Sonic Youth

Ranaldo was already playing in Glenn Branca's electric guitar ensemble when Moore joined him there too, absorbing a vocabulary neither man dropped afterward. "We were combining elements of all of these different things...but also things we learned from these art music composers like Rhys Chatham, Glenn Branca, Philip Glass, Steve Reich," Ranaldo told Red Bull Music Academy, describing how the group tuned guitars into "all these weird tunings" and played with "drumsticks and screwdrivers under our strings." When Branca needed a label for his own records, funded by the gallerist Josh Baer, he caught one of the trio's earliest gigs and made Sonic Youth its first release.

listen: upstream & heresource: Red Bull Music Academy Daily — Interview ↗share

1981

The AscensionGlenn Branca

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1983

Shaking HellSonic Youth

listen forBranca's title track stacks a dozen detuned electric guitars until the overtones ring like a cathedral organ threatening to topple — nothing resembles a riff, only rising, clashing drone. Sonic Youth compress that same appetite onto two guitars: on "Shaking Hell," Moore and Ranaldo grind against each other in tunings that refuse to resolve, feedback bleeding under Kim Gordon's half-spoken vocal. Listen for the shared premise — harmonic clash treated as the point, not a mistake waiting to be fixed.

Moore has described the pull of the Velvet Underground as one of the reasons he moved to New York, drawn by what the band represented the city to be — "a really mysterious kind of environment," he told American Masters, "this real underground of poets and writers and musicians doing kind of radical work." His first New York band, the Coachmen, copied the Velvets' rapid downstroke strum directly off the records. It was years before Moore learned that Lou Reed and John Cale had built that sound on alternate guitar tunings borrowed from the composer La Monte Young — the same trick that became Sonic Youth's own signature.

listen: upstream & hereshare

1967

HeroinThe Velvet Underground

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1986

Expressway to Yr. SkullSonic Youth

listen forMoore has pointed to "Heroin" specifically: the two guitars lock into what he called "almost like a unison string tuning," droning under John Cale's viola as the song accelerates into noise and stalls back to a whisper. "Expressway to Yr. Skull" runs a version of the same trick — Ranaldo and Moore's guitars droning in unison tunings that curdle into feedback before the song dissolves into pure hum, a slow-motion replay of the same climb and collapse.

Moore was sixteen in rural Connecticut when he saw a photograph of Iggy Pop "standing on people's hands, his body spray-painted silver, pointing out to the skies," he later wrote in his memoir Sonic Life. "It was like, What is this? I needed to hear what that image sounded like." He learned the songs on a secondhand Stratocaster, and the debt came due in public in 1987, when Sonic Youth crashed a Boston benefit show and tore into the Stooges' own "I Wanna Be Your Dog," Kim Gordon on vocals, J Mascis of the noise-rock band Dinosaur Jr. sitting in on guitar.

listen: upstream & heresource: mxdwn Music — Sonic Youth covers the Stooges' "I Wanna Be Your Dog," 1987 (Boston cover show, Kim Gordon/J Mascis) ↗share

1969

I Wanna Be Your DogThe Stooges

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1987

I Wanna Be Your Dog (live, The Rat, Boston)Sonic Youth

listen forThe Stooges' original rides three sludgy chords under a sleigh bell and a single-note hook that never resolves, Iggy Pop crooning the title in a stoned deadpan. Sonic Youth's cover keeps that hook nearly note for note but buries it in scraped, detuned feedback, with Gordon delivering the same come-on flat and toneless rather than horny — the menace intact, the wink replaced by a sneer. It's a teenage record collection turning into a live dare.