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Welcome to the latest edition of Pitchfork’s Guest List. Each week, we ask one of our favorite artists to fill us in on what they’ve been up to lately: which tracks they can’t stop spinning, what books they can’t put down, and what new bands they’ve caught on tour. This week it’s Thurston Moore, who remembers buying tickets to a Joy Division show days before Ian Curtis’ tragic demise, recalls his feat of derring-do from a recent recording session, and tips us off to some bands so obscure, even we haven’t heard of some of them.
>> Favorite New Songs from the Past Year
Clipse: “Momma I’m So Sorry”There’s a song off of that CD that came out last year by Clipse, the hip-hop duo I think from Atlanta– they played at the Pitchfork Music Festival, which for me was super exciting, to be able to see them. I was aware of them but I never got deep into their CDs or anything, but I did get very deep into the one that came out this year, Hell Hath No Fury. Most of the songs on there are great, but there’s one that, I don’t know the name of it, but the line is like: “Momma I’m sorry, I’m so obnoxious.” The way the alliteration is there with the rap– it’s really brilliant. To be at that festival, to have access to the side of the stage, and see those guys walk up in their white outfits and the bling hanging from their wrists…I snuck around to the photo pit in front of the stage and watched it from there. They were kick-ass. They were killer. A lot of hip-hop live can be an ordeal. Sometimes it’s great, sometimes it’s like this abstract party. They had a really solid performance down. Anyway, I really dig that song. That’s one of my favorite songs this year for sure.
>> Favorite Older Songs at the Moment
A couple of older things have come into my life this year that have re-invigorated me as to how great they were musically to my wanting to make music right now. I guess the first thing would be a band like Mars, this New-York band, from like 1975 to like ‘78 or ‘79– they were one of the first bands that could really be considered to be called no-wave in the New York scene. The reason I’ve been really listening to them a lot lately is because I’m editing a book with Byron Coley that’s being published by Abrams coming out in Spring 08. It’s a pictorial-driven essay on the history of No Wave music in New York. It’s really specific in its parameters, it’s only about the musicians that really were the ones that developed that sound in a communal way in new york; Lydia Lunch, James Chance, Mars, Teenage Jesus & the Jerks, DNA. And then the bands that weren’t documented on that record, and also the kind of so-called SoHo contingent of people. I’m going back a lot into that catalogue.
The band Mars, I find the most intriguing of them all. They were just so musically audacious in the way they were playing these more sort of extrapolated guitar lines that were expressing this feeling of displacement and alienation and dread. In a way, it was pre-figuring a lot of later what we’d call post-punk. They weren’t post-punk, if anything they were pre-punk. They were played alongside with famous bands like Patti Smith and Television…but they were just so weird! That was the band like a young Lydia Lunch, coming down from upstate New York would see and think like, okay, well that’s my muse. It created this different aesthetic in New York than just what was known as the CBGBs punk thing. And that’s certainly where Sonic Youth came out of. I would pick one of their songs, it would be from their first single, “3E”. It’s a killer tune.>> Favorite New Band
That’s like reaching into a grab-bag because there’s so many at every given time or day that I’m hearing. There’s always bands popping up that are doing something I really like. There’s this duo from the UK that I really like: Temperatures. I don’t know too much about them but I think they’re just two guys from the UK. I sort of, well it’s one of those things where you get your information through this underground network of noise and avant-garde, weird music that’s happening all the time now. And I saw their name a couple of times, and then I saw the Temperatures album, the one on Heat Retention, at Hospital Records in New York. On the wall, it’s like, Temperatures LP, limited edition, 100 copies, and the cover is kind of this rough paper and really homemade with silkscreen on it. Very little information. Just “Temperatures”. It’s the kind of thing that makes me buy records– all of those aspects. Like, an intriguing name, only making enough records that they know that they can sell in a couple of months and not having any lying around in their basement in boxes, and the most minimal of information– just play the fucking record and that’s all the information you need. They did two 7″s themselves, where the sleeves where very homemade. I knew it would be something really extreme, noise-duo kind of stuff. We were playing it the other day and it was pretty cool. It’s really this dark-hole of noise-playing. It’s actually really distinctive in a way amongst that genre, because there’s a lot of standardized tropes in the noise genre that people fall into– which I don’t mind, I like the idea that this is traditional way of playing in that world, but it’s always cool to hear something like this where you can’t really slot it into those things.
