Hippies vs Punks: Lee Ranaldo's Clouds (1997)

Clouds is an edited and reworked recording of a May 1997 performance by Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo and free jazz drummer William Hooker at the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville. Reminiscent of the sound of free jazzers Last Exit, Clouds is better than its dismissive AllMusic review, but it is not the Lee Ranaldo record I have been listening to all week. All week I have been listening to his 2006 Ambient Loop For Vancouver, a quiet 50 minutes of droning electronica that also features William Hooker; sadly, it is not available for streaming on YouTube.

Which should be the main theme of this post -- the shortcomings of our purportedly fully-retrievable, enhanced digital World Wide Web.

By happenstance, last week I started listening to a lot of Aphex Twin, in particular Selected Ambient Works Volume II (1994). It is a quiet album of electronica. I need quiet. The year is in its last month and I'm limping to New Year's Eve. I feel no vigor and am waiting for the clock to run out while I expedite my remaining goal for 2015, one last race.

But so far in December as each day arrives I have been trying to think of at least one thing I want to accomplish, not only in the New Year but during the day itself, even if it is so humble as taking two tablets of vitamin C. So far I have been successful. But I need the musical accompaniment to be subdued.

Last weekend I got to thinking about a performance of Lee Ranaldo's that I saw with a friend and coworker back in the dark days of the post-9/11 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Ranaldo was playing guitar in a theater at the Experience Music Project while a film by his wife, Leah Singer, was projected on a screen above him. He was joined on stage by a guy (maybe two, I can't remember) with a stack of electronic hardware. This guy, if my memory serves me, was introduced as "Golden Aphex Twin."

The show itself was excruciatingly painful. My friend Tony and I laughed about it, saying it was akin to torture (very timely since torture was being embraced by U.S. policymakers as "enhanced interrogation techniques" permissible as long as it did not result in organ failure).

The problem is that the only record on the Internet that I can find of this show is a tiny announcement in The Stranger. Plus, there is no such electronica artist as "Golden Aphex Twin," or at least one searchable on the Web. There is Aphex Twin. But my sense is that Richard David James is too big time for a gig as a sideman for Lee Ranaldo's free jam accompanying an esoteric art film.

Ranaldo is important not only as a founder of the enormously influential Sonic Youth (just about any alt rock produced post-Grunge is inflected with Sonic Youth), but also as a keeper of the Beats flame.

An intellectual foundation of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs underlies postwar U.S. cultural revolt -- both Hippie and Punk as well as Grunge -- leading up to the millennium. But I don't think it pertains any longer.

I think something has shifted post-millennium, and it has to do with the all-pervasive digital milieu we find ourselves in today. But as my experience shows, the Web is not a repository of consciousness. It might seem so, but it is not.

Hippies vs. Punks: Last Exit

It has been cold. The last several days temperatures have been either a little above or a little below freezing. Granted, it is not single-digit cold. I experienced that living in New York City; that is a whole different level of pain. Nonetheless, commuting in freezing weather bleeds out enough energy that I find myself in a struggle to complete an average workday.

During a post-lunch nap in the darkened file room on the first floor I listened to Last Exit's "Crackin" off the eponymous Last Exit (1986). When we first moved to New York City in August of 1988 my buddy Oliver, who was visiting with his wife Lyn, insisted that we go see Sonny Sharrock at the Knitting Factory. Oliver was a big advocate of Sharrock's guitar playing, which was jazz played in a manner that appealed to Punk fans.

In any event, I didn't really enjoy the Knitting Factory show, but I admired the music.

The sound of Last Exit (drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson just died a couple months ago) and Sonny Sharrock -- the unyielding edginess and difficulty of it -- I never bonded with or got inside of it and felt what it was up to.

Yesterday, drifting off to sleep in the noon hour in a dark room on a cold carpeted floor, listening on my iPod to that track off Last Exit, I finally did. It made perfect sense. I think the freezing weather helped.

It has something to do with the moment that sense forms out of nonsense; for lack of a better description, "birth." It is a musical exploration of the assertoric nature of all creation. And I guess that's something.