Happy 70th Birthday Lee Ranaldo!

Celebrating 70th birthday of Sonic Youth co-founder Lee Ranaldo with a few old faves performed with his pals in Yo La Tengo. 

90s Nostalgia: The Action Swingers

Here's a few clips of the Action Swingers at various stages fronted by singer/guitarist Ned Hayden with Bob Bert and many others. 

Project Nowhere feat. Lee Ranaldo & Leah Singer @ St. Anne's Parish, Friday

Sonic Youth guitar slinger Lee Ranaldo is joined by Leah Singer headlining this year's Project Nowhere on Friday night.

Project Nowhere (October 3-5)

Wavelength is excited to be a part of the second year of Project Nowhere, a community-led event featuring underground legends, modern vanguards and exciting up-and-coming talent from Toronto and beyond. Different venues in Toronto’s west end will be taking part in this multi-dimensional music experience, hosting artist showcases over the 3-day festival. 

This year, Wavelength will be co-presenting two nights of exciting programming at St. Anne’s Parish and Lower Hall. Night 1 will feature an immersive sound and visual performance by Leah Singer + Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth) presenting Contre Jour, Hamilton shoegazers Zoon, and experimental trio Yoo Doo Right. Night 2 will feature Slim Twig mastermind Max Turnbull’s side project Badge Époque Ensemble, along with fuzzed-out guitar rocker Sam Jr. and baroque psychedelic outfit The Royal Family. Visuals both nights by The Oscillitarium. Read an interview with Lee Ranaldo & Leah Singer right here and check out a Contre Jour performance in Spain from 2022 along with Lee's guided tour of  his gear below. 

Project Nowhere & Wavelength: Night 1 

Friday (October 4) @ St. Anne’s Parish Hall (651 Dufferin St)

10:30 – Leah Singer + Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth) presenting Contre Jour

9:30 – Zoon

8:30 – Yoo Doo Right

Doors 8pm 

Tickets: $38.13 advance (including taxes and fees) available from DICE.FM right here.  

Project Nowhere & Wavelength: Night 2 

Saturday (October 5) @ St. Anne’s Parish Hall (651 Dufferin St)

10:30 – Badge Époque Ensemble

9:30 – Sam Jr.

8:30 – The Royal Family

Doors 8pm 

Tickets: $26.49 advance (including taxes and fees) available from DICE.FM right here.  

Martin Bisi's Sound & Chaos doc screens @ Collective Arts, Saturday

The screening of the Sound & Chaos doc will be followed by performances of the Martin Bisi Collective and Crying High. Starts at 7:30pm. 

Here's the scoop...

Martin Bisi presents the Canadian premiere screening of Sound And Chaos: The Story Of BC Studio, a feature-length documentary about his Brooklyn recording space at Collective Arts Toronto (148 Markham St) on Saturday (September 14) at 7:30 pm. There'll be a Q&A with the director followed by performances by the Martin Bisi Collective and Toronto band, Crying High. Get tickets right here. 

Martin Bisi is an original No Wave and Post-Punk producer from New York City who has been part of it's musical history for the past four decades. Bisi made landmark recordings by Brian Eno (On Land), Sonic Youth, Swans, Unsane, Lydia Lunch, John Zorn, Africa Bambaataa, JG Thirlwell/Foetus, Cop Shoot Cop, Herbie Hancock's "Rockit", Helmet, Live Skull, White Hills, Dresden Dolls and countless others.

For over 40 years, Martin Bisi has recorded music from his studio in Brooklyn's Gowanus neighborhood. After a chance New York encounter, the studio was founded with money from Brian Eno, who subsequently worked on the album On Land there.

Working with Bill Laswell and the band Material, Bisi recorded Herbie Hancock's hit Rockit in this underground space. This was the first mainstream, popular song to feature a DJ and a turntable, utilizing "scratching". Following that success, Bisi worked with many other influential musicians there, including Sonic Youth, Swans, Angels of Light, John Zorn, Foetus and the Dresden Dolls. He has recorded across many genres, from experimental music, to hip hop and indie rock in the old factory building by the contaminated Gowanus Canal.

