Today, Thurston Moore unveiled his latest solo project, Flow Critical Lucidity, an album that encapsulates his signature guitar-driven charm and dives deep into his experimental roots.
The September 20 release marks another fascinating chapter in the illustrious career of an artist who has woven the tapestry of his music with the threads of New York's vibrant no wave scene since his teenage years in the mid-'70s.
Moore's journey has been one of constant evolution, intersecting with countless facets of New York's indie arts. From legendary gigs at CBGBs and the Mudd Club to watching William S. Burroughs stalk the neighborhood streets and being drafted into Glenn Branca’s guitar orchestra, his story is deeply embedded in the city's art mythos. Alongside then-partner Kim Gordon, Moore formed the legendary Sonic Youth eventually joined by Lee Ranaldo and Steve Shelley. Through decades, lineup shifts, 15 LPs and countless experimental releases, the band transcended the boundaries of punk and outsider art, drawing influences from figures as diverse as Joni Mitchell and John Cage.
Their 1988 release, Daydream Nation, is likely their best-known, an epic triumph beloved by adventurous fans worldwide that has placed on countless "greatest albums ever" lists and influenced musicians and artists of many different disciplines.
Even when his work had made its way to major labels and international acclaim, Moore has never shied away from the avant-garde — from hours of guitar feedback to audacious records where he and his bandmates hammer nails into piano keys. From "Teen Age Riot" to "Kool Thing", and "100%," he’s co-written some of the most iconic indie rock songs of a generation as part of Sonic Youth and has also released pieces that question the very definition of music.
Both during and after the dissolution of Sonic Youth, and following his move from New York to London — where he runs the book publishing house Ecstatic Peace Library and the record label Daydream Library Series with his partner, Eva Prinz — Moore's voracious appetite for creating new, exciting art persists. Flow Critical Lucidity exemplifies this relentless pursuit, bridging past influences with futuristic sounds in a sublime stretch of spacey rock.
Every conversation with Moore reveals an encyclopedic knowledge of experimental art and more inspiring anecdotes than one could dream of — and this one is no different.
As Moore prepares for the release, GRAMMY.com caught up with him to reflect on his storied career and ever-changing landscape of experimental art, the history of no wave cinema, his evolving assessment of his own vocals, and his decision to say goodbye to New York.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
The art for your new album is based on a Jamie Nares piece, and I know you mention her in your memoir alongside no wave filmmakers like Vivienne Dick and Scott B and Beth B — a scene that you described as "a community that became only more alluring to me in their smart and erotic subversion." I mean, even just reading that is appealing.
Yeah. Downtown New York in the late '70s had the initial CBGB and Max's punk scene with Patti [Smith] and Blondie and Talking Heads, Ramones and Television, Richard Hell. There was a concurrent community of younger artists and musicians, and they got tagged with the genre of being no wave. And no wave wasn't something that came out of punk or new wave. It actually coexisted as even more challenging music. Punk really was a rock and roll music, whereas no wave was absolutely not a rock and roll music. It was just using the instrumentation of it, but the players were approaching the instruments without any semblance of traditional tropes.
That fascinated a lot of people who were already in New York City, downtown, in the art scene coming out of minimalist and conceptual art practices. Some of these artists are filmmakers, and they're very attracted to these bands that are creating a new way of playing music in complete resistance to the standards of expectation with traditionalism. No wave becomes a real pride of definition for them in some of the visual art. Super 8 and 16 millimeter movie cameras were affordable cameras. The film was somewhat affordable from certain film labs downtown. And you could make either silent, or if you're really audacious, sound movies that weren’t expensive. It wasn't any more expensive than making a 7-inch. And so these no wave filmmakers had a space on St. Mark's Place, just a ratty little storefront where they would show these movies. Some were better than others, let's put it that way, but the idea was that they were doing it and it was being done fast and it was using just the local people on the scene as actors. And some of them became serious filmmakers. I mean, Jim Jarmusch came out of that scene.
Jamie Nares was living in Manhattan and making these interesting films at the time, utilizing some of the no wave musicians as actors and actresses. Her films had a certain character about them because she had a really specific focus on what she wanted to present. It wasn't just having fun and slapdash. Some of the films were really affecting and really interesting. Also, if you look at the back of No New York, the compilation album that Brian Eno recorded of some of the bands on the downtown scene at that point, Jamie was the first guitar player in the Contortions.
What was it about Nare's work specifically that really burrowed into you and led to this cover?
Well, the work actually on the cover of the record is maybe not that indicative of what people usually know about Jamie Nares today. A lot of her work is really in the realm of painting, fairly large canvases with huge swaths of energy, paint streaking across them. They're very dancey and poetic.
