music – Page 15 – Roy Christopher

October 7, 2009

Dossier: Brian Reitzell

So, I was watching the Kevin Spacey movie Shrink (2009) yesterday, and I couldn’t help but notice that the score sounded very similar to the one for Friday Night Lights (2004) that Explosions in the Sky did. I opened up my laptop and found out that the movie Shrink was scored by Brian Reitzell… type, type, type… enhance… type, type, type... who produced the Friday Night Lights soundtrack… and used to play drums for Redd Kross. He is also credited with coaxing Kevin Shields out of hiding to do work on the Lost in Translation (2003) soundtrack (subsequently reuniting My Bloody Valentine). Hmmm…

More typing and enhancing later and I learned that Brian Reitzell has been making badass film music for a decade now, not to mention providing the beats for one of my favorite early-90s pop bands. His unique approach to sound has abetted Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides (1999), Lost in Translation, and Marie Antoinette (2006), as well as Stranger Than Fiction (2006). He most recently — before Shrink — scored all of 30 Days of Night (2007), for which he built an instrument out of a potter’s wheel.

“I got a pottery wheel because I am obsessed with Doppler, things spinning around your head,” Reitzell told Chaos Control Digizine. “I took this black tube that I got at Home Depot and I affixed it around the pottery wheel. The pottery wheel looks like a turntable, it spins. This particular one cost me $800 so I was a little worried that I wasn’t going to be able to get it to work. But you can put 150 lbs of pressure on it, and it can extend from 0 to 280 RPMs, and you can control it with a foot pedal. So I suspended the tube with bungee cables affixed to cymbal stands, sort of around the circumference of the platter. And then I affixed a felt palette in the center of the pottery wheel using some rigging gear that cinematographers or grips use on film. The mallet would sort of rest on top of the tube, and the tube has ridges on it so when the mallet was spinning around, it would rub on those ridges and create this very eerie sound. The faster I would spin it, the higher the pitch would be. I shock-mounted microphones onto either side inside the tube, and lo and behold, I had the perfect doppler.”

Reitzell, along with Jellyfish alumni Roger Manning Jr. and Jason Faulkner, also scored a non-existant sequel to Logan’s Run (1976). Dubbed Logan’s Sanctuary, the soundtrack without a film was released by the late Emperor Norton Records in 2000, who’d also released The Virgin Suicides soundtrack. “The head of Emperor Norton asked me specifically to do that,” Reitzell explains. “It was his idea. He wanted me to do a real score to a fake movie. And that movie was to be the sequel to Logan’s Run. To do that, I enlisted my friend Roger Manning, who I’ve known for years. He played with Jellyfish, and was playing with Beck at the time. Roger and I set out to do this, but to do it I had to write a plot. So I sat down and wrote a storyline with the help of a friend, and then we started scoring scene by scene. Originally, we weren’t going to use our real names, it was going to be a hoax. But then when we turned it in, the record label was so happy with it that they wanted to exploit it.”

So, while I wait for the Shrink score to be released, I’ll be spinning Reitzell’s other soundtracks and listening to “The Lady in the Front Row” over and over. It’s good stuff.

——————

Here’s the video for TV Eyes’ “She’s a Study” [runtime: 4:52]. TV Eyes is/was (details are sketchy) Reitzell’s band with Roger Manning and Jason Falkner (ex-Jellyfish).

qgcbcLOwVLY

——————

Read the complete interview with Brian Reitzell at Chaos Control Digizine.

September 26, 2009

Weekly Good Stuff

Here is some stuff I’m digging for the week of September 26th, 2009:

1. Porcupine Tree The Incident
2. Southern Lord records (more specifically, Sunn O))), Boris [with Merzbow], Oren Ambarchi, Pelican, etc.)
3. This package:
Pretty package

4. A big pile of Daniel Menche CDs from Soleilmoon
5. UT library
6. Rediscovering Sub Rosa’s Subsonic series, including CDs by duos like Justin K. Broadrick and Andy Hawkins, Caspar Brotzmann and Page Hamilton, Bill Laswell and Nick Bullen, Lou Barlow and Rudi Trouve, et al.
7. My thrift-store copy of Dune (the very picture of “classic”):
Dune

8. Naked Raygun What Poor Gods We Do Make DVD
9. Mulholland Dr by David Lynch
10. Fez T-shirt by Polytron Corporation (the wait continues):

September 19, 2009

Grandmaster Roc Raida R.I.P.

