Sonic Youth Records

Sonic Youth

Simon Werner a Disparu

Sonic Youth Records

***BACK IN STOCK!!! In Spring 2010, Sonic Youth gathered at their Echo Canyon West studio in Hoboken, New Jersey, to watch the rushes of a new film, Simon Werner a Disparu, by French director Fabrice Gobert. They spent the following few weeks recording music which was then shaped as needed to fit the various scenes. For this release, rather than present the small clips of music as used in the film, the band went back in the autumn to the original tapes and re-organized the various pieces for this original soundtrack release, sometimes montaging multiple tracks together, other times extending cues into new sonic realms. The film premiered at Cannes in May 2010 and opened nationwide in France.

Sonic Youth

Silver Session

Sonic Youth Records

***"We didn't really know Jason Knuth--it's possible we had met him, or had been in the same room as him, but we didn't recall... We heard about his passing on the internet--a flurry of grievous and surprised reactions. People were asking us if we were aware of how much he identified and championed our music. As program director for KUSF, he seemingly used Sonic Youth as a standard for playlisting--indeed, at his memorial his friends played 'The Diamond Sea' in acknowledgment of his enthusiasm toward us. He was affectionately referred to as 'Sonic Knuth.' Here in NYC, so far from the San Francisco community, we were touched and more than intrigued. We learned Jason was a vibrant, well-loved guy on the music scene with a completely genuine exuberance toward art and music. His demeanor obviously shrouded a complex inner life which led to suicide. What Jason's feelings were toward his own human existence we may never know, but we do know he will be missed by many as a companion. Sonic Youth wanted to make some gesture toward him as well as focus on suicide prevention. A portion of the proceeds from this CD goes to local charities in NYC, SF, and beyond, and in the past have included www.sfsuicide.org. class="break"> "A note on the music: Silver Sessions was taken from an evening when Sonic Youth had to do vocal overdubs for A Thousand Leaves--a band upstairs was hammering out some funky metal overdrive and we couldn't 'sing'...

Sonic Youth With Mats Gustafsson And Merzbow

Andre Sider Af Sonic Youth

Sonic Youth Records

This installment of Sonic Youth's series of experimental and mostly instrumental releases is available in a CD-only edition on the band's own SYR label.  Andre Sider af Sonic Youth presents the complete "Other Sides of Sonic Youth" improvised live performance from the 2005 Roskilde Festival in Denmark, featuring Sonic Youth (with Jim O'Rourke) and guests Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson and Japanese sound artist Masami Akita (a.k.a. Merzbow). The single piece performed was a structured improvisation which for 60 minutes added and subtracted musicians one by one until only Akita was left onstage. Black Sabbath followed.

Sonic Youth

J’accuse Ted Hughes

Sonic Youth Records

The seventh in the series of Sonic Youth's SYR documents unearths even more fruit from the fields of Sonic improvisational/compositional love. On the heels of a lengthy investigation into their relationship to 20th Century classical music, the band took advantage of their millennial crossroads in 2000 via the adventurous, then-newfound All Tomorrow's Parties festival in the UK, on invitation from Mogwai. Besides it being historical as their last show as a foursome until 2006, it stands as a wholly unique set that not only delved into instrumental previews of the forthcoming NYC Ghosts And Flowers, but also featured an opening 20 minute group interpretation of a solo composition Thurston had performed at NYC's late/beloved venue The Cooler.With Thurston and Lee both sporting electric 12-strings, and Kim on her Eterna, the piece was set-listed as "New Drone", and took a right turn from the initial instrumental plan with Kim's added intonings that reflected on Sylvia Plath's relationship to her husband, hence retitled "J'Accuse Ted Hughes". It's a sublimely spaced out bit of one-chord introspection, though perhaps not what the festival punters were looking for at that moment. Certainly not the irked Melody Maker scribe who headlined his review "Goodbye 20th Century/Goodbye Talent", a screencap of which appears on the sleeve of this 2008 release. Sparks infamously declared "Talent Is An Asset", and one of SY's great ones was to give their deep listener faction something new and unheard to chew on. Initially live streamed in not-so-great quality, the SYR 7 mix...

