Earlier this month, Larry caught up with Lee Ranaldo from the iconic group Sonic Youth, who will return to Australia next month for the local premiere of his new work Hurricane Transcriptions (Last Night on Earth) exclusively at the Sydney Festival. We talk about the composition, his recent work with his band The Dust and we look back on some Sonic Youth experiences in Australia in the 1990s… read on!
I understand you’ve just returned home from your European tour?
Yeah, I just came back from Europe yesterday touring with my band (The Dust) in support of our latest record, Last Night on Earth. We were touring the US in October, then most of November in Europe and we’re about to head over to the West Coast (of the US) for a run of shows. That’s been the main thing I’ve been involved in at the moment, we’ve been spending a lot of time touring that. We even went over to India to play shows in September.
Then after the next week and a half (of shows on the West Coast) I will have a break before coming down to Australia to work on something totally different!
Before we talk about that, I’d like to talk about your experiences in India briefly. How did that part of the world treat you and the band?
Well, we played shows in clubs in Delhi and Bombay (Mumbai), and they were pretty normal clubs, they were good. But the main reason we were brought over was to play at this young festival called the Ziro Festival of Music. It’s in this place called the Ziro valley, which is in the middle of nowhere! It took 16 hours of driving from the nearest town to get there, on the lousy Indian roads, with crazy local drivers. But once we got there it was one of the most beautiful, remote places I’ve ever been to on the earth.
It was far Eastern India, so it was more like being in South East Asia than being in India, it was all rice paddies, and people were a mix of Tibetan, Vietnamese and Thai… it was really fascinating. We spent about six days out there, it was unbelievable. And we were the only Western band on the lineup of the three day event, with 25 or 30 Indian bands. So it was a truly unique experience for us. They’re trying to grow it into something that more Western bands will come and play. So as far as I know this was their first experience with a Western band.
It wasn’t an easy trip, but it was a fascinating one. I’d been wanting to go there for a long, long time. So it was quite rewarding for me.
It’s an incredible part of the world. And as the growing middle class of under 30s really delve deeper and deeper into Western music, the possibilities for the region are endless.
I completely agree with you there.
So as we alluded to before, we’re here to talk about her recent work Hurricane Transcriptions, which will see its Australian premiere as part of the Sydney Festival, inspired by the devastation of Hurricane Sandy. I guess to start, how did this project come about?
I had been invited by a Berlin based group called Kaleidoscope, that are a fourteen piece string ensemble, to produce a piece for them. And I’d been mulling it over for a while, and I had some things started on guitars and what not for them. Then the storm hit and on the day of the storm, I was in my loft in New York and I was hearing all this crazy stuff out my window, as the storm built in intensity. It sounded like music to me…. sometimes distorted and other times very beautiful; it sounded like voices, like crazy alien instruments, and I was intrigued by what was going on. I believe it was the wind rushing between the buildings, and going up and down the fire escapes, and things like that.
Many years ago I’d spent some time investigating these wind string instruments called Aeolian Harps that the Greeks used to build. They’d stretch strings on a windy section of the coastline and the wind would play the strings basically, it would vibrate the strings and make tunes happen. And so much in the same way, it felt like the city was being played by the hurricane in that manner.
So I got my rain gear on and my little digital recorder, and went out into the middle of the storm – well, just before the height of the storm, really – and walked around my neighbourhood, recording a bunch of sounds. And by the time I’d gotten over to the west side highway, by the river, the water was spilling over the top of the river onto the roads and it was just before things started getting out of hand. So I made it back to my house and transcribed the stuff I’d heard and recorded onto the piano and I left it for a few days, at which point I realised I could possibly utilise that material for the piece I was being asked to write.
I should say that the piece was at this point being co-commissioned by the ensemble in Berlin, the Holland Festival in Amsterdam and the Sydney Festival. We had the premiere in Amsterdam in June, and we’re reworking it slightly for the ensemble that we’ll have in Sydney – there’s going to be more than just string players there. So I’m working with a good orchestral arranger here at home on that.
The hard thing for us has been figuring it out how to write it in a way that’s faithful to what I want, and still has a different attitude at work there when placed in front of orchestral players and classical musicians, compared to the rock and roll people I’m used to working with. So depending on the nature of the ensemble, if it’s got a bunch of adventurous players, you can get really great things to happen. But you can also find yourself working with musicians who don’t want to play anything that’s not written and don’t want to add anything that’s not on the page so to speak. And I’m definitely asking for more than that from the ensemble.