However, the future of the recording studio is in question as it is being squeezed in by the encroaching gentrification of the neighborhood. A new, massive Whole Foods supermarket across the street, is the latest addition to this once out-of-the-way area that Bisi fears will increase property values to the point of pushing out long-time renters and artists like himself.

The documentary includes interviews with musicians such as Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth, Michael Gira of Swans, Brian Viglione of the Dresden Dolls, Bob Bert, who played on Sonic Youth's Bad Moon Rising, Bill Laswell of Material, JG Thirlwell aka Foetus, Grand Mixer DXT and Michael Holman of Gray (with Jean-Michel Basquiat) and creator of famed 1984 hip-hop TV pilot Graffiti Rock. 

Watch a clip from the film below. 

Thurston Moore and Sonic Youth pals host a Walls Have Ears listening party, Thursday

Members of Sonic Youth are having a free online listening party for their 1986 live recording Walls Have Ears. RSVP below. 

Here's the scoop...

Join hosts Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo and Steve Shelley for a free listening party on Thursday, February 8th at 2:30pm Eastern to celebrate Walls Have Ears. Including an advance listen to the full album and chat with the artists about Sonic Youth and this legendary live release. RSVP right here. 

• WALLS HAVE EARS •

Sonic Youth presents Walls Have Ears – the legendary 2xLP bootleg compilation of their ripping 1985 UK performances, held up passionately as a fan favorite since its original unsanctioned release in 1986, ‘Walls Have Ears’ is finally reclaimed, remastered and officially released by the band for the first time in 38 years. 

Considered by the band at the time as a transgression of trust and control and an ensuing thorn in their side that continued to forge a life of its own decade after decade on the bootleg market, ‘Walls Have Ears’ has finally been embraced and presented by the band as the fascinating and exhilarating document that it is: Sonic Youth in a state of incendiary mania, violently yet artfully shedding the skins of their first incarnation and developing vision and solidifying the band lineup and sound that would be central to the rest of their 3 decade career. 

Raw, jagged and going for it full out; experience ‘Walls Have Ears’ on 2xLP, including a deluxe edition and colored vinyl, CD, Cassette and Digital February 9th on Goofin.’ 

Pre-order a copy of Sonic Youth's Walls Have Ears via Bandcamp right here. Have a listen below. 

Official release of Sonic Youth bootleg Walls Have Ears 2LP due February 9th!

Originally issued in 1986, the brilliant Walls Have Ears boot captures Sonic Youth in action at their best before it all went wrong. 

Here's the scoop...

Culled from three 1985 gigs in the UK during a transitional and transcendent time in the band’s story, Sonic Youth’s ‘Walls Have Ears’ appeared as a 2LP set in 1986, not just a live album but an artful tapestry full of live experimentation with songs, between-song tape segues, darkness, humor and audio verité on par with elements of side B of ‘Master Dik’ to come later. With a bit of complexity to the situation of the release itself. Deleted as quickly as it appeared, it’s now issued for the first time officially under the band’s auspices.

