Goodbye 20th Century

Product Description:

This is an Enhanced audio CD, which contains regular audio tracks and multimedia computer files.

Sonic Youth: Kim Gordon, Lee Ranaldo, Steve Shelley, Thurston Moore.

Additional personnel: William Winant, Jim O'Rourke, Takehisa Kosugi, Christian Wolff, Christian Marclay, Coco Hayley Gordon Moore, Wharton Tiers.

Producers: Sonic Youth, William Winant, Jim O'Rourke.

Recorded in New York, New York from March-August 1999.

This is an Enhanced CD, which contains both regular audio tracks and multimedia computer files.

New York's premier alternative band has been releasing "experimental" material on the sly on its private label, SYR, for a few years now. But this fourth release, a homage to a handful of highly influential experimental composers such as John Cage, Cornelius Cardew, and Pauline Oliveros, qualifies as a major Sonic Youth album. There's formless experimental music and then there's formless experimental music. This bona fide modernist rock & roll band knows the idiom so well and has been playing so well together for so long that the group's finely honed guitar textures (and familiar voices) make for a surprisingly revealing addition to the mix. These are no musical amateurs. Cage's music in particular demands a kind of haiku-like perfect placement of musical elements and the band demonstrates on no less than three tracks that it knows where to put what and when. Even Steve Reich's "Pendulum Music", a composition for a swinging, feedback-prone microphone and speakers seems somehow sweetly melodic in the loving hands of these millennial kids.