Kim Gordon, the noise of the present
More than forty years after Sonic Youth’s explosion in New York’s underground scene, Kim Gordon continues to move as if his story was yet to be written. There’s something surprisingly alive, almost restless, in the way the musician, visual artist and inadvertent rock icon approaches this new chapter in her career. The March 13 will come out”Play me“, third solo album by the co-founder of Sonic Youth, a record that comes after “No home record” in 2019 and “The collective” in 2024, confirming how Gordon has not no intention of turning into a static legend.
The project was born once again from the partnership with the Los Angeles producer Justin Raisena figure from the world of pop and hip hop that Kim Gordon has chosen as a traveling companion for redefine his musical language. “Thanks to producer Justin Raisen, the album was built around beats. We started with rhythms similar to hip hop and then I added guitars and vocals. I don’t want to work the same way I worked with Sonic Youth for a long time. I don’t care anymore,” Gordon explained in an interview for “Numéro”.
A choice that was anything but predictable, but perfectly consistent with his attitude to sabotage rock conventions. “I had no desire to make a solo record“, the artist told the US edition of “Rolling Stone”: “For a long time I made music for guitar and bass. When I came back to Los Angeles I had no plan other than to continue with Body/Head and make art. It was Justin who convinced me to make a solo album.” From that meeting a sound was born that evolved into “The collective” mixing rock and aggression with industrial, electronic and trapallowing Gordon’s voice to move between fragmented beats, loops and distorted rhythms.
In “Play me” this aesthetic becomes even more radical, as demonstrated by singles “Not today”, “Dirty tech” and the title track. The album proceeds through scraps and sound collisions, while the lyrics they observe contemporary American culture with irony and angerbetween technology, consumption and identity. “There’s a lot of humor in it. And a lot of anger“, explains Gordon to “Rolling Stone”. The result is a record that seems to move like a flow of images and fragments, closer to the logic of artistic collage than to that of the traditional song form. In this context it is therefore found Dave Grohl playing drums in “Busy Bee” above a dialogue between Gordon and Julia Cafritz, his partner in Free Kitten, taken from an episode of MTV Beach House that the two had co-hosted in the nineties.
Kim Gordon continues to view music as an extension of her visual work. “Like many people, I found myself in the post-punk and punk scene without knowing much about music at first,” the former Sonic Youth artist told “Numéro”. I never learned to play an instrument. Ever since I was a child I just wanted to be a visual artist. That’s why I moved from California, where I grew up, to New York in the early 1980s.” And again: “So I think I approach music more as a visual artist. I am not a conventional musician and have no interest in becoming one or making conventional music. I like things that break the mold. I admire those who studied music. But a lot of my guitar vocabulary comes from the fact that I can’t read music. I think in terms other than melody and chords. I’m more interested in contrast, dissonance and noise”. It is probably this perspective, free from any idea of rock purity, that keep his creative curiosity alive. Even after decades spent redefining the boundaries of electrical noise, Gordon continues to proceed in the same way, without certainties, with the curious gaze of someone who, as she herself says, is “simply curious to see what will come out”.