Will you have a bit of time in Sydney before the show, to rehearse?
Yeah we have a few rehearsals together before the show.
I know you have a few shows along the East Coast of the US just before you come down, too…
Yeah literally just before. Play a few shows in New York and then fly down for it!
So how was the performance in Holland received?
Yeah it was good! I had a good week with that ensemble before hand; more time than I’ll have in Sydney. But still, we practically didn’t have a completely run through of the piece before the performance, but everything went so nicely in the performance. When I was writing the piece following the hurricane, I was without power, so I was writing a lot of the music on my acoustic guitar by candlelight. From that I ended up deciding to challenge the ensemble by dividing the abstract hurricane sections that I wrote for them into three sections, and inter-cut them with three songs.
So the piece has this back and forth movement that invokes being out in the storm and the maybe you’re being a glass window, looking onto the storm, from the secure confines of a warm house. Some of the songs evoke that in the lyrics. So the abstract sections bounce back and forth a few times with these songs.
Since I’ve mostly been preoccupied by songwriting for my last couple of records, I wanted to find a way to incorporate that into the performance.
With these songs, is this pretty much just that – you and a guitar – or will there be other things at play, too?
Well it’s the whole ensemble backing me up. I don’t know where we’ll end up in Sydney but in Amsterdam, we sang the three songs with the ensemble – I was on acoustic guitar for one, electric for the next and for the third I just sang, backed by the string ensemble. So that was a very new thing for me, as well. I think having them play songs was a new thing for them as well.
You mentioned of course your latest record with The Dust, is there any chance you’ll be able to perform any shows with them while you’re down here in Australia?
Well you know I tried very hard to make that happen, especially because I’m coming down around the time of Big Day Out and Laneway Festival and all this other stuff. But because of that it seemed like every promoter we spoke to was chock-a-block full up with things around that period. I tried for some solo acoustic shows too at something like MONO FOMA (in Tasmania), and many things like that but unfortunately none of them worked out!
There is a slight chance I’ll be doing a surprise solo electric guitar improv at one of the Sydney Festival venues on the day after the performance. But that hasn’t been locked in yet. I do a piece on electic guitar where I hang it from the ceiling, and fling it around like a big pendulum. It’s quite a dramatic improv piece, and usually goes down really well with audiences. So I think they’re going to see if that can be done or even just an acoustic set, I’m not sure.
How long has it been since you last performed in Australia?
Well I was down there with The Dust in October 2012, so it’ll have just been a year and a few months between visits.
What was that experience like for you?
It was really good. We had just switched bass players and the unit has really tightened up with the addition of this new guy, Tim Lüntzel who’s playing with us now. We were just starting to play a few of the songs that ended up on our latest record, Last Night on Earth, and I felt like we had some really great shows everywhere down there. I really love coming to Australia. I’ve had a relationship with friends and other musicians down there for a long time and for me it’s always one of the most fun places to travel to. So to be able to come down there with my own band – I’d obviously come down there many times with Sonic Youth – and once or twice on my own… I worked with You Am I as well… it was an awful lot of fun for me.
Just looking through some of those earlier tours you did, and there was one event that popped out for me – a festival you did in 1995 (Summersault Festival) with what looks like the greatest lineup I’ve ever seen… Beastie Boys, Beck, Breeders, Pavement, The Ants, Bikini Kill…
Oh yeah! That one. We played in Sydney on New Years Eve as part of that run I think. It was Steve Pav’s thing (now of Modular records). Summersault… what a super fun festival. It was really one with all of our buddies…
I wish I was there! What a lineup. Well it’ll be great to have you down here, I can’t wait to see the piece… and having been caught in Sandy myself, I’m sure I’ll have my own relationship with it.
I hope it works out to be a good performance when we’re down there, I hope you enjoy it and I hope it brings back some memories for you… well, the better ones of that time!
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Lee Ranaldo will present the Australian premiere of his new work Hurricane Transcriptions (Last Night on Earth), a piece composed in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, alongside Mike Patton’s Laborintus II on January 16th at City Recital Hall Angel Place for Sydney Festival. More details about the performance and tickets can be found here: http://www.sydneyfestival.org.au/2014/Music/Hurricane-Transcriptions-Laborintus-II/