Sonic Youth

Koncertas Stan Brakhage Prisiminimui

Sonic Youth Records

The sixth edition of the SYR series is a live recording of the April 12, 2003 benefit concert held at and for The Anthology Film Archives, the international center for the preservation, study, and exhibition of avant-garde and independent cinema. In addition to screening films for the public, AFA houses a film museum, research library and art gallery. The event, which raised money for the Archives and celebrated the life and work of avant-garde film maker Stan Brakhage, featured Sonic Youth providing an improvised instrumental collaboration with silent Brakhage’s films. The band performed with drummer/percussionist Tim Barnes (Essex Green, Jukeboxer, Silver Jews). Part of the proceeds of this CD will again benefit the Anthology Film Archives. -

Sonic Youth

Live in Venlo, Holland 1983

Sonic Youth Records

"This Sonic Youth live set was captured in November 1983 at the Dutch town of Venlo, and it features some monumentally raw versions of early SY classics from Confusion Is Sex and Kill Yr Idols, including hair-raising outings of 'Brother James' (featuring some slightly scary, grunted vocals from Kim Gordon), 'She's In A Bad Mood' and 'Confusion Is Next'. The soupy, very rhythmic sound of the set brings to mind the dissonant pounding of a particularly venomous Swans performance, and as a live album this has to stand as one of the band's more visceral documents."--Boomkat

Gordon, Kim / Mori, Ikue / Dj Olive

Syr 5

Sonic Youth Records

***"Donald Duck, kill Minnie!" These words, ordered with urgency against a circular series of drum strikes and manipulated guitar/electronic textures, come over three fourths of the way through the album known as SYR 5 (aka "Olive's Horn"). While the words and sounds taken on their own may shock, their appearance within this collaborative effort between Kim Gordon (Sonic Youth, Body/Head, solo efforts), Ikue Mori (DNA, solo) and DJ Olive (We, solo) by this point in the album are not surprising. Taken on whole, SYR 5 sees its creators' respective histories forged in the 80s downtown noise scene, No Wave zone and Marclay-inspired club collide head on to create the audio equivalent of a slow-playing J.G. Ballard novel. Starting from the album's initial impressions where shimmering tones are interrupted by the sounds of winding clocks and bird calls before giving way to a cinematic sweeps of percussion, alien samples and blown out wasteland subs, the listener is constantly taken on a guided journey through a waking dream state where anything is possible. It is a world where dub samples, gurling beats and plaintive vocals (as only Gordon can deliver) fit together like the final locking puzzle pieces, the only elements needed to fully grasp a new reality. Re-appearing on vinyl for the first time in 25 years, these sounds have proven to be jaw-droppingly timeless. - Cory Rayborn, 2025

Sonic Youth W/ Jim O' Rourke

Invito Al Cielo

Sonic Youth Records

This third installment of the SYR series issued in 1998 continues to showcase the home-brewed outer explorations of Sonic Youth running concurrent to their busy mid-decade major label run with the Washing Machine LP, world tours, and Lollapalooza engagements. As the millenium neared, SY took time to investigate a particular interest in exploring its identity within a 20th Century classical/compositional spirit (already evidenced on SYR 1 and 2), the opportunity to build its own homebase studio environs, and further blur barriers between its pure rock/avant heritage and the possibilities to dissect and rebuild new/organic Euro-flavored directives in their sound. Jim O'Rourke, already long-steeped in this universe via work with Gastr Del Sol, Faust, Henry Kaiser, Tony Conrad and others became a perfect collaborative foil to bring into Echo Canyon to explore this expanding playground of limitless, improvised potential. Taking some downtime from a NYC event involving Takehisa Kosugi and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (of which Thurston was also a participant), the new SY+1 rolled tape in house and tackled adventurous avenues rife with subtle guitar/amp/synth/trumpet pulse, evocative whispered vocal textures from Kim Gordon, and tasteful tonalities in percussion augmented by Steve Shelley. Adding to the mystery are compositional credits in Esperanto (Wharton Tiers' engineer credit being that of the "Ĉefsoninĝeniero"), and track titles such as "Invito Al Ĉielo", "Hungara Vivo", and "Radio-Amatoroj". Ringing in near the one hour mark, the collaboration eventually opened the doors to O'Rourke's full-time recruitment into the Sonic fold for the next seven years. His...

