7.
Sonic Youth. The Melbourne alternative
music scene, alternative to Countdown and everything awful, “greatly influenced
my taste in music,” though today I don’t listen to that music much but to what
came next. 1976-1982 is when punk turned into new wave turned into goth, techno,
industrial, thrash, grunge, shoe gaze, before growing up into further
radiations of musical originality. Worldwide, musicians tested limits. Of all those,
Sonic Youth is the band I return to most often. I’ve heard them live twice,
once at the Prince of Wales in Fitzroy, a club which never knew the term ‘spatial
distancing’, and another time at the Forum in Flinders Street. The electric
guitar is the omnipresent instrument of the second half of the twentieth century
and this band, tracing its way from Jimi Hendrix and Lou Reed through Frank
Zappa and Neil Young, made over thirty years of recordings of unsurpassable and
elevating sounds using alternative tunings, dreamlike feedback, intense rhythms,
transcendent noise. It is the shifting sounds and aural walls that continue to
astonish me. Here are six of their albums. I have inserted inside cover art as
the cover, which is why they don’t look the way they do on download outlets. Photocopy:
‘Sister’ (1987). Bunny: ‘Dirty’ (1992). Pillows: ‘A Thousand Leaves’ (1998). Street: ‘nyc ghosts & flowers’ (2000). One
Way: ‘Murray Street’ (2002). Clocks: ‘The Eternal’ (2009). Oddly, I cannot
locate my copy of their album that “greatly influenced” me, but their wiki says
of ‘Daydream Nation’ (1988) that “it was chosen by the Library of Congress to
be preserved in the National Recording Registry in 2005.” Yes.