I went to her retrospective [in Milwaukee], and noticed that some of her earlier sculptures were there, and one of them was that helmet with the tuning forks sticking out of it. I just thought it was so evocative and beautiful, this idea of taking a military implement and recontextualizing it as an article of communication and music. Jamie’s piece is called "Samurai Walkman," and I toyed with calling the album that. But I really liked calling the record Flow Critical Lucidity, taken from a lyric Eva [Prinz] had written. She wrote lyrics to five out of the seven songs on the record. The line reminded me of something that would come out of the pen of Mark E. Smith of the Fall. Even though that's the last thing I think Eva was considering. She writes under the pseudonym Radieux Radio, and always has, since The Best Day record in 2014. It's been really wonderful because it's this other voice that I get to work with. It's a voice that's decidedly not a white male voice. It's a feminist voice. And I really embrace that because I think that really gives the music that much more strength.
What do you appreciate most about Eva's purview as a writer and lyricist?
There's a certain joy to the intellect of nature that she is able to put into words that I find really endearing and alluring and smart. I tend to be a little more thorny, maybe a little more…I don't know, no wave sassy. I'll add a little bit to what she does and vice versa. It's a really great collaboration. We collaborate mostly on publishing books. She was a senior book editor at Rizzoli, Abrams, and Taschen. So that to me is really enjoyable, publishing books and actually putting some records up by new bands.
What else do you have on tap?
Well, this record of mine is on our label, Daydream Library [Series]. We put out a new record by Devon Ross, a young singer/songwriter from Los Angeles. She's an actress and a model, and she was in this limited TV series called "Irma Vep" that the filmmaker Olivier Assayas made for HBO with Alicia Vikander. I met her at screenings and she said she had music. People send me music all the time, and I'm usually like, "Yeah, sure." There's not that much I'm that interested in facilitating. I used to put a lot of records out through the '80s and '90s, but when we moved to London, I cooled down on it. And then we saw this band called Big Joanie, which was these three Black English girls who have a really amazing political punk band. We put out their first two records, and now Devon Ross is the latest that we put out.
Eva listened to it first and said, "It's really good." I listened to it and I agreed. We put an EP out, and it's become really buzzy. She has this great band, and it's really just noisy, sonic punk pop music. There's a couple of bands in Miami that we put records out by. There's a shoegaze Caribbean kind of band called the Sea Foam Walls I really like. And there's an all-girl band there called Las Nubes, which means the clouds en español. They sing in Spanish and English, and they're very much part of the Miami punk scene that is primarily bilingual. We put out a record by the drummer of the Ex, the anarcho-punk band from Holland… we put out a CD of her sound healing music.
We put out whatever we want. We're just an indie label out of our London flat, and we make books whenever we get enough coin to do something. We've done a few memoirs, one by David Toop, an experimental musician here in London. We're doing another one with Maggie Nicols, who since the late '60s has been in the forefront of free improvisation music here in England. We keep ourselves busy, but we try not to stretch ourselves too thin at the same time.
Right now, I just want to stay in one place and continue writing because I really enjoyed writing the memoir. And now I'm heads down, putting the finishing touches on a novel that I hope to get published, if somebody bites. It takes place in the early '80s in downtown New York City, just characters.
I bet that in its own way there’s some memoir to that, too.
A little bit, yeah, a little bit. I certainly realized that I had to place it in an environment that I could be intimate with.
When you’re back in New York City and walking around, is it recognizable at all to you from 50 years ago?
Especially the deeper in the Lower East Side you go, there are certain walls or corners where you can flash back on the '70s, early '80s. The city was far dirtier then, a little more lawless. And in that respect, you never really felt that safe. But when you're young, it's like you're somewhat invincible anyway. So I don't really miss it at the age I am now. I'd rather be living underneath an olive tree somewhere in northern Italy than having to live on East Broadway or something. But it's also a matter of financial stability. If somebody offered me some fabulous place in Manhattan, or anywhere in New York City, free of charge, I might swoop on it.
But I like living in London. We really love it. There's no guns here really. That's a real plus. I'm just really waiting to see what the elections are going to be in November as far as how safe I feel the USA is because I have such anxiety about that. We're flying in the day before the election just to vote.
I know you’ve shared that you’re dealing with a heart condition, too. Has that cleared to the point that you can travel?
Another reason why I'll be coming in at the end of the year is because I still have to go under the knife a bit. But it's nothing critical. It's just an ablation thing. People have AFib [atrial fibrillation] and irregular heartbeats and stuff, and sometimes you have to go in there and put a stent in. It's an operation that's done all day every day. Its success rate is 99%. I have more of a chance of falling out the window tonight. It still means that I can't do too much else. So I'm not going to really be doing much touring. But like I said, I prefer actually writing. I want to get into writer mode more so than getting into a van and crisscrossing the planet and playing in beer halls. I've done that a lot.
I'll play some specific shows as long as they are interesting. I like playing in special places like in churches, and certain festivals are cool.
Can you talk about building the sound on Flow Critical Lucidity? There are parts of it that conjure The Stooges’ "We Will Fall," or something like that.