Sonic Youth

Anagrama

Sonic Youth Records

BACK IN PRINT ON VINYL!  While 1995's Washing Machine LP moniker was a thinly-veiled jab at the corporate aesthetic ("no, you cannot turn Sonic Youth into a household appliance brand", the band even considered changing its name to Washing Machine but settled on the album title instead), their major label relationship was indeed a curious buzzpoint of talk on the street after their intake to DGC in 1990. It wouldn't be fair to say that this state of existence propelled the band to reinforce its independent mindset by releasing a series of opaque-looking, French-language-dipping, highbrow-looking releases on their own that focused on the more abstract improv/compositional side of the band; in all truths they had been heavily steeped in self-releasing spillover material prior to that. But after a pressure pot of the early 90's indoctrination into a new operational mode for the band and its visibility, and the forces around it attempting to shape their direction, it seemed like a good time to create a strong show of radical concept.The Anagrama EP became the first in a series of the SYR label's Perspective Musicales releases seemingly cementing Sonic Youth's connectivity to an increasing public awareness in experimental composers of the 20th century (French or otherwise). The irony was that many of those original avant composers being rediscovered by the indie audience (Partch, Neuhaus, Reich, Messaien) often found themselves on major labels anyway! So, perhaps this...

Sonic Youth

Slaapkamers Met Slagroom

Sonic Youth Records

Unfettered by studio time limitations with their own home base of Echo Canyon, SYR 2 shows Sonic Youth chasing the shadows of predecessor SYR 1 and the series' distinct aesthetic: total exploration of freedom and further discovery. While the cover art evokes European contempo classical releases of yore, Sonic Youth distinctively reinvent their own personal output potential the way those kinds of records revolutionized a previously defined genre. Their ethos of utilizing the roots of the Ramones, Television, VU, Stooges, and No Wave to shape their first decade now find the band in later years bullet-pointing fascination in AMM, MEV, improvised music, free jazz and other outer-limit/organic refractions of traditional rock. While Sonic Youth's spontaneous-creation moments had long been showcased in their recordings, Peel Sessions, and live, SYR 2 sums up the band's state in 1997: rolling lots of tape, fine-tuning ideas and presenting great moments of exciting new directions, allowing deep-listener type fans to gain better insight into their sound process. Add to that the alchemy of Jim O'Rourke's gradual entry into the core band which would soon be fully on display for SYR 3, and this series is an X-ray of evolution, dissection and reconstruction.

Sonic Youth

Goodbye 20th Century

Sonic Youth Records

25th Anniversary Edition  Originally released 11/16/1999. SONIC YOUTH Goodbye 20th Century The fractal rock of Sonic Youth has, needless to say, always been about the challenge of space: the space between notes, the close dissonance of guitar figures that created all new overtones in their proximity. Television’s Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd themselves hinted at such microtonal methodology in their heroic solos that blasted the roles of twin lead electric guitars into poetic, simmering collision wedding chaos and tranquility, masterfully disassembling the primal thud of the rock genre into a nebula of intricate interactions that complemented each others’ paths. At times, for example, Verlaine’s Bollywood guitar jones reared its head and pirouetted around Lloyd’s Keith Richards moves; both played extended solos generating something wholly new and cerebral, yet adding nods to the places from whence they originated. Sonic Youth in turn also drew on this (especially with Television’s influence) adding their own input: Hendrix, The Beatles, punk trash, and quite prominently the din of Downtown as presented and templated by the avant-garde composers Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham. These two captured a maximal bent on minimalism by souping up guitar armies to sound like passing subways, then daring to situate themselves in the Classical bin of record stores. For Sonic Youth, the fringe was always the feeding trough from which ideas fed over the course of their story. The brutalist gronk of Confusion Is Sex eventually steered into sublime song- smithery on Evol. They also fed on the spirit...

Sonic Youth & Yamatsuka Eye

TV Shit

Sonic Youth Records

***This strange release between legendary NYC art-rockers SONIC YOUTH and BOREDOMS head wacko YAMATSUKA EYE is finally available again. A symphony mix version of YOUTH BRIGADE's legendary "No Song 11" in four takes. Long rumored to have backing vocals from MARK ARM and J. MASCIS, this is one of the weirdest and most extreme SONIC YOUTH releases ever.