American fringe music boasts no figurehead as prominent or as potent as Thurston Moore: The multimedia mogul of independent rock, Moore still leads Sonic Youth after nearly three decades, runs a record label with worldwide distribution, writes poetry, reviews records in Arthur, scribes liner notes, recently co-authored a handsome hardback on the history of no wave, wrote trenchantly about Finnish hardcore last year for The Wire, and managed to narrate a straight-edge documentary for National Geographic. Oh, and if you have a guitar and a pedal around, he'd probably be super fucking stoked to do a little collabo later this afternoon.
Indeed, even with big-time moves like a Sonic Youth compilation that's available only in Starbucks and a book with his name on it available in Border's, Moore's outsider foundations remain conscious, pronounced and, ultimately, very respected: During a photo shoot for Sonic Youth's recent Rather Ripped, Skinny T donned a Merzbow shirt. In lieu of liner notes for Sensitive/Lethal-- his noise debut for New York's excellent No Fun Productions imprint-- he penned a poem that closes, "blessed are the noise musicians for they shall go down in history./ way. way. down." And, unless you're really paying attention, Moore has probably released music on at least 10 labels you've never heard of, even though he's, like, legitimately famous. Maybe you caught that track he put on a 1997 vinyl-only compilation for Norway's Apartment Records, or maybe you dug Please Just Leave Me (My Paul Desmond), the 1996 one-track blazer for RRR imprint Pure? Moore does a lot, and he often offers small labels he likes-- like No Fun, Little Brother, Table of the Elements or Important, who released two albums of Moore's duo the Bark Haze last year-- his work mostly as limited-run, highly sellable gifts. While Geffen still gets Sonic Youth records and his own Ecstatic Peace got last year's song-oriented Trees Outside the Academy, Moore often hands upstarts something with his name on it mainly, it seems, so they can release more things he likes without his name on it.
Of course, quantity and/or beneficence don't equal quality, and Sensitive/Lethal doesn't equal much else. Constituted of three tracks of very-precedented, long-form noise, Sensitive/Lethal is an entirely unfocused trip, a hodgepodge of techniques and sounds gleaned and recombined without much imagination or élan. Moore is painting by the numbers without much of a mind for the intermediate processes or the completed picture. The first track is a dense psychedelic wash that pits a harsh, zig-zagging electric din against a a steadily strummed acoustic. Static bombs, slow oscillations, and blurred high frequencies clip and chew at that core for much of the track's 22 minutes. Hear it better on the extended take of Sonic Youth's "The Diamond Sea" or any of a few hundred "dense textural drone" records, from Bardo Pond to Thuja.
Track two sounds like an industrial or doom-metal version of Steve Reich's "ultimate process piece," "Pendulum Music (For Microphones, Amplifiers, Speakers, and Performers)", which Sonic Youth already interpreted for its 1999 album, SYR4: Goodbye 20th Century. The best four minutes of Sensitive/Lethal's 60, the track is worth your time. But track three is a 26-minute guitar-and-pedal marathon, wrapping punishing high tones and broken waves of squall into and around one another. It's epically boring, a marathon for no one. Hear such sounds done better on Prurient's Black Vase or a dozen Yellow Swans records. Many of the best noise records create their own environment, a singular space of sound that runs like an hour of mimesis through a world you'd never imagined. C. Spencer Yeh does this as Burning Star Core, as does Mike Tamburo on 2006's expansive The Ghosts of Marumbey. Sensitive/Lethal-- an unstable structure of second-hand materials-- barely tries.
This isn't the first stale experimental record from Moore, and no signs indicate it will be his last. No problem: If selling through the run of Sensitive/Lethal allows No Fun proprietor Carlos Giffoni to continue releasing groundbreakers like last year's tense-and-torturous Consumer Electronics LP Nobody's Ugly or this year's psychedelic coup, Resin by Religious Knives, so be it. Just let the Sonic Youth quasi-completists be the bros who snag it. Don't let it serve as a lens into what the best of noise in 2008 can be. At best, it lifts weakly from those he long ago inspired.