The ’85 shows were the second time the band appeared on British soil, picking up on a newfound high profile in the press after their 1983 London debut supporting SPK and Danielle Dax. That particular gig, while admittedly a technically-challenged, volumatically room-clearing one for the band, nonetheless wowed music scribes in attendance. This anarchic set cast the New Yorkers in a bit of an exotic light, Brits now getting juiced to the mythos of the emerging guitar-slinging American independent underground; an art/punk band from NYC sporting casual attitudes and tees sporting Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, and Prince made some good copy on top of their bludgeoning stage appearance. For Brits, Sonic Youth repped an all new avenue apart from the usual 4AD/Rough Trade/Some Bizarre hold on the scene, and were embraced. After a mostly dormant 1984, the band then established a new evolution within themselves via ‘Bad Moon Rising’ and found a home stateside on Homestead. In Britain, SY found its keyhole to the all-encompassing (even on an indie standpoint) music biz via Paul Smith, who was wowed by a cassette passed to him by Lydia Lunch. A promoter and label liaison who had forged many connections locally working for the likes of EMI and Cabaret Voltaire’s Doublevision label, Smith ultimately founded his own imprint Blast First to take on ‘Bad Moon Rising’ and evangelized the band with P.T. Barnum-esque gusto, eventually acting as a strong portal for UK footing for others of the American underground (Big Black, Butthole Surfers, Dinosaur Jr.). Blast First continued to act as an overseas diplomatic envoy for Sonic Youth through their SST years as well as issuing their classic 1988 Daydream Nation outside the USA. But true to Barnum, Smith’s injection into the band’s creative sphere as a sort of de facto manager type was somewhat in guerilla mode, and the Smith-produced ‘bootleg’ of their ’85 UK gigs surfaced much to everyone’s surprise, just before EVOL, their SST debut, was to be released. It turned out to be a marker of the group’s dissatisfaction that ultimately led to the band and Smith parting ways after Daydream.

In this 2LP set brimming with primitive classics like “The Burning Spear”, “I Love Her All The Time”, “Death Valley 69” and “I’m Insane” (uncredited on sleeve), segues and live guitar changes ooze together threaded by Madonna tapes and vocal loops off the board (somewhat a necessity for distraction until the band had a full fledged stage crew to prepare guitars). Claude Bessy (French punk raconteur who moved to LA for a period to cofound Slash Magazine and notoriously appeared in the Penelope Spheeris ‘Decline of Western Civilization’ documentary) humorously MC’s their intro to a October 30th ULU London gig with a lob at the indie label zeitgeist: vocally detailing how Rough Trade had come down on distributing the “Flower” 12” for sporting a xeroxed, nude female on the cover. The message was that music was reality, not manufactured subcultures, and Sonic Youth was there to present Britain with a healthy dose of it. The first two sides of ‘Walls’ are massive, cavernous, with newly-drafted drummer Steve Shelley in tow taking on past tunes and unveiling “Expressway To Yr Skull” in glorious form. They tear it up especially on one trash-fi excerpt of “Blood On Brighton Beach” (actually “Making the Nature Scene”) from a legendary outdoor gig November 8th where Moore, Gordon and Ranaldo’s guitars treble-blast dissonant shockwaves over the black-stoned beach of Quadrophenia fame.

The record’s second slab spotlights an April 1985 pre-Shelley gig supporting Nick Cave at London’s Hammersmith Palais and was one of the final appearances live of Bob Bert, again featuring some molten takes on “Brother James”, “Kill Yr Idols”, “Flower” (Iisted as “The Word (E.V.O.L.)”), “Ghost Bitch” and others. The emergence of the Jesus and Mary Chain in the world gave Brit scribes a lazy and easy parallel, addressed here with a wink with the inclusion of “Speed JAMC”, another offstage tape interlude playfully scrolling through one of that band’s songs at fast-forward. In six more years the continual evolution of Sonic Youth would find them darlings of The Reading Festival, on tour with Nirvana in tow and continuing to smash down walls, but this document remains an essential representation of some lean and mean years of the quartet’s throttling march out into the world.

– Brian Turner

Watch a Walls Have Ears trailer clip from 1985 followed by the recording. 

Thurston Moore's Sonic Life memoir due October 24

Thurston Moore tells the Sonic Youth origin story of how he got from Connecticut to Manhattan's East Village in Sonic Life. 

Here's the scoop...

From the founding member of Sonic Youth, a passionate memoir tracing the author’s life and art—from his teen years as a music obsessive in small-town Connecticut, to the formation of his legendary rock group, to thirty years of creation, experimentation, and wonder

Thurston Moore moved to Manhattan’s East Village in 1978 with a yearning for music.  He wanted to be immersed in downtown New York’s sights and sounds—the feral energy of its nightclubs, the angular roar of its bands, the magnetic personalities within its orbit.  But more than anything, he wanted to make music—to create indelible sounds that would move, provoke, and inspire.

