For 40 years now, Thurston Moore has maintained dual citizenship in the worlds of rock and the avant-garde. But where he spent his three decades in Sonic Youth straddling the line between those discrete realms, he’s spent much of his solo career jumping from one side to the other. For every tuneful acoustic collection he’s issued under his own name and every searing set of guitar jams he’s kicked out with his Thurston Moore Group, there are literally over a hundred small-run micro-label releases and one-off collaborations where Moore has indulged his unabating loves of improvised noise, free jazz, spoken-word poetry, and black metal without interfering with his official indie-rock discography.
By contrast, Moore’s songs in recent years have hewed more conventionally classic rock, while his sideline pursuits have turned more extreme. But even though Moore is following up his most straight-up rockin’ album to date—2017’s Rock n Roll Consciousness—with a three-disc box set consisting of three mammoth instrumental movements that collectively run for over two and a half hours, he’s using the opportunity to build a bridge across the avant/rock divide instead of a wall. Even with its imposing length, Spirit Counsel is arguably the most accessible entry point into Moore’s boundless experimental canon.
The three works that comprise Spirit Counsel showcase vastly different methodologies, but each pays impressionistic tribute to influential figures in his life and art. The first, “Alice Moki Jayne,” is named for spiritual-jazz master Alice Coltrane, Swedish visual artist/musician Moki Cherry, and political poet Jayne Cortez, three women who, perhaps not coincidentally, established singular artistic identities outside the long shadows cast by their famous husbands (John Coltrane, Don Cherry, and Ornette Coleman, respectively). But unlike Moore’s more explicit tributes to the female avant-guardians of yore, “Alice Moki Jayne” channels their radical spirit implicitly into a work that’s perpetually reaching for a higher level of consciousness while embodying the struggle to achieve it amid the disorder and distractions of modern life.
“Alice Moki Jayne” is a rarity among Moore’s improvised releases, in that its personnel—namely, guitarist James Sedwards and My Bloody Valentine bassist Deb Googe—overlaps with his regular rock-band formation, and it feels like an extension of sounds and themes mined on Rock n Roll Consciousness. Here, we’re treated to a supersized version of the Thurston Moore Group with third guitarist Jen Chochinov and electronics wizard Jon Liedecker, a.k.a. Matmos/Negativland associate Wobbly, while the band’s usual drummer, Steve Shelley, is replaced by Róisín Murphy’s touring drummer Jem Doulton. But where it’s not uncommon for Thurston Moore Group to zone out past the 10-minute mark, here he employs his players in service of a monumental work that feels like nothing less than the eternal psychic tug-of-war between hope and despair rendered as a 63-minute, 12-string guitour de force.
Following a few minutes of ominous, cymbal-washed ambient haze, “Alice Moki Jayne” starts to take shape through a shimmering refrain that provides a distant echo of Pink Floyd’s “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” in both its repeated four-note melody and willingness to let it slowly evaporate into the late-night air for a seeming eternity. But from there, the work acquires a step-like structure, answering its psych-rock ascensions with meditative plateaus. One-third of the way in, after a steady build, the group locks into a hypnotic, warmly lit melody and lingers on it for several minutes, providing the track with the closest thing it has to a chorus. But half an hour later, the tension between the group’s rock formalism and lawless exploration has turned to all-out war: following a free-form, drum-less passage of flatulent guitar spasms and electronic indigestion, the group drops some truly startling blasts of distortion that trigger a heavy-metal meltdown. All of which is to say, “Alice Moki Jayne” demands a lot of your time, and rewards your patience handsomely.
Spirit Counsel’s second work is as intimate as its predecessor is expansive, with a relatively lean 29-minute runtime. “8 Spring Street” is named for the former address of Moore’s mentor and spirit guide into avant-underworld, the composer Glenn Branca. As the missing link between punk rock and Steve Reich, Branca’s densely layered guitar symphonies were foundational to the Sonic Youth sound. But instead of paying overt tribute to his late friend by attempting to replicate Branca’s heart-racing grandeur, “8 Spring Street” is a solo guitar piece that’s seemingly more interested in recapturing their moments of personal and musical connection in that SoHo apartment.
As Moore recently revealed, when hanging at Branca’s apartment, the two “would listen to the rotary fan in his window in the summertime. We would listen to the overtones, and he would say, ‘that’s what we need to sound like.” Tellingly, Moore spends much of “8 Spring Street” furiously strumming and jabbing at his instrument, conjuring the choppy rhythm and blurring motion of fan blades cutting through air—though when he activates the distortion pedal around eight minutes in, the effect is more like exploding warplanes crashing into an ocean. But “8 Spring Street” navigates its way through periodic stormy sections to arrive at a transfixing ambient-drone conclusion that functions not only as a somber farewell to a transformative figure in Moore’s life, but also a fading memory of a bohemian Manhattan that no longer exists.
If “8 Spring Street” finds Moore communing with his past, and “Alice Moki Jayne” showcases his band at full strength in the present, then Spirit Counsel’s final act points to his possible future. Recorded at London’s Barbican theater in April 2018, “Galaxies (Sky)” finds Moore leading an ensemble of 12 players on 12-string guitars for a cosmically themed composition inspired by a Sun Ra poem. The roster includes, among others, some familiar faces (Googe, Sedwards), old friends (Susan Stenger of Band of Susans, Alex Ward of N.E.W.), more recent road-mates (Rachel Aggs of Shopping/Sacred Paws, Jonah Falco of Fucked Up), the esteemed musicologist David Toop, and, perhaps most improbably, singer/songwriter James McCartney (son of you-know-who).
Clocking in at 55 minutes, “Galaxies (Sky)” is the most demanding of Spirit Counsel’s pieces, and the one positioned furthest away from Moore’s rock vernacular. Prior to the performance, Moore admitted that he had never met some of the players before; as such, he gives his charges a little extra time to get to know each other in an extended opening free-for-all where the guitars plink and plonk like mangled kalimbas, purr like a sleeping wildebeests, and clang like cast-iron wind chimes. But at the 11:30 mark, all those random noises coalesce into an ecstatic, 144-stringed drone that clears a path for a vibrant, “Street Hassle”-style pulse to take hold.
Compared to the more sectional construction of “Alice Moki Jayne,“ “Galaxies (Sky)” evolves through a more fluid, organic process, where the subtlest changes eventually have profound effects on the course of the piece. Over its second half, the psychedelic, trance-inducing qualities gradually give way to doomy dissonance, reaching particularly nauseous extremes around the 37th minute. But fitting for a release intended to coincide with International Peace Day (Sept. 21), Moore steers his troupe toward a calming come-down, harnessing the squall into a hypnotic feedback hum with lion-tamer poise. And, in the piece’s dying moments, all the guitars start ringing out like a thousand alarm clocks going off at once, a finale that feels less like self-implosion than a celebration—as if the seated players were giving themselves a string-strangled standing ovation. As the full-circle conclusion to a box set that mirrors Moore’s personal journey from avant-garde acolyte to rock-band ringleader and back again, “Galaxies (Sky)” reaffirms that, after all these years, he’s still traveling down the expressway to yr skull—it’s just expanded to a 12-lane superhighway.
Buy: Rough Trade