Famous people have been passing with an alarming pace lately. It’s weird. It’s weirder when it’s someone you met or hung out with.

X-Men I’m not going to front: Roc Raida didn’t know me from anyone, but we did sit down and chat a couple of times. The first of those times was on July 27, 1997 at The Crocodile Café in Seattle. Just before the X-Men’s sound check (during which I took the photos here), I sat down in the Crocodile’s back bar with Rob Swift, Total Eclipse, Mista Sinista, and Roc Raida. I was wearing a Deep Concentration tour t-shirt that had a picture of Roc on the front. San Francisco’s Om Records had put out a compilation of Turntablists — including the X-Men — and the subsequent tour (made up of a rotating cast of beat jugglers and scratch masters) had come through Seattle the night before. As we settled in to chat and I turned on my tape recorder, Roc Raida was noticeably distracted. I asked my first question anyway, but he ignored it, saying, “I want that shirt.”

X-Men

Roc Raida worked with everyone from O.C. (on the classic Word…Life LP from 1994), Big Pun (R.I.P.), Big L (R.I.P.), and Immortal Technique to Linkin Park, Mike Patton, The X-Men/X-Ecutioners (of course), and, more recently, Busta Rhymes. He was known for his innovative body tricks and lightning-fast yet super precise scratch moves, and they won him countless DMC and ITF competitions. He was dubbed “Grandmaster” by the O. G. Grandmaster himself, Grandmaster Flash. He was, simply put, one of the best doing it.

My thoughts go out to his family, friends, and all who knew him. Hip-hop and the world have suffered a great loss today.

Rest in peace, Anthony Williams.

———-

Here’s Roc Raida’s winning routine from DMC 1995 [runtime: 6:20]:

ZbVKKJvJltY

September 18, 2009

The Lies Are All True: Alien Workshop’s Mind Field

In the late 80s and early 90s, skateboarding started a transition from a five-company economy to an independently-owned, skateboarder-run, hundred-company industry. All of the sudden everyone had a company, a brand, a team, a video. Most of them are long-gone, but for a few years there, it was difficult to keep up (Foundation’s Tod Swank tells the story best).

Alien Workshop was one of the original skateboard companies to emerge from the cacophony of skateboarding’s new-found independence, and for twenty years hence they’ve maintained a uniqueness that sets them apart from the changing trends of the SoCalcentric skateboard industry at large. This uniqueness manifests itself in all aspects of their existence. Their team and their videos are no exception.

Mind Field (2009) is a reminder of everything Alien Workshop stands for, a reminder less like a post-it note and more like an atomic bomb. While one might describe Alien Workshop films as “artsy,” it never gets in the way of the skateboarding. Besides, artful clips of J. Mascis noodling around at home on his guitar, writhing plastic robot bugs, twisting weathervanes, high roaming clouds, interesting buildings, and flocking birds all ultimately coalesce into what Alien Workshop — and indeed skateboarding — is all about: individual artistic expression.

And what about the skateboarding? Well, Omar Salazar’s part, which emerges seamlessly from the clips of him strumming along with Mascis, is pure four-wheel fun. Whether it’s the over-vert full-pipe 50-50 or his huge hippie leaps, Omar just looks like he’s completely enjoying himself the whole damn time. It’s infectious.

Arto Saari’s part (my favorite here — embedded below) proves he can combine tech with gnar like no one else this side of Chris Cole. He peppers his part with subtle flips and shoves here and there without a single slippage in style or steez — and most of his tricks are big-man burly. Do not sleep on the boy.

Self-styled enigma Jason Dill keeps skateboarding weird and wild at the same time. His parts in Feedback (1999) and Photosynthesis (2000) are two of my most-watched, and his part here is hereby added to the pre-session playlist.

One can’t help but think of the mighty Jason Jessee when watching Anthony Van Engelen’s part, but he also channels some old John Lucero (the tailslide to noseslide ledge switchers). He skates mean like the both of them used to, but his update is all AVE. Where others hesitate, Anthony just monster-trucks it.

All of the rumours
Keeping me grounded
I never said, I never said that they were
Completely unfounded — Morrissey

Heath Kirchart’s closing clip doesn’t just make me want to skateboard, it makes me want to put my head down and go hard for everything I’ve ever dreamt of doing. It takes more than talent to make top-notch street skating look this clean. From the opening BS 360 and FS allie-oop lien boosters (ten feet up?) to the motorcycle tow-in street-gap BS flip, Heath just slays everything in sight, and he does it all with style and smoothness not seen since Ethan Fowler’s heyday. Determination is evident, and his thanks list in the credits says it all (“Nobody.”).

