 |
| |
|
| |
Live Review
by SashaS
17-6-2001
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
| Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon |
|
Live: Sonic Youth
Royal Festival Hall, London
Saturday, June 16, 2001
Aural-hypnosis by a roquallibrium
'Summertime/And the living is easy, ' goes the evergreen song but not if you are a music lover with interesLin varied musicat genres. Saturday was pure hell deciding amidst Neil Young's topping FJeadh, Fa4thless at CrashJand orSoni£ Youth '~ taking part at the Meltdown Festival, curretted by the Soft Machine's legend, Robert Wyatt, this year. Taking the weather, distances and volatile mental state in consideration, the New York's sound terrorist Sonic Youth secured another happy-camper. The choice turned out to be what a doctor should have ordered.
The concrete slab of the 1950s architectural folly that is South Bank complex turned out to be the perfect home for the seminal band's latest show, ' Goodbye 20th Century , , a review of avant-garde works by composers such as John Cage, Steve Reich, Yoko Ono and James Tenney. Sonic Youth, the renown psychotic-punk's, fit this mantle with customary ease and masterfully handJefree-form minimalist, maximalist and in-between pieces, from seconds-lasting Ono 'Voice Piece For A Soprano', three separate screams actually, to a half-hour long Reich 's opus.
Thurston Moore and Kid Gordon fronted outfit is reenforced by frequent sideman Jim 0'Rourke, another percussionist and assorted guests helping out, all seated for comfortable concentration on these delicate and precise compositions outside popular conventions. Magnificently free of structures and textural restraint, one-chord riffing takes volume to' 11' and then tames it into a hush, a process that is effectively an aural-hypnosis. You could feel the inner doors of pure sonic perception creaking wider...
And yet, the audience, lacking a habit of regular rotating this music at home, find it all intimidating and confusing; there is shuffling during the longish pauses between 'songs' and applaud-delay due to uncertainty about the unothodox forms and endings... Definitely nor Rock 'n 'Punk that prompted, over a quieter instrumental passage, a voice in the crowd to shout, "Pretentious crap!" It damn was a premature conclusion with the band's own 'Side2Side' restoring a roquilibrfum of these intellectuals at play.
Sonic Youth's creosoting the avant-garde fence is spellbinding.
SashaS
17-6-2001
|
|
|
