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Unfazed, steely-dreamy, surely about 5’4’’ if not shorter, Kim Gordon remains one of the most durable celebrities we’ve still got. Who else has managed to marry the bric-a-brac of New York’s highly haloed rock history with a fantasy mixture of art and theater bona fides, the mysterious ingredients of cult magnetism and the magically casual disposition necessary to hurl it further futureward in her 70th year?queenliest among the rampant boy-and-girl wonders that dominated the southerly part of Manhattan back when Basquiat and Lydia Lunch were just people you might run into on a Wednesday after midnight.
We are in the part of the city she laid claim to years ago, and being there was making her reflective. “I think I’m seeing things a little bit like revisionist history,” she says, staring out at the dirty diorama in front of her. “I like that it’s still freaks-only out here, for sure, but sometimes, those days are weirder and harder to access than you think.” Suspicion toward the past is a sensible disposition for a woman whose new album tampers with the screws of memory.does this not exactly by bolting those screws all the way down, but by twisting them partially—allowing some seepage from history, and some flow from the imagined future, but mostly by honoring a current coming from an uncanny, lived-in present. For the uninitiated, it’s not exactlyKim Gordon album to begin with—try anything else from Sonic Youth’s 15 studio albums and seven EPs, Gordon’s ‘90s solo work in Free Kitten, evenis not really about getting to know Gordon anyway. This is more like a flight—from time, but with it too.We were early. The “funny old Chinese mall” where she’d planned to poke around was mostly empty at that time of day, and now, stepping out from the deserted storefront to wind among the streets that noisily sold octopi, pomelos in cling film, woody lotus roots, and pyramids of yams, her croissant-colored head bobbed as it began rerouting us through the lower bits of the Lower East Side. “I wish I was better at Chinese,” she said.,'” she recalled with a smile. “I’d get kicked out of any shop here if I could remember them.” These days, her dominant language is still Californian. She’s spending this year in L.A.—a mirror to her teen years there in the ‘70s—and the state has blessed her with that sticky, golden accent, which remains one of her most crucial musical tricks. On all her tracks, it sounds like she’s sun-drunk, vocal cords thrashed by saltwater, adenoidal. You’ll hear that voice onbut when it speaks in normal human sentences, it’s a low shrug of a thing that mounts a small gallery of feeling: bemused to bored to charmed to solipsistic. Recollection has been the chief activity at her home in Los Angeles’ Los Feliz neighborhood of late, where she’s been enjoying long stretches of solitude and reading a lot of Marguerite Duras. “Lots of writing,” she nodded. “It’s nice to be quiet and claustrophobic sometimes.” Much of this evening seclusion—or as Duras wrote, meditative hours spent under “electric light, and the room in shadow”—has impelledThe title is mononymic because he’s her great totem, a stand-in for fear, male garrulity, growing up in L.A., the power he held over her. But also because he’s the sort of figure she wants to fold up and put aside. There’s a part in a recently publishedwhere a man at the crematorium, filling out Keller’s death certificate, asks her what his job was. She wrote: “I said he never worked, he was schizophrenic. The man pressed me on it and said my brother had to have an occupation, so I said he was a poet. Next question: ‘How many years did he do that for?’” “I think I know my inheritance from him by now,” she says to me. “He wasn’t an original, but he was sort of a romantic—to me, he just represents so much stunted potential. I guess I wanted to take his unselfconsciousness, and I think I learned how to reach it by performing it over and over again. I learned by doing.” She walks in a mystic’s manner—serenely reflective, head lowered. She’s wearing a wool beret and a cardigan with buttons that look like Sicilian coinage. With eyeliner tightlined just on her bottom lids, she looks the part too. Keller’s only a part of the history she’s bewitched behind her. When she’s reminded that we’re only five minutes from her famous old apartment, the one where in 1981 she’d formed a band with her ex-husband that would shift the nature of American music, she laughs. Time really was the anima of Sonic Youth. They were post-everything, inasmuch as they mixed and matriculated genre and warped and screwed it until their music sounded like avant-garde played as if it were scraggly guitar rock with the occasional yowling of punk. It wasn’t so much a severance but a maceration of underground music’s prevailing styles at the time. When Sonic Youth broke up in 2011, Kim formed Body/Head with collaborator Bill Nance, and their polytonal, bluesy, arrhythmic stretches of improvisational songs felt like a swallowing and smashing of even“So much of avant-garde—or really any music—is made out of making accidents,” she says, navigating southbound. Has she always been drawn to intense, doomy walls-of-sounds because they offer her safety? “Painters don’t like to start on a white canvas, and adding structure anywhere can sometimes be…” “effective.” Noise offers her a framework for embellishment, destruction, and inspection. “Really,” she said, “I just want to damage sounds as much as I can.”When she’s reminded that we’re only five minutes from her famous old apartment, the one where in 1981 she’d formed a band with her ex-husband that would shift the nature of American music, she laughs.grim ponderings, and drum beats zooted enough to warrant comparisons to Playboi Carti, Suicide, and Einstürzende Neubauten, is certainly in line with Kim’s usual sledgehammer sonic approach. It’s her second LP made with producers Justin Raisen and his younger brother, Jeremiah, who share a CV studded with artists like 6ix9ine, Charli XCX, and Yves Tumor. These are performers who live on a particularly left-field island of clangy pop, who adore noise sensibilities and seem to focus their bloodletting energy around lyrics usually delivering some sort of chilly poem. They make the Top 40 feel like a place for disgorgement.the unholy doodling of digital guitar filters and trappy, trashy drums—the types of sounds Justin Raisen calls a product of “Jack-Nicholson-in-This work demanded more out of him than any collaborative juncture with his spring chicken-y upstarts, he said, because “they have a different attitude, and a different history. With Kim, it’s like working with John Cale,” for whom he also produces. “He’s insanely fucking crazy on his shit,” he added warmly. “The point is to make them feel like they’re doing something at least two steps away from what they think they want. If you can get them to feel like, ‘this is me, like this is“I think all the sounds Justin makes for me are funny,” Kim shrugged, back on the street in Chinatown. Despite someis a deepening of everything she's been doing. Rock was bored down to its most elemental state right when she started making music—primitive percussion, monkey-brain emotions, guitars intentionally off-tune and broken. The album’s lead single “BYE BYE” sounds like a scrapheap oftrap drums shoved up against a cheap tape recorder, all with the energy of a Rottweiler on the loose. Raisen’s production, which provides a contained rumpus area in which Gordon can thrash around, demands heavy contrapuntal poetry. Writing lyrics has always been a complex affair off a stack. “Um. Yes.” Coco reddened. “They didn’t look amazing on me.”
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