Heath Kirchart in Mind Field

I don’t want to geek and gush much more, but let’s not forget the rest of the team. Grant Taylor kills is with big tricks and stamina to match. Steve Berra and Rob Dyrdek turn in short but impressive parts. Kalis keeps it gangster as usual. Dylan Rieder’s opening montage ollie impossible is the cleanest execution of that trick ever committed to video. His part — as well as those of Tyler Bledsoe, Jake Johnson, and Mikey Taylor — illustrate why The Workshop has one of the best teams out right now.

There’s plenty more to say — especially about the parts I just yadda-yadda’d — but the last thing I want to mention is the soundtrack. It’s mostly a solid mix of current Pitchfork-rock (Animal Collective, Battles, Elliott Smith, etc.) and individual style (Dyrdek’s Traffic, AVE’s Adolescents, Heath’s creepy Morrissey song, and you know Kalis skates to the Boom-Bap: “Boom Box” by Bullymouth). Aforementioned Workshop friend J. Mascis and his skate-video stalwarts Dinosaur Jr. contribute several songs (“A Little Ethnic Song” and “Creepies,” and “Almost Ready,” “Grab It,” and “Crumble,” respectively), and original Workshop pro Duane Pitre contributes two pieces (“Music For Microtonal Guitar And Mallets” and “Study For ‘Sun AM'”). The Workshop is a family.

Skateboarding is about pushing yourself and having fun with your friends. Mind Field may lean a little more on the former, but it’s still fun. If nothing else, it proves that Alien Workshop and solid skateboarding are here to stay.

———–

Here’s Arto Saari’s part in Mind Field [runtime: 3:57]. The hyped kinked rails are only a fraction of the story.

_ySqHiiCF5I

September 10, 2009

Russian Circles in DIG BMX

My recent feature on Russian Circles for DIG BMX Magazine has hit the stands. It’s in issue #72, if you’re interested. Also be on the lookout for their new record, Geneva (Suicide Squeaze), which hits the stores and sites on October 20th.

The full text from DIG is as follows:

The subgenre of instrumental post-rock has grown into its own over the last several years, and many of the bands emerging to represent the subgenre sound remarkably similar. The inherent irony of classification is that even as the category grows (i.e., the more bands there are that sound enough alike to lump together), the harder it gets to stand out (i.e., to be considered a part of the group, but to distinguish your work from the rest of that group). As My friend Max Bristol might say, Explosions in the Sky is a band — not a genre.

“I suppose it means there are quite a few more reference points,” says Brian Cook, who’s also done time in Botch and These Arms Are Snakes, “both for us as artists and for our audience. It means that we’re somewhat self-aware of what we do, and for the audience it may be tempting to weigh the merits of what we do against other bands and artists instead of judging it on its own terms.” Russian Circles stand out from the crowding in with sheer brut force. They are a power trio with the emphasis on power. Where other groups’ slow builds often leave one dissatisfied with the release, these guys drop it like it’s too heavy. They can simmer with the slowest of boilers and riff it up with the most metalest. It’s a difference difficult to describe but easy to hear, leaving many writers — myself included — sounding stupid.

At the time of this writing, Mike Sullivan (guitar), Brian Cook (bass), and Dave Turncrantz (drums) were just finishing up in the studio with Brandon Curtis (of Secret Machines) behind the boards, working on a follow-up to last year’s massive and majestic Station (Suicide Squeeze). “We were less concerned with perfect takes and more concerned with perfect tones,” Cook says of their studio time. “We switched up a lot of ideas as we were recording and we were less concerned with making sure we could replicate the material live as we were with making a compelling album. both Enter (Flameshovel, 2006) and Station were pretty faithful to how we play live, so we felt we could get away with doing an album where we elaborate on the material a bit more.” Apparently, the new album will incorporate strings and brass, as well as a howling dog — none of which they’re planning to take on tour.

“The new album is a bit longer than we had planned,” Cook continues, “but all the material made sense together. We don’t want to overstay our welcome, so we feel that six or seven songs is about the extent of material people can put up with in one sitting.” Of course, six or seven songs, an EP for most bands, for Russian Circles is an epic, album-length amount of time. Knowingly, Cook adds, “We’ll take our chances that our ADD-afflicted culture can put up with our self-indulgence.”

