--it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen.

KG: You have a good memory.

TM: It was a striking image. It burned itself into my brain.

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