SYR是Sonic Youth乐队在1997年成立的独立厂牌(Sonic Youth Records),以作为专门出版其Avant-Garde作品,把以Sonic Youth名义发表的前卫音乐作品全纳入SYR旗下,实行建立起其Avant-Garde音乐品牌。
过去SYR在1997年至2000年间出版过的五款出品,分别有Sonic Youth的Anagrama(SYR 1)和Slaapkamers Met Slagroom(SYR 2),Sonic Youth与Jim O’Rourke合作(彷佛为Jim在2001年正式加入Sonic Youth露出端倪)的Invito Al Cielo(SYR 3),他们向二十世纪前卫作曲家致敬的双唱片专辑Godbye 20th Century(SYR 4)以及其低音结他手Kim Gordon、纽约Illbient制作人DJ Oliver 和前DNA的日籍女将Ikue Mori三人联诀带来的同名专辑(SYR 5)。这批SYR的出品,可以反映到Sonic Youth对创作偏锋实验音乐的野心与冒险精神仍未减退、对即兴演奏与噪音美学的义无反顾态度,得以尽情地表现出他们的Avant-Garde音乐风骨。
Part of the "Perspectives Musicales"-series as "ミュ乛ジャル パ一スペスティブ"
Recorded at Tribeca Recording Center, NYC. Mixed at Sterling Sound, NYC.
© 2000 Riptorn Music admin. by Zomba Music/BMI
UPC: 7 87996 90052 0
When Free Kitten took an extended sabbatical following their second album, Kim Gordon spent her spare time outside Sonic Youth putting together a new trio with two other luminaries from the New York downtown scene: former drummer of no-wave legends DNA, Ikue Mori, and turntablist extraordinaire DJ Olive of We and Liminal (not to mention the coiner of the term "illbient"). The trio started playing together in 1999, arriving at a sonic concept before recording their debut album (the first recording on SYR not by Sonic Youth proper) with engineer Whaton Tiers and jack-of-all-trades Jim O'Rourke. As can be expected with the involved parties, it is an artsy, exploratory effort, but it is also somewhat more than just the sum of its parts. The music is full of stops and starts, short snatches of funkified low-end that dissipate as quick as they begin, and ringing alien sounds, all spun into a post-apocalyptic, cyberconscious milieu of indeterminate time and space, a razed wasteland of alternately glistening and metallic washes of sound. "Paperbag/Orange Laptop" is a jumble of slammed-door percussion and turntable trickery, with Gordon's angular, open-ended guitar doodles perhaps the closest the album comes to melody. Gradually the song opens up with womb-like surrealism: a Miles Davis trumpet flare sounds off in the distance, water droplets turn into alien voices. "Olive's Horn" begins as the musical equivalent to a Close Encounters-like UFO landing, but it is washed away as if it were a dream by a pair of sorrowful alto saxes that close the song. That is how the album works in general. No style, whether it is fashionably electronic or the quaint flourishes of jazz, sticks around long enough to take precedence. They bleed into each other like life sounds. Where the album could have just been fashionably futuristic sound effects and garbled avant-noise, it becomes a fascinating tangle. The sonic manipulation creates its own narrative, while Gordon's singing weaves in and out of the sound with a ghostly beauty that recalls experimental free vocalists such as Patty Waters or Joan LaBradford. The music is an exercise in deconstruction, to be sure, and is not exactly easy listening, but it is also a relentlessly expressive dismantling of sound that doesn't leave a listener spent just for trying to follow its headiness. What could have been a bleak soundscape becomes a maze, both intriguing and disorienting, a jungle where black-lit eyes stare back at you from the bushes.