nothin Thurston Moore Brings Show Full Of Ideas | New Haven Independent

Thurston Moore Brings Show Full Of Ideas

Daniel Shoemaker Photo

Moore and company.

Saturday evening’s show at the State House on State Street, featuring and curated by indie rock legend Thurston Moore, brought an eclectic assortment of performers together for a night of multimedia boundary pushing that defied the conventions of your average music icon comes to town” nostalgia act. On this night, no laurels were rested upon. Acknowledgments were made to each performer’s rich past, but all of them trotted out new ideas and projects in a way rarely seen from behind the safety of a long and laudatory career.

The show kicked off with the post-Beat prose of Byron Coley, a man with 10 fingers in 11 pies. He’s been a music journalist, poet, record store owner, record label runner, liner note contributor, and Chuck Norris biographer. If that’s not enough, he is happy to regale you with a tale or two of his extracurriculars, as he did the audience on Saturday night. From behind his wry smile and oft-rolling eyes, Coley shared a host of semi-autobiographical yarns about his experiences staying in shelters, finding a quick, if shady dollar and consuming obscure booze so low grade it manages to sit on the shelf below Colt .45 and Hurricane. Interspersed with occasional political vitriol and a tableaux of post-coital interactions with Joni Mitchell, Coley’s readings were not so much envelope-pushing as envelope-crumpling, in a manner consistent with the rest of the night’s performances.

Following Coley, the night took a sharp turn into the electronic improvisations of Wobbly, the stage name of Jon Leidecker, a member of perennial experimentalists Negativland and frequent collaborator with various outsider electronic and computer music acts. His set full of bloops, screeches, blips and skips sounded like a Geiger counter performing some lysergic exorcism on a cheap sampler. Visibly fiddling with no less than three iSomethings (pads? pods? phones?) as well a few mixers and other electronic miscellanea, Wobbly’s music lived up to the project’s name, swirling around the room while Leidecker loomed over his card table full of devices with mad-scientist focus.

Then after a brief but frightening medical emergency in the audience (lady who passed out and used my coat as a pillow, I hope you’re doing okay!), the final performance of the night commenced. Thurston Moore was joined on stage by a venerable line-up of aural adventurers, including recent collaborator and guitarist James Sedwards, My Bloody Valentine bassist Debbie Googe, and longtime Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley, who has appeared on many of Moore’s recent solo efforts as well.

From the first waves of drone and reverb on through the final collapse of the last drum swell, the band played the entire set without pause. The performance was a churning and unique blend of composition and improvisation, guided by cues from Moore, as the band responded to his nods and his handwritten annotated chord charts on the tiny music stands before them.

With a work titled New Explorations in Noise Guitar from a left-field legend like Thurston Moore, an attendee would be forgiven for expecting something monolithic and abrasive, and while those aesthetics had their passing moments of prominence, the piece as a whole was a lot more kinetic and consonant than droney and dissonant. It started with textured waves of delay that gave way to a dreamy repetition of multi-hued chords, not unknown to fans of Sonic Youth or bassist Googe’s My Bloody Valentine. While the term shoegaze has become a common, if overused phrase for any band that bathes its melodies in a wash of guitar pedal modulations, its connotations weren’t too off the mark for what some of what Moore’s low-key super group presented.

This work, however, felt more forward-gazing. It flowed and evolved over its duration. If the music may have occasionally recalled sounds of each musician’s past, as a group they managed to keep moving toward something new. Trite as it seems, Thurston Moore’s work — one of the few track records that can boast both a 10.0 and a 0.0 from notoriously opinionated online music magazine Pitchfork — may still require the listener to expect the unexpected.

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