And then there’s this group called Dial. It’s this woman named Jacqui Ham. She was in this band called Ut around in the 70s and mostly 80s, a New York, UK trio, all women. They played really outsider rock music. Sonic Youth actually toured with them a few times in the UK. I used to see them in New York in the early days, too. They were a fascinating group. The three women would change instruments between each song. This woman, Jacqui, had this amazing voice when she sang with the band. On one level it was really bored, and on the other level it had this passion. She has a thing now called Dial with these guys from Westport, Connecticut. They’ve done three CDs. This new one just came out called 168k. It’s on this label called CEDE. CEDE Records. It’s really cool. And the next thing will be this more extrapolated Deadsy jammer, with more rockish moves. They’re really cool. She’s really interesting.
>> Favorite Song Ever
Some of people’s favorite songs ever start at a really young age, because you identify yourself with these things at such a young age and they never leave you. They introduce you to the feelings you have for music. I mean, I could reach as far back as “Louie Louie”. My older brother would play that in my house in the 60s. It’s either “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us” by Sparks, or there’s this song by Patti Smith that not too many people reference. It’s called “Godspeed”. It’s the B-side of her hit “Because the Night”. It’s this really long tune. I think what I know about this song is when they were recording at Electric Ladyland one night, they started improvising and she has these words that she sings on top of this improvistation. According to whatever legend, it was like Hendrix’s birthday or Hendrix’s death day while they were recording this jammer. It was a really sort of odd and unorthodox b-side for this hit single that they had co-written with Bruce Springsteen. It’s one of their more far-out songs; most of their radical stuff was on their second album, Radio Ethiopia. This one’s as heavy as that but it’s a really moving track.It’s hard for me to pinpoint my favorite song ever. It would probably be something by Negative Approach or something, maybe “Nothing”. That could be my favorite song ever, actually.
>> Best Recent Concert
Orphan Fairytale
It might very well be this solo female from Antwerp, Belgium, who records under the name Orphan Fairytale. She did a couple of shows with us opening up; one of those shows was one of the best shows I’ve seen recently. She has these ideas that she wants to do onstage but she improvises as well. She’ll come out and do a tap-dance routine, and then play a Casio keyboard, and then tape down the keys where she really wants to use this chord as a bed for what she’s going to do next, which is when she plays all these toy instruments that she gets from little kids stores and improvises on top of it. She takes it to a certain point and then she starts singing on top of it and mixing it. It’s really good. And it’s really, very listenable and watchable. She’s really delightful to watch on stage. It just sounded glorious. It was one of the coolest things I’ve seen this year.
>> Last Great Film I Saw
Anton Corbijn: ControlI just went to see Anton Corbijn’s film, Control. I really liked it. Usually, a biopic like that– I’ve had a lot of feelings of conflict about a short-lived and precious kind of band in a way. And this is going to be hard to watch. But he really nailed it by not really making so much a biopic about Joy Division, but just basically really relying on Ian Curtis’s wife’s account of her relationship with this guy. And the fact that they got married at such a young age and had a baby at such a young age and started singing in this band, and they became pretty popular pretty quickly and dealing with his own epilepsy and his obvious problems with self-doubt and immaturity at that age. Being at such a state of reponsibilty at parenthood and having a band that were so demanding of his time, and getting involved with another relationship– I thought Anton really captured that in a very– not in an exploitative way at all. It’s a very simple film because it only takes time between this guy when he’s 17 to when he’s 23. But what really kind of excited me, was as soon as he becomes the singer of this band called Warsaw who later become Joy Division, the way he captured it on film, the way they’re playing music, was really startling. I had never really seen a movie where a director captured a band playing as a punk band in a way where it wasn’t just exploiting the fact that they were a punk band, and having all of this shock-vibe to it…it was all about the idea of these young people making radical and marginalized music. He shows the band doing their first performance, and that nervous-energy of playing that kind of music in front of a crowd at a club. It sounded so good. The way that band sounded was real minimal, direct, aggressive, yet very artful; Ian as a lyricist and a vocalist was so personal. It really comes across. It really inspired me; how heavy a band they were.