His dream came to life in 1981 with the formation of Sonic Youth, a band Moore cofounded with Kim Gordon and Lee Ranaldo.  Sonic Youth became a fixture in New York’s burgeoning No Wave scene—an avant-garde collision of art and sound, poetry and punk.  The band would evolve from critical darlings to commercial heavyweights, headlining festivals around the globe while helping introduce listeners to such artists as Nirvana, Hole, and Pavement, and playing alongside such icons as Neil Young and Iggy Pop.  Through it all, Moore maintained an unwavering love of music: the new, the unheralded, the challenging, the irresistible.

In the spirit of Just Kids, Sonic Life offers a window into the trajectory of a celebrated artist and a tribute to an era of explosive creativity.  It presents a firsthand account of New York in a defining cultural moment, a history of alternative rock as it was birthed and came to dominate airwaves, and a love letter to music, whatever the form.  This is a story for anyone who has ever felt touched by sound—who knows the way the right song at the right moment can change the course of a life.

Get a copy of Thurston Moore's Sonic Life from Penguin Random House right here. Read Thurston's instagram announcement for Sonic Life followed by a recent interview with Daniel Belo on a sunny beach in Portugal below. 

Happy Birthday Bob Bert!

Check out Bob's entertaining chat with Lydia Lunch for The Lydian Spin podcast and another with Rev. Derek Moody.

LINK 

PKM Bob Bert: The View From Behind The Drum Kit

Happy Birthday Bob Bert!

Celebrating the birthday of drummer/photographer and journalist Bob Bert with "The Trip"

LINKS
Louder Than War: Bob Bert – In depth interview with New York legend

Before They Were Famous: Chris Cohen

More than a decade prior to hooking up with Deerhoof, Chris Cohen starred in David Markey's video for "Cinderella's Big Score" by Sonic Youth. 

Lee Ranaldo joins Greek art rockers The Callas for "Trouble and Desire"

The Callas' new album Trouble and Desire is out October 26 via Dirty Water Records – pre-order it right here.

Here's the scoop...
Sez Lee Ranaldo: "It’s been a pleasure for me to know and collaborate with The Callas on their new album Trouble and Desire. We met a few years ago and I’ve been drawn into their artistic world in Athens. I’m a fan of their visual art tapestries and their art studio/venue and I’ve been having a great time making music with these like-minded travelers. Our collaboration took off quickly and was such a natural fit – we speak the same language and the performances we’ve done together have been a total blast! I love the community of artists that they have gathered around them, and I hope we will do more collaborations in the future." Watch the clip for the album's title track below.

Hear Kim Gordon's new track "Murdered Out"

Kim Gordon's "Murdered Out" was cut with Warpaint drummer Stella Mozgawa & producer Justin Raisen. 

Black matte spray.

When I moved back to LA I noticed more and more cars painted with black matte spray, tinted windows, blackened logos, and black wheels. This was something I had occasionally seen in the past, part of low-rider car culture. A reclaiming of a corporate symbol of American success, The Car, from an outsider’s point of view. A statement-making rejection of the shiny brand new look, the idea of a new start, the promise of power, and the freedom on the open road. Like an option on a voting ballot, “none of the above.”

“Murdered Out,” as a look, is now creeping into mainstream culture as a design trend. A coffee brand. A clothing line. A nail polish color.

Black-on-black matte is the ultimate expression in digging out, getting rid of, purging the soul. Like a black hole, the supreme inward look, a culture collapsing in on itself, the outsider as an unwilling participant as the “It” look.

###

I met the uber talented Justin Raisen, the producer, offhandedly. He was working on a project with another artist and kept sending me tracks to listen to with the possibility of getting me to sing on one of them. When I learned I could make up my own lyrics, I was in. With the remaining bits of unused vocals, he started what would be “Murdered Out.” Stella Mozgawa (Warpaint) plays drums, based on the trashy drums that Justin first laid down. I went back and did more vocals and guitar and we mixed it…”Murdered Out” was such a great surprise! Looking forward to our next collaboration.

– Kim Gordon,  August 2016