Upon seeing me ride my bike one day, jumping curbs and such, a friend of mine commented that while I was out learning to ride BMX, he must’ve been in his room learning to play his guitar. The same might be said of Cook. “Once upon a time,” he says, “my friend was packing me on the handlebars of his BMX. He went off a really big curb and my foot slid in between the spokes of the wheel. I was barefoot. I broke eight of the spokes with my foot and flew headfirst into the asphalt. Remarkably, I didn’t break anything, but that was the last time I’ve been on a BMX.”

So, no more bikes for Russian Circles, but they are planning to thin out the instrumental post-rock competition. “On a side note,” Cook concludes, “I am starting a ballot initiative that would require people to apply for a license before they can buy a delay pedal. That should help stymie the popularity of this brand of music.”

August 19, 2009

Slayer: Show No Mercy

There is no other metal band that compares to Slayer. No other band has been together as long, destroyed as much stuff, ripped as hard, nor kept their collective foot so heavy on the pedal. Slayer has never let up. Ever.

I finally got to see them wreck shit live on stage at the Mayhem Festival on August 14th in San Antonio, Texas. Thanks to Matt and Nate Bailie, whom I’ve known since the ninth grade, I can now die happy. The set list included “Psychopathy Red” from their forthcoming World Painted Blood record, but also featured highlights from their nearly three decades of chaos, including “War Ensemble,” “Dead Skin Mask,” “Mandatory Suicide,” “Born of Fire,” “Ghosts of War,” “South of Heaven,” “Angel of Death,” “Raining Blood” and “Hell Awaits.”

Here are some of the photos that Jessy and I took from the seething floor of the arena.

SLAYER

Tom

Devil Sign

If you had to sum it up… That probably does it.

Flaming Slayer eagle

Hell Awaits

Thanks again to Matt and Nate for getting us there and getting us in.

August 4, 2009

The Clutter of Pop

In the mid-1990s my friend Dave Allen published a zine called “The Clutter of Pop” (followed by a record of the same name). In one of them he wrote an essay about the glut of entertainment media choking our attention spans. I’ve long since lost the zine and I can barely remember Dave’s insights, but I do keep thinking about it in light of the ever increasing glut since its publication.

It is often said that we only use ten percent of our brains. While that’s not exactly true, we often do only use about ten percent of its capacity at any given time. Another way to look at it is as a giant sieve. When we’re awake and alert, our brains are filtering out a vast majority of the stimuli around us. Don’t check my math, but think of it as only ten percent of the world getting in. Contrast that idea to idea that when we’re asleep and dreaming, the filters are only partially on or completely off. This makes using less of your brain — or stimulating less of it — not only an advantage, but a necessity to your sanity.

As amazing as the human brain is, it still has plenty of limitations. Some of its limitations are what have created the aforementioned glut. We externalize our knowledge and the processing thereof to free up our internal bandwidth. Hieroglyphs, language, books, keyboards, archives, databases, cassette tapes, websites, and iPods are all products of our mental offloading. We’ve emptied our heads so much that now it’s difficult to find a signal among the noise. The digital shift from bits to atoms only exacerbates the issue, problematizing the filtering process in altogether new ways.

For instance, with the impending demise of the printed page the debate regarding digital books is in full swing, following closely after that of the compact disc. Though the nature of reading the printed word and listening to music lend themselves to digitization in very different ways, there is a major overlooked similarity in the transition: The organizing principles of both are being irrevocably reconfigured.

What is a book but an organizing principle? What is an organizing principle but a filtering device? The book works for printed language just as the album does for recorded music: it filters and organizes it in a meaningful way for mental consumption. As David Weinberger pointed out, analog media like books and albums filter first, whereas digital media like websites and MP3s filter last. That is, by the time you read a book it’s been through a thorough rigorous organizing, writing, editing, proofreading, and design process. When you run a search on Google or Wikipedia, what you end up reading is filtered and organized on the fly as you request it (Wikipedia actually has an ongoing organizing process, and Facebook and Twitter are filtering digital information in still new and different ways).

None of this filtering and reorganizing means that the book as we know it is going to go away anytime soon. What all of this means is that some things that were never meant to be books will now have a place to be themselves. Let’s face it, just as some records only have one good song, some books would be better off as blogs.