Yeah, it does have that vibe. I demoed a lot of it on a small digital recorder that I figured out how to use because I'm pretty much a Luddite with this stuff. I allowed the musicians to create parts to what I was doing. I was using digital drum patterns just so I could have a drum pattern, and sometimes I would pick these really weirdo drum patterns. So something like the song "We Get High" has that "We Will Fall" drum rhythm. And my drummer, Jem Daulton, listened to that and he recreated it himself, or at least what that vibe was. We used a studio called Total Refreshment Centre in North London that the Chicago label International Anthem uses as their English studio. It has that kind of new cosmic dub vibe.
Then there’s Jon Leidecker, who's an electronics musician who's in the band, he's actually processing some of the inputs and outputting them in a specific way and adding some electronic flourishes. He records under the name Wobbly and is a member of Negativland. That, and also the engineer, Margo Broom, was really instrumental in how that record sounded. She had recorded, mixed, and mastered Big Joanie, and I really liked how those records were sounding. She's a genius, and she really made this record sound the way it sounds. Watching her work, she was just so smart and so expedient, and she really knew my history as a musician. Even working with the vocals, I always hate my vocals because I feel like I'm being very challenged by how to stay in key to all this finicky music. I was really impressed how she was treating the vocals and making it work. And she said, "Well, I've been listening to your vocals since I was 10 years old."
How did you treat singing back in the '80s? Were you just not self-conscious about it? Because you sound comfortable on this.
It was through fits and starts that I had some realization of how to present myself as a vocalist. I never felt like I reached a point where I feel like I am comfortable with it, and I regret not actually focusing on that more seriously as I did with everything else. When it came to getting on the mic, I just thought, well, it's either going to work or it's not. And then I realized, no, there's a lot of discipline. There's a lot of practice that you can put into this. When I see Nick Cave sit down at a piano and start singing, it’s clear this is somebody who's really focused on how to be a singer. I regret that I didn't focus more on that because I think there's such a power there.
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When you would see punk bands in the late '80s, early '90s, it was like, "Okay, the singers can be good, or they can be not so good, but the collective is what it's all about." But at the same time, a band like Nirvana comes out, and they’re a great band, but they’re not altogether that different from a lot of other bands that they associated with. What's really raising the level is that singer's voice and how that singer is getting on the microphone. Kurt's voice was just something else entirely. Nobody was singing like that. When I first heard him, I was like, "Oh, he's doing a Lemmy from Motörhead thing but in the context of a Pacific Northwest punk thing. That's brilliant." But it was so much more than that because it was soul shredding and it was beautiful.
So I always thought, in my case, I can be a serviceable singer more than a remarkable singer. There's only a few people who can be remarkable singers. It's like wanting to speak another language. I wish I could speak another language. I wish I could sing with the same astounding resonance as Billie Holiday or Joni Mitchell. But I ignored that.
I'm very conscious of that when I make a record now. Like, "I'm going to do my best here." But when I listen to live tapes, I'm just like, "Man, nobody's going to get fooled into thinking that I'm Jim Morrison." I used to complain about Steve Albini's vocal mixes. It was all about really slamming drums and guitars and stuff like that. And I love Steve, but I was like, "The vocals kind of suffer because everything else is just blasting." And his response was, "Well, listen, most of these singers I record, very few of them are Paul McCartneys." And he's right about that. But also it's like, "Well, maybe you should try to make them Paul McCartneys. Let's figure this out. Take some singing lessons."
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Back in 1985 or '86, we were doing some gig and this musician came up to me and she goes, "There’s nothing wrong with taking singing lessons. You should try singing and not screaming or shouting." I was really just in shock. I was like, "Wow. I never even thought about that." Early on, I was just yelling into the microphone. Of course, there was a lot of din going on on stage. You had to yell to get heard because the sound systems couldn't deal with the blasting guitar noise. But it made me think, "You're right, that would make it better."
I assumed this would be a long answer so I saved it for the end, but what are you listening to and reading lately that’s turning you on?
I take cues from other young poets that I see in social media sharing what they're reading and then sending away for those books. I love that whole culture of literature. There's a lot of mainstream literature I think is great. I think Colson Whitehead continues to be one of the great writers that we have in the USA, if not the world. Even this trio of genre novels that he's been working on, that second one, Harlem Shuffle, was really, really fun to read and really extremely artful and for me, a great course in how to write fiction, just by reading a book like that.
And listening, I know I just constantly take cues again from different people I entrust with their tastes of buying records on Bandcamp. I generally tend towards buying more experimental music, the whole continuing underground aesthetics that you might hear coming out of the Wolf Eyes world. I still think that's where some great music is happening. I don't really listen to too much straight ahead, compositional rock and roll music. I feel like I've so decoded a lot of that kind of songwriting that I don't find myself listening to it for any sense of wonder.
Sometimes I'll spend an hour or two just putting things on, playing them at a commanding volume, and I'll just sit there and look at the record cover. Sometimes it leads me into being really intrigued by other people on the record, and I'll go into Discogs and find out all the other work they've done. That's what I really adore about the internet. You can actually do this research while you're processing the work. The internet was always an ideal coming out of the hippie mindset anyway, wasn't it? It's just been corporatized and monetized beyond any recognition of such a thing. But it does exist.