Sonic Youth's performance at the Anthology Film Archives in 2003 was intended as a commemorative tribute to Stan Brakhage, arguably the most influential filmmaker in the history of experimental cinema. Brakhage's death earlier that year was greeted with general indifference in major media outlets, and for a while SY seemed to be the only prominent outfit to even acknowledge his passing. (I learned of his death only via a press release for the tribute concert.) Four years earlier, Lee Ranaldo began the Text of Light cooperative, which is named after a 1974 Brakhage movie and regularly performs improv concerts at experimental cinema screenings. For the 2003 memorial, the full Sonic Youth troupe (and Tim Barnes of the Silver Jews) flaunted their most pretentious tendencies in front of Brakhage's short films.
SYR6, a recording of that concert, is the latest episode in Sonic Youth's peculiar series of noise, static, drone, and improv. Yet it's also a backhanded attempt to duplicate Brakhage's silent superimpositions and montages in audible form; it claims to be an imaginary soundtrack for movies that deliberately detest sound in general. Witness Brakhage's famous words on the incompatibility between his silent films and any form of musical accompaniment: "I don't make my films out of caprice. I feel they need a silent attention [rather than] a non-stop soundtrack of the most distracting order." He adamantly asserted that his movies' musical patterns were solely visual-- or cinematographic-- and hence incommensurable with aural rhythms. He further admonished that music would only obstruct his films' natural pulses of illumination and disintegration.
One is certainly entitled to dismiss Brakhage's manifesto as obscenely arrogant gibberish. (It's even reminiscent of Derek Bailey's vitriolic criticism of recorded music, though that's slightly more perplexing since he was a guitarist with dozens of albums.) Nevertheless, there's a certain wryness and sarcasm in Sonic Youth's whole endeavor. To extol Brakhage by denying his wishes is both awfully disturbing and darkly amusing. It's also sometimes sort of boring. In this sense, it encapsulates the album perfectly.
Generally speaking, SYR6 teems with the funerary bells and foreboding vertigo that's so predominant in film scores. While it's performed with as much wit and proficiency as one could imagine, it also feels a bit simplistic or lazy. Metallic pulses, catalytic drums, and railing strings fall apart, and skeletal guitar radiates brief noir themes. The first track seems particularly laggard and serves as one more example of Sonic Youth's maddening tendency to appropriate the sound of the very bands they once influenced. My guess is that the performance converted Brakhage's subtle dissonance into the sort of raging, epic, let's-rock-these-geometric-figures-with-our-balls-out anthems that the filmmaker so abhorred. It raises the perennial question of rock and roll: Why play so loudly if you have nothing much to say?
Consequently, the most successful moments are those which are nearly silent (in an improv-acoustic sort of way): bruised strings, tinny mic-stand tapping, muffled radio frequencies, zither-like electric effects, Barnes' railroad-spike percussion, Thurston Moore's wobbly tuning pegs. In fact, Sonic Youth's affinity for manual dexterity and physical texture correlates nicely with Brakhage's experiments on scratched and painted celluloid. In the final piece, a 28-minute marathon, these intimate and scarcely audible tinkerings assemble and dismantle, making way for brief prismatic stretches of methamphetic jazz guitar, spectral Western wah-wah, and static so conflagrant it literally sets off a fire alarm (twice). It's luminescent and jarring music, possibly the best ever released in the SYR series, and it evokes the spiritual metamorphosis and physical pliability that Brakhage found in film. I only wish they could have accomplished a full album of this material. Perhaps Brakhage would have changed his mind about all this noise. Instead, he must be merely rolling his eyes one last time.
