Kim Gordon’s voice cascades dreamily over the liquid guitars in “In & Out.” Steve Shelley plays a muted but active beat, clicking on the rims and rumbling on the toms, so that it sounds like a herd of wild horses pounding over a beach miles away. The cut is classic, late-period Sonic Youth and, with a little polish, could have slid into any number of albums from Murray Street on. In fact, it’s one of the last bits of music ever recorded by Sonic Youth, laid down at a soundcheck in California just before the domestic bomb that blew this band to pieces.
In/Out/In collects five such tracks, all improvised by the band between 2000 and 2010, a reminder that Sonic Youth was always making music and, often, tape was running. There’s likely to be lots more where this came from, as one of…
…the great ongoing art rock projects of the late 20th and early 21st centuries moves into a shadowy afterlife of posthumous reissues.
And yet, these cuts are so live, so fresh, so untouched by all the years they’ve been in storage. The earliest two, from 2000, are from the Jim O’Rourke period. “Social Static” juxtaposes striated layers of feedback in a free-flowing roar and twitter and scree of sound. “Out & In” is more lyrical, a strummed guitar kicking up an undulating melody, while another picks out glittery dissonances; it slouches and undulates for 12 minutes, piling tone on tone on tone, so that the after-images bend the light into rainbows.
You can hear band members pushing out the corners of these elastic grooves, finding the places where the music can be bent and shifted and expanded without skewing the structure. Players have an intuitive sense of what their counterparts are about to do, so that there’s no audible adjustment, just a steady, ever-evolving flow. Even the shortest, most riff-centric cut, “Machine” admits of wide-ranging possibilities, as guitars arc off the solid foundation of chug and clatter, seeking give within the melody.
It all reminds you of how great a band Sonic Youth was, even at play, even at home trying out tunings and motifs, tossing one idea out into the amplifiers and hearing it echoed, altered, elaborated by tuned-in others. It’s a pity they’re not still doing it, but the vaults are full of new-old music and it will be a while before we run out.