I remember buying a ticket to see them play in New York when they were coming over, and I certainly remember really liking Unknown Pleasures because it was such a mysterious kind of record. And it was only, like, days before that concert that we got a report that the singer killed himself and they’re not coming over. I remember at the time, I couldn’t really process that. I was like the same age, living in New York, and thinking, “What could bring somebody like that to that point?” Being in a band, a great band like that– what could possibly be the reason? And I remember holding onto the ticket for awhile, but then I got evicted from my apartment and I lost everything. I don’t have it anymore. But then, six months later, New Order came over. I didn’t go to that. I invested most of my interest in that band as a band with that singer. And then gladly rediscovering their music. But their music has become so culturally important to so many people, like Siouxsie and the Banshees or something. I kind of have a reaction to that kind of thing in a way. And I think Anton did a really fabulous job as far as giving a band like that an interesting story.
>> Last Great Book I Read
I just read Joe Carducci’s new book. Joe Carducci was one of the people that helped form and develop the SST Record Label in the early 80s. He’s written a book that was pretty popular, called Rock and the Pop Narcotic. But he has a new book he just wrote called Enter Naomi. Naomi Peterson was this photographer in LA who started hanging out at SST and the whole Black Flag scene and took it upon herself to start photographing and documenting it. In a way, she became this person that they started employing as their house photographer. Even as SST was becoming discombobulated into the 90s, she remained active in the scene. She was so, so devoted to that part of the American underground scene that I think people just took it for granted that she would always be there. But Joe Carducci, along with myself and other people, who were sort of friendly with her throughout those years, posthumously found out that she had died– a year or two prior to when we found out. It was shocking. It really was a catalyst for Joe to revisit this time period in LA with these individuals developing their separate world of rock’n'roll, and how that corresponded with somebody like Naomi who was a female. And so this book is a really interesting memoir by this guy who worked with all these other guys and how he remembers that world. He has a lot of very personalized takes on American underground rock history. One thing is that it’s a book that doesn’t care about the fact that maybe a lot of people don’t know about this stuff. It just presupposes that you already know about SST as a label and all the different figures that were involved with it. If you don’t know that, it’s sort of like a hieroglyph. Sort of like a James Elroy book where it’s a lot of name listing. He’ll throw down a lot of different band names and stuff– if you don’t know those people, it doesn’t really mean anything. But if you do, it’s a fascinating account. And he self-published it where he lives.>> Favorite Piece of Musical Equipment
I think it would be this acoustic guitar pickup that is detached from the acoustic guitar and hangs nakedly by itself and plugs directly into an amplifier booster box.
>> Favorite Record Shop
I like going into Hospital Records in New York. It’s a self-professed center for harsh extreme noise, black-metal and adult games. I like hanging out there. It’s not just a record store but it’s like a fetishized art gallery. But just for records, there’s this place called Twisted Village in Cambridge. Another really great one is called Mystery Train in Amherst, Massachusetts. Always really good records in there. And there’s this one I’ve been going to called Time Machine. Really cool, obscure place. There’s some good ones in Chicago, too…Reckless, Dusty Groove.>> Best Purchase of the Past Year
A piece of art by this artist named Steven Parrino. He was an artist in New York who died a couple years ago in a motorcycle accident on New Years Eve. He used to play in this cool, black-noise duo, with this other artist, Jutta Koether, called Electrophilia. He was an artist who did black centric paintings and objects, utilized a lot of images from punk rock. I bought a piece of his that I saw in the Whitney Biennial and I called this gallery and they came down and offered me a few of these pieces. I could only afford to get one. He’s an important artist.
>> Best Thing I Did This Year
I really feel good about while I was recording Trees Outside the Academy, I was happy to get a pair of tweezers and pull this wood-tick off of Luisa, J Mascis’ wife. J was on tour and she was pregnant and found this wood-tick on her. I pulled it off of her. I felt so glad to have been around to have done that.
>> Favorite Music Venue
Stubbs Bar-B-Q, Austin, Texas
I like playing at Stubb’s. Cold beers, hot barbecue, and rock’n'roll. It’s sort of an equation you really can’t deny. There are a lot of good venues, but that one is always consistent.
