Sonic Youth Guitarist Lee Ranaldo Launches Cutting-Edge Seasons for Hallwalls, Big Orbit Gallery
by Craig Reynolds
Sonic Youth's 1999 CD Goodbye Twentieth Century is one of the most intriguing, and yet criminally overlooked, masterpieces of recent rock-n-roll, in no small part because it consists entirely of performances of avant-garde classics by composers like Cage, Maciunus, Oliveros, et al.
The album sounds as abrasive and raw as the toughest punk, but inaugurates the formal marriage of radical rock and modern new music, which is popularly maligned as antithetical to the great and noble institution that is . . . "Rock."
Well, few bands rock as hard, with as much attitude, as Sonic Youth. And in one perfectly executed shot, the group managed to level the playing field, deftly locating rock music and the classical avant-garde within a larger cultural project that its hipster fanbase--and self-appointed gaurdians of the rock-n-roll faith--would have to admit their ages to reject. In summing up a century, the band established a bedrock non-aesthetic (everything-is-possible-on-the-edge) on which to found the next 100 years’ innovations.
To be sure, current fulfillment of Goodbye Twenteith Century’s promises lies not in Sonic Youth’s major label releases, but in individual members’ seemingly infinite collaborations with all-stars from the downtown NYC scene, as well as the international fringe.
On Friday, September 7, Hallwalls and Big Orbit Gallery join forces to bring one such project to The Tralf: The Lee Ranaldo Trio, featuring Sonic Youth guitarist Ranaldo, free jazz drummer and long-time collaborator William Hooker and Canadian reedsman Glenn Hall. Cost is $10 advance, $12 at the door. The show starts at 8pm.
For rock fans wondering what went wrong, new music heads seeking cutting edge free improv and anybody else with even a hint of musical curiosity left in them, I assure you that this show is an absolute goldmine. Last year, I caught a double bill of The Kim Gordon Trio and a blistering collaboration featuring Sonic Youth’s other guitarist Thurston Moore, Nels Cline and Zeena Parkins at NYC’s Tonic. The next night’s roster at The Cooler across town included a repeat performance by Moore and Co. followed by a trio consisting of Ranaldo, Christian Marclay and Shelley Hirsch.
Of all the amazing sets I saw that weekend, Ranaldo’s was by far the most mind-blowing (a giant surprise considering how comfortably he lingers in the shadows cast by his foxy SY bandmates Gordon and Moore). Leaping around the stage in fragmented guitar overdrive, scratching his instrument against the Cooler’s low-beamed ceilings, his fingers sliding up and down the fretboard like a 13-year old kid lost in air guitar abandon (the strings stuffed with records plucked from Marclay’s turntables), Lee absolutely burned.
Best of all, the performance wasn’t driven by bullshit gimmickry or over-the-top nonsensical theatrics for fans. Ranaldo’s playing revealed a new musical vocabulary informed by rock’s history of guitar shreddings, NYC art-rock bonfires and the stretched sonic palletes of free jazz and the classical avant-garde. To be sure, Sonic Youth rages similarly within the framework of deconstructed punk rock, but his side-project performances are unusually fecund in their total openness. No song, no melody, no attitude, no rules . . . total freedom.
By contrast, the Sonic Youth show I saw in Syracuse a few months later struck me as wonderful but wonderful the way The Who always are, no matter how old or silly they have become (or how much gold lamé John Entwistle forces us to endure).
Unencumbered by the mythof Sonic Youth, the absolute dexterity and stunning invention of Renaldo’s solo or side-project playing pushes rock to the breaking point and beyond, offering a total recallibration of how his instrument can and will be played, and music should and will be heard.
MORE MUSIC THIS FALL
Luckily, the edge doesn’t end at The Tralf this Friday. Between Hallwalls and Big Orbit, some kind of new music or avant-garde happening overtakes Buffalo almost every week through Thanksgiving.
Starting with Mathew Shipp and Rob Brown (the day after the Ranaldo show), Hallwalls has planned a stellar season of top-notch improvisers including Joe Fonda, George Schuller, Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, Assif Tsahar, Peter Koald, Hamid Drake, Leroy Jenkins and Charles Gayle, among others.
Reflecting Hallwalls’ bent toward free improv and experimental jazz, the program is another in a long string of steller lineups featuring some of the most exciting and internationally admired new music artists working today.
I had a chance to see Buffalo-born Gayle and Shipp on a double bill in Chicago on the fringes of the Jazz Fest last year, and Tsahar in NYC a few months earlier. Once again, I can hardly stop myself from bursting with praise for these performers and for Hallwalls for bringing them to Buffalo.
Strangely overlooked by those mourning the death of jazz locally, Hallwalls is the uncontested leader in cutting edge free improv in town, an energetic oasis of music for those unenecumbered by outdates notions of what jazz should be. If you’ve never been to a Hallwalls music event, close your eyes, point at the calendar at random and go. If you have open ears, you will not be disappointed.
Big Orbit, for its part, continues to scrape the avant-noise underground with its roster. The Phi Phenomena Noise Tour; Tree Lined Highway performing a live film soundtrack; NYC electro-acoustic experimentalists Etherdrag; Seattle guitarist Bill Horist; and NYC avant-turntablist Marina Rosenfeld, in addition to multi-media events such as Murder the Word mark Big Orbit’s fall.
Leaning toward the noise/rock end of the free improv spectrum, and embracing electronic music, performance art and multi-media events, Big Orbit’s programming tends to exhibit a conceptual tendency towards sensory overload.
This fall, a typical example might be Marina Rosenfeld’s live recombinant performance of "The Fragment Opera," which utilizes a fluxuating suite of original vinyl and acetate records played on multiple turntables simultaneously. In performance, the records are modified, sometimes with pins or nails, to produce temporary loops altered by effects, digital processors and a Powerbook.
Additionally, Big Orbit and Hallwalls will team up once again to bring Gregg Bendian’s Interzone, featuring Nels Cline on guitar. Performing a musical tribute to Jack "The King" Kirby, the legendary comic book artist whose credits include Captain America, The Fantastic Four, The Hulk, Spiderman, and Thor), Interzone’s compositions reflect the dramatic, sumptuously colorful, archetypally violent, lyrically beautiful and always bizaree sci-fi world of Kirby’s art.