Time is the one truly finite resource. If we are to optimize it, we need better filters and better organizing principles. Instead of slogging through a whole book on a topic that would’ve just as well made a decent magazine piece, we’ll read it as it develops on the author’s blog. When we want to get lost in some convoluted alternate reality, we can still read a thousand-page Thomas Pynchon novel on good ol’ paper (his newest is out today and is roughly half that long).

These changes change the way we think. They literally change our minds. With more and more choices for our filtering pleasure, I believe it’s mostly for the better.

July 17, 2009

A New Level

The old Level Magazine was one of those titles that put the Life in “lifestyle” magazine — and it’s back online starting today! Editor/publisher/leader Chris Noble invited me to contribute, so I’ll be posting bits over there on a regular.

Here’s the history of the magazine direct from Chris:

In 1999, the magazine Level was born. Brothers Mark and Chris Noble, publishers of a BMX magazine and a core MTB magazine, got bored of going into their local newsagent and seeing nothing on the lifestyle shelves for them or their like. The US had produced Grand Royal, a happy-go-lucky hobby, more or less, of The Beastie Boys, and Mark and Chris felt that there was a gap in the UK market for something along those lines.

How hard could it be?

After several months of masterminding, almost-disastrous back-and-forth wrangling with the bureaucracy of WH Smith (the main wholesaler/retailers in the UK), designing and redesigning and getting editor Chris Quigley on board, Level quietly appeared on magazine shelves across the UK and beyond.

With the contributions of various luminaries—some of whom grace these web pages—and a remit of “All Things Good”, Level went down well. Unhindered by strict genres or target niches, it really did fill a gap. The talk was underground but very complimentary. Issue 01 picked up the UK’s inaugural Magazine Design Awards’ “Best Designed Consumer Magazine” prize.

From then on, the only way was, well, neither up nor down. The high-budget, low-moral advertising vultures of the London-based competition had a stranglehold on the ad spends of the rich and famous brands. Despite an increase in promotional spend and advertising sales strategy, Level, without a desire to sell its soul, found its pages to be a hard sell. Only the most discerning of brands supported the magazine, and it just wasn’t enough. The brakes came on in November 2000, after only eleven issues.

But it’s always been there. Gnawing away in the back of our minds, especially that of publisher/designer Chris Noble. The brothers parted ways with the publishing company at the end of 2006, but Chris saw to it that he took Level with him.

Since then, Chris has had more time to think about bringing the magazine back in one way or another, and during the first half of 2009, he dove head-first into the world of web code which he had so far largely managed to avoid.

And the rest is browser history.

Many thanks to Chris Noble. I am damn proud to be a part of the new era of Level.

Check it out.

July 15, 2009

Blanks for the Memories

“The tape cassette is a liberating force…” proclaimed Malcolm McLaren thirty years ago. “Taping has produced a new lifestyle.” Cassettes made recording and customization possible. Cassette players made listening on the go possible.

Tom Waits by iri5

More than any other subset of culture, youth culture was created — and is enabled — by technology. The telephone supposedly created the Teenager, and even if it didn’t, those formative years of the socialization process wouldn’t be the same without the dialtone (even metaphorically), and for my generation, the same could be said for the cassette tape.

“Home taping is killing music.” It sounds funny now, but the British Phonographic Industry — sister of the RIAA — was incensed. Their attitude was that every blank tape sold was a record stolen. “BPI says that home taping costs the industry £228 billion a year in lost revenue,” McLaren said in 1979, “so they’re not happy that Bow Wow Wow have already reached No. 25 on the singles chart… ” The home-taping controversy was handcrafted for McLaren. He was managing Bow Wow Wow who had a hit with a song celebrating home-taping called “C-30! C-60! C-90! Go!” “In fact,” adds McLaren, “it’s the classic story of the 80s. It’s about a girl who finds it cheaper and easier to tape her favorite discs off the radio… which is why the record companies are so petrified.”

“The other big advantage of cassettes, of course, were that they were recordable,” elaborates Steven Levy in a recent Gizmodo piece celebrating the thirty-year anniversary of the Walkman.

You’d buy blank 90-minute cassettes (chrome high bias, if you were an audio nut) and tape one album on each side. (Since most records were shorter than 45 minutes, you’d grab a song or two from another album to avoid a long dead spot before the tape reversed.) And you’d borrow albums from friends and tape your own. You could also tape from other cassettes, but the quality degraded each time you made a copy made from a copy. It was like an organic form of DRM. Everybody had a box with hand-labeled cassettes and before you went on a car trip you’d dig in the box to find the tunes that would soundtrack your journey.

