Graham Reid | | 1 min read
Hypnogram
When Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth separated after more than 20 years of marriage, for the indie.kid generation it was as if their own parents had broken up.
Moore and Gordon seemed to have had it all: a life together making music and art, being creative, hanging out with the hippest of the hip and so on.
Well, infidelity rarely plays out well as Moore discovered, and Gordon's memoir Girl in a Band didn't pull many punches.
Moore's more recent memoir Sonic Life was sensibly much more circumspect.
Moore's albums used to gain considerable attention, but since that messy separation in 2011, his star has been tarnished.
And his enormously productive solo career – collaborations and albums under his own name – is quite shapeless.
There have been the expected firestorms of guitar noise (the 2013 free-form improvisations of “@” with John Zorn) but his first post-SY album was the quieter, Beck-produced Demolished Thoughts with synths, violin and harpist Mary Lattimore.
It's follow-up was the straight-ahead rock of The Best Day (2014) and Screen Time (2021) was inventive guitar pieces which were almost ambient.
This time he hits an interesting midpoint of his many style with an album of quirky moments (New in Town), delightful dream-pop (Hypnogram) and minimalist guitar figures morphing into cinematic pop (Sans Limites with Stereolab singer Laeitia Sadier providing a brief atmospheric dreamscape).
Perhaps his new life in a leafy part of London has lead to the hypnotic, psychedelic roll of Rewilding: “This terrain is changing . . . so I'm singing for animals”.
Behind the typically odd album title is Thurston Moore -- with lyrics by his new wife Eva Prinz - at his most approachable, the eight minute closer The Diver like a glistening, languid slo-mo take on Sonic Youth's The Diamond Sea.
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You can hear this album at Spotify here.
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