Blame It On My (Sonic) Youth

After being buffeted by frigid winds and crisp sunlight while traipsing on the soft sand of an Oregon beach for several hours last Sunday, I recovered by sinking into a couch with Evan Parker’s latest release for Intakt Records.

Mentally settled and bodily exhausted, I experienced all 50 minutes of Etching the Ether without a single distraction or chemical enhancement. Completely immersed in sound, I was transported to an elevated dimension.

How did I get there? Most people never acquire a taste for improvised new music, but I consume the often harsh form as if it were candy. A moment on Live in Brooklyn 2011, a new release documenting Sonic Youth’s final concert in the United States, supplies a clue.

Thurston Moore, the loudest member of one of the most transformative bands of my youth, informs the audience that Weasel Walter is slated to perform at the concert’s afterparty at The Stone. The name-check affirms the connection between Sonic Youth’s art-punk free jazz.

The aside also brought me full circle. Since performing with a group including local standout Seth Davis in Kansas City last year, Weasel Walter is featured on the exhilarating March release Branches Choke. Etching the Ether is even better. 

The quartet of Parker (soprano saxophone), Peter Evans (trumpets), Matthew Wright (electronics) and Mark Nauseef (percussion) draw on the most refined developments from Tokyo, Philadelphia and the International Space Station. As Sonic Youth might put it, it’s a late-life riot.

Book Review: Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise and Fall of SST Records, Jim Ruland

Original image by There Stands the Glass.

Greg Ginn and I bonded over our mutual respect for Sonny Rollins the first time we met.  Many fans of Ginn’s seminal punk band Black Flag might be surprised by the anecdote.  Yet Jim Ruland’s revealing new book Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise and Fall of SST Records repeatedly affirms Ginn's predilection for jazz.

Through a circuitous series of developments in the music distribution realm I then inhabited, my initial meeting with Ginn in the late ‘80s indirectly led to the debilitating blow dealt to SST by the bankruptcy of my employer in 2001.  (Mine was among the dozens of jobs that were lost in the post-Napster fallout.)

Ruland mentions the bankruptcy in passing, but his study primarily focuses on the staggeringly eclectic range of music released by SST.  The backstories of classic albums by the likes of Black Flag, ​​Hüsker Dü, the Minutemen and Sonic Youth are related in detail, as is Ginn’s adamant refusal to sign Nirvana.

From a purely artistic perspective, Ginn’s bias was justified.  He’d already signed the superior Soundgarden to SST.  Yet my head spins when I speculate about the additional Sonny Rollins-inspired punk albums that might have been issued had SST been flush with Nirvana money.