And then I just decided which ones I thought I could build on. I played him things I liked, but then he would send me beats. What's your dynamic like when you collaborate on music together? You worked again with Justin Raisen, who produced your last album, No Home Record, on this one. I thought it'd be nice to contrast it rather than try and replicate the intensity of it. I wanted to make some lyrics that were banal to go with the music because it was so propulsive. And I was like, "oh yeah, well, she had a very minimal packing list." But I liked that idea, that she kept it on her refrigerator. ![]() I forgot about the packing list thing, but I was rereading some of her work. Can you tell me about how that song came together? Speaking of "BYE BYE," the first thing that I thought about was Joan Didion's packing list. Sometimes if you put limitations on things, it can push you to be more creative. That sounds like a good challenge, though. Like "BYE BYE" and "I'm a Man." To some extent, some of the things are half-written, and then other things are made up as I go along. I did pick phrases - not for all the songs, for a couple of them. But then, we'd be always challenged with: "What can you do with this?" Thurston and Lee would do the more melodic things, where they would come in with the melody, and we would build our parts around it and still arrange it and shape it together. In a way, it wasn't that unlike working on an instrumental piece of Sonic Youth music, where I tended to sing on the more abstract pieces. Yeah, I still do that, and sometimes I just improvise and lines come out of my mouth. What do you find generative about using that method? You all wrote down random lines on pieces of paper, and then you cherry-picked fragments during the vocal overdubs and sang whatever happened to be written on the paper. I was rereading your 2015 memoir, Girl in a Band, and was struck by a part where you talked about creating the first Sonic Youth EP. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. ![]() By turns surprising and disconcerting, listening to Gordon's radically inventive songs on this album play as an apt distillation of what it's like to live right now. The warped and captivating soundscapes that Gordon creates on the likes of the skittering "The Candy House," for instance, call to mind the rapid-fire influx of information we absorb when we unconsciously open window after window, tumble down rabbit holes, mistakenly open ad pop-ups, furrow our brows trying to figure out if something was created by AI and frantically try and close whatever browser a phantom soundbite might be beaming in from. The fact that kids are headbanging to Kim Gordon's music is electrifying to see, particularly in a world that isn't always supportive of artists making challenging sounds - much less on TikTok.Ĭalling via video from her sun-drenched home in Los Angeles, Gordon says she went into making The Collective, out on March 8, wanting it to be more "beat-oriented." From there, she started "reacting to things going on in the world." Listening to The Collective uncannily bottles up the feeling of being on the internet, trying to discern what's real and what's not. Released in January, the single "BYE BYE" took on a life of its own on TikTok, with Gordon's menacing vocals, rattling off household items against a trap-infused barnburner, soundtracking videos of teens packing for a trip. ![]() When asked about the songs on her forthcoming album, her second solo effort The Collective, Gordon says she thinks of them as "little movies." But in a plot twist, one of those short films has short-circuited the internet as of late. Gordon's thrilling new solo music draws from a similar visual ethos, too. This singularly iconoclastic approach to music-making has guided the way Gordon, who is also a painter, has forged conceptually inventive music for four decades and counting: Her attention to negative space and phrasing shimmer through the no-wave jams she created with her former band Sonic Youth from the late 1980s until the early 2010s, and her textured guitar playing lends the improvisational two-piece she performs in with Bill Nace, Body/Head, an experimental edge. ![]() Rather, Gordon sees herself more as an artist who makes music. Kim Gordon has said that she doesn't view herself as a musician.
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