Tape The magnetic tape was as much a part of the journey as the road. The portability and recordability of cassettes, which all sounds so very labor intensive now, were the precursor to today’s MP3s and iPods. Just as the book individualized the exchange of stories and information, the cassette tape and its attendant technologies individualized music listening.

Seeing the iconic cassette tapes on the shirts of the teens these days, like some technological Che Guevera, confirms Heraclitus’s conjecture that generations cycle on thirty-year intervals. You’re not likely to see the same thing come of the compact disc (it’s more of a RuPaul than a Che), so here’s to the cassette tape, the 3.5″ disc of the stereo.

[Tom Waits cassette art by iri5]

June 28, 2009

The Eternal Sonic Youth

Sonic Youth is not a band. It is an institution. Where other bands who manage to stay together for over a quarter of a century (or much less) become legacy bands (i.e., bands that are only known and revered for a part of their careers long past), Sonic Youth continue to push themselves and their fans into new and exciting territory with every passing year together. Lately there’s plenty of proof. In addition to a new record and a recent movie (both discussed below), there’s also David Browne’s Goodbye 20th Century (Da Capo, 2008), Matthew Stearns’ 33 1/3 book on Daydream Nation (Continuum, 2007), and a forthcoming tour (I’ll be seeing them [again] on July 12th at Sloss Furnaces in Birmingham, Alabama).

Sonic Youth: The Eternal Their latest dozen songs, The Eternal (Matador, 2009) — their first for Matador after a long stint with Geffen — is no exception to the experimentation and consistent limit-pushing. Their sound has always been thick, but the official addition of Marc Ibold (ex-Pavement, Free Kitten), who’s toured with them for the past few years, adds yet another layer, and legendary producer John Agnello (Jawbox, Fugazi, et al.) assisted them in the studio this time. It’s not all walls though. “Antenna” is alternately mellow and melodic, sparse and jagged, driving and droney. “Thunderclap for Bobby Pyn” indulges Thurston’s punk fetishes before devolving into his signature screech. His and Kim’s disembodied vocals on “Anti-Orgasm” also hearken back to earlier, less tuneful times. Other songs, “Leaky Lifeboat (For Gregory Corso)” and “Calming the Snake” for instance, recall “Candle” and “Kissability,” respectively, from Daydream Nation (Blast First, 1988). The Eternal (named after the Joy Division song?) is not the full-on energetic onslaught of that record or 2006’s Rather Ripped, but it does prove that Sonic Youth is still ripe with noisily good ideas.

Sonic Youth: Sleeping Nights Awake

Named after a line from the Sonic Youth song “Tom Violence” from EVOL (Blast First, 1986), Sleeping Nights Awake is a documentary/concert film crowdsourced to a group of Reno high school students through the non-profit Project Moonshine. Ali Alonso, Noah Conrath, Danielle Hauser, Charlie Hayes, Ben Kolton, Allana Noyes, and Nathan Lower were given three digital video cameras (Panasonic AG-DVC30s), training, and told to film the event. They ended up with ten songs from the July 4th, 2006 show in Reno and plenty of backstage, pre- and post-show banter from the band.

The students shot fifteen hours of black-and-white footage, and Project Moonshine founder Michael Albright edited it into the 86-minute Sleeping Nights Awake. I caught it at The Alamo Drafthouse in downtown Austin, Texas, and the results are stunning, if a bit unevenly paced. The ten songs captured are separated by backstage chatter, stalling the film’s momentum each time it really gets rolling. Chunking the songs and the candid bits more might have solved this minor flaw. Otherwise, the film is raw like a Sonic Youth film should be and beautiful like much of the noise they make. It also humanizes the members in a way that’s never been done. Even the New Kid Marc Ibold, and drummer Steve Shelley, who’s on camera backstage for a grand total of about five seconds, come across as personable members of the Sonic Youth family. None of that is to say that the members of Sonic Youth ever seemed inhuman, aforementioned “disembodied vocals” notwithstanding. It is to say that Sleeping Nights Awake does a damn good job of showing their many dimensions.

So, Sonic Youth might be ironically monikered these days, but their age doesn’t show in the youthful energy of their music and experimentation — shown in spades on The Eternal and Sleeping Nights Awake.

———–

Here’s the trailer for Sleeping Nights Awake [runtime: 3:50]:

psr-lSFCmZA