NOX ORAE 2016 - ...Thurston Moore... - (english version)

…Thurston Moore…

Because poetry, even in a disembodied form* is an attempt to become music again

Something about the sound.. A way of playing guitar, of incorporating influences… an energy, a furious need to knock paradigms over… to experiment new possibilities… to paint unexplored landscapes… This sound is brut, unknown, deep, potent but it’s overflowing with accumulated knowledges, with some fury to extirpate, with wisdom to share… a sound, a music, a man who seem to have overstepped duality, who seem to have integrated it in an acceptable wholeness… material and nothingness, noise and silence, rock and roll are not considered as  spaces septated by time but as pure instants vaporizing and re-materializing themselves… a boiling magma with numerous textures, an original blend of colors, exploding, imploding, fragmenting itself… oscillating from a brutal chaos to a complete sensitivity… It’s a sensitive chaos… a chaotic sensitivity… It’s about Thurston Moore’s guitar sound…

« For me writing lyrics and Sonic Youth was really coming out of a void. Confusion is Sex, writing lyrics like « Confusion is next », came out of Henry Miller. Sister came out of reading Philip K. Dick. Richard Hell’s lyrics were really important. Talking Heads lyrics, really important. Patti Smith, really important. These were pretty key poets within that context, working within a form that I was in, so I didn’t really need to go and read Ron Padgett. »

Porject MUSE, Postmodern culture, an interview with Thurston Moore

   A particular tone… loops of guitar superimposing themselves, repeating themselves, driving the listener in indistincts lands. The concept of post-modernity is embodied, defined, constructed and dismantled from this sound, for this sound, with this sound, through this sound, still this sound and until this sound.** Since the end of the 70’s, Sonic Youth explored this possible melting between art and music, words and sounds, literature and noise, weaving an invisible web for example between Gerard Richter, William Burroughs, Richard Kern or Raymond Petitbon. Painting or photography discover new spaces. Sound becomes a landscape still to be painted a negative not developed yet. Duality vanishes… seems to float in an acceptable wholeness… antagonisms drift together in a cosmic pool… hierarchies don’t existe anymore… from a punk fanzine to a classic philosophy piece, from black metal to free jazz, from underground poets to mythic writers, from a demonic performance to an ethereal reading… we can be inspired by everything ; the madness of this world, the mutations of the bodies, the minds dereliction, history of the arts, pulp magazines, crescent individualism, community desires, chaos, sensitivity, sensitivity of chaos, philosophy, rock n roll…

    From teaching disembodied poetry in a buddhist university to a scary wall of sound generated by his band in a museum, from a spoken word to the publication of a book about Mayhem, from a collaboration with a french poet to an extreme noise performance, from a deep consciousness of History to a constant eruption of unconsciousness, Thurston Moore seems to have overstepped duality, seems to have integrated it in an acceptable wholeness…

*  allusion to the « Jack Kerouac School of disembodied poetics » founded by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldmann and taking place at Naropa University. Thurston Moore teaches there every summer. 

** allusion to a sentence from Antonin Artaud ; "From the body, for the body,, though the body, still the body and until the body" (approximate sentence and translation)

Dejan Gacond, La Chaux-de-Fonds, 23.08.2016