Sonic Youth Dig Through Vaults
In addition to the release of their new album, Murray
Street, next month, Sonic Youth have begun work on a trio of
reissues, the first of which, Dirty, is scheduled for
release this summer. The band has been pouring through unreleased
demos and songs for the series, which will see Dirty,
Daydream Nation and Goo remastered and reissued
with new liner notes and a bonus CD of new material.
“It’s pretty much together,” singer-guitarist Thurston Moore
says of the new Dirty. “We weren’t too interested in
putting live stuff on there; it would take forever to go through
it. But there’s lots of sort of weird stuff that we had on
eight-track tape, like demos of us working out songs. And there’s a
couple of pieces that never came to fruition during the songwriting
of that record that we discovered that we thought were kind of
interesting. And there are all the B-sides that sort of existed
around then. They’ll be fully loaded, that’s for sure.”
The band members have been sifting through video for a tour
movie compiled from footage during its 1986 tour behind
EVOL. They have also asked fans with audiotapes from four
shows during that tour to lend them to the project. “It’s really
ninety-nine percent there,” Moore says. “We’ve tinkered with it
through the years and then it’ll go on the shelf for months on end.
In a way it’s a great sort of companion film to [Michael Azerrad’s
indie rock book] Our Band Could Be Your Life era. It’s
completely different dynamic at work. None of us had the
responsibility of parenthood — we were completely destitute,
across the board and we were just free as the squirrels.” Moore
hopes the film will be released by year’s end.
Sonic Youth have European and U.S. tour dates lined up through
the summer and hope to release another new album on their
independent SYR label by year’s end. The album will consist of a
session recorded with French chanteuse Brigitte Fontaine in Paris
two years ago. Moore says that the band is still trying to get
clearance from Fontaine’s French label, before releasing the
recording, which will be accompanied by a DVD that includes a live
performance with Sonic Youth and Fontaine.