>> Favorite TV Show at the Moment
“The Wire”. And I like “Weeds”. And I like the ones that everyone likes: “Entourage”, “Curb Your Enthusiasm”. But the writing on “The Wire” is pretty intense. The dialogue, the storylines– they’re really involving. I don’t really watch TV that much. For years I didn’t watch TV. The fact that there are these TV shows that are serialized like this; they’re kind of adult stories. I got caught up in “The Sopranos” and “Six Feet Under”. Now, they allow you to access it on DVD.
>> Favorite Video Game at the Moment
I don’t play video games. I tried playing “Guitar Hero”. I was over at Jemina Pearl’s house, the singer from Be Your Own Pet in Nashville, and she had it and I was like, “Aw man, that’s so fuckin’ easy!” And she’s like, “Yeah?” And she played “Search & Destroy” by the Stooges on it. And she just kicked ass. She just ripped on it, like, she played all of James Williamson’s leads, and I was watching her, like, “Huh, I could do that.” And then I tried my hand at it. I couldn’t even get out of the gate. I was just splayed on the living room floor, bleeding and humiliated [laughs]. It does take a lot of…I don’t know, it does take some kind of skill, certainly but I think it just takes a lot of…hours [laughs]. Okay, if I sat with this thing for a few days, I might be able to– it’s cool, I don’t have any problem with it, but I’d rather read a book.>> Favorite Radio Show
My favorite radio station is local– where I live, in Northhampton, Massachusetts. This station, WHMP, that has this morning show with this guy named Bill Dwight. He’s a local video-store clerk [laughs], and he’s got a lot of interesting things to say about daily political news and then also local happenings. Really funny and really smart and really personable. So in a way he’s really representative of the best of radio. I love hearing local radio and local cable access TV. I was driving through the South and getting a local Doppler station in passing; it’s really wonderful. I really like regional action, as supposed to more standardized network stuff. I would have to say that because I do listen to that everyday.
>> My Ringtone
You know, Kim gave me an iPhone for my birthday and they don’t let you– you can’t download ringtones on there, which is a bummer. I’m trying to think of my previous cell phone’s ringtone, which I really liked…I don’t even remember what it is, so I can’t even tell you. I think my ringtone is called “science fiction” [laughs]. Which is kind of cool because when you’re playing a CD in a car and the science fiction ringtone goes off, it sounds good with every track. Sometimes it’ll be going and I’m like, “Wow, that’s so cool that they put that in their song,” and I’m like, “Oh, it’s my fucking phone.” J Mascis has the best ringtone, he just put his phone on top of his drum and then he just like whacked the drum with a drumstick and he recorded it onto his phone, so when his phone, well…rings, it actually just goes, “BABABABABA!” [laughs].
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- LV + Errol Bellott - ‘Globetrotting’ (Hyperdub)
- Peverelist - ‘The Grind’ (Punchdrunk)
- Massive Music - ‘Find My Way’ (Kode9 Remix) (Hyperdub)
- King Midas Sound - ‘Cool Out’ (Hyperdub)
- Digital Mystikz - ‘Blue Notes’ (DMZ)
- The Bug feat. Flow Dan - ‘Jah War’ (Loefah Remix) (Ninja Tune)
- Kode9 - ‘9 Samurai’ (Hyperdub)
- Dabrye feat. Doom - ‘Air’ (Kode9 Remix) (Ghostly Int.)
- Kode9 - ‘Stung’ (dubplate)
- Digital Mystikz - ‘Lean Forward’ (dubplate)
- Burial - ‘Stairwell’ (Hyperdub)
- Cluekid & Cotti - ‘Sensi Dub VIP’ (Minus 30 Records)
- Benga - ‘Electro Music’ (Tempa)
- Kode9 & Warrior Queen - ‘Fuck You’ (dubplate)
- Kode9 - ‘Magnetic City’ (Soul Jazz)
- 2562 - ‘Channel One’ (dubplate)
- Junior boys - ‘Double Shadow’ (Kode9 Remix feat. The Spaceape) (Domino)
- Shackleton- ‘You Bring Me Down’ (Skull Disco)
- Skream - ‘2D’ (Tempa)
- Digital Mystikz - ‘Bury the Boy’ (DMZ)
- Skream - ‘Bit Stream’ (Tempa)
- Skream - ‘Losin’ Control’ (Tempa)
- The Bug & Warrior Queen - ‘Poison Dart’ (Ninja Tune)
- Kode9 - Konfusion (dubplate)
- D1 - ‘Quantum Jazz’ (Tempa)
