Thurston Moore seeks comfort and salvation in a sonic valentine

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      Newtonian physics is one of the topics that went undiscussed in the Georgia Straight’s brief but wide-ranging chat with Thurston Moore, but Sir Isaac might have had the former Sonic Youth guitarist in mind when he came up with his Third Law.

      “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction,” the science pioneer proclaimed, and that, as much as anything else, explains Moore’s latest solo release, The Best Day.

      The action that indirectly led to the new disc was going into the studio with Beck Hansen to make 2011’s low-key Demolished Thoughts, while the reaction, naturally, was to plug in, turn up, and rock out.

      Demolished Thoughts was this record I did with Beck,” Moore explains in a Skype interview from New York City. “It was focused on 12-string-guitar music, with violin, and a harp, and some fairly unintrusive percussion and second guitar.”

      After that, he adds, “I was itching to get the amp going again, a little louder. And then I moved to London, and I just spent some time in contemplation of what I was going to do with a new record. In the interim, I was doing a lot of work with different people, like in the poetry world and the free-improvisation world—two worlds that I have a lot of dalliance with. And then I started writing again.”

      The real impetus for forming a new band came when Moore met British guitarist James Sedwards, whose sonic inventiveness clicked nicely with Moore’s own. Then came a reconnection with guitarist Lee Ranaldo and drummer Steve Shelley, Moore’s former bandmates in NYC’s legendary Sonic Youth.

      “We started playing gigs, just the two of us, doing instrumental versions of the songs on the album,” Moore says. “One of our gigs was opening for Lee Ranaldo’s band with Steve Shelley. Steve was into what we were doing and he said, ‘I’m up for working, if you’d like me to play drums.’ Of course we did, and then we called Deb Googe, who plays in My Bloody Valentine, and she was in. So I had this clutch of songs I had written, but we didn’t all play together as a four-piece until we started recording—and I thought it sounded great. I was really happy.”

      Moore has especially high praise for his old Sonic Youth bandmate. “Steve has gotten considerably, progressively more remarkable,” he says. “In a way, he would be the perfect drummer for Neil Young and Crazy Horse. He knows that music inside out. I would love to impress upon people like Neil Young that there’s a drummer out there who could really kill in their band right now, if they needed someone. But hopefully that doesn’t happen—for me, because I kind of like using Steve in this group. He’s the man!

      “When he got together with us, just his rhythm connection with Deb was beautiful,” Moore adds. “It’s exactly what you would hope to hear from My Sonic Valentine, as some young people have been referring to it on the Interweb.”

      With that, our conversation is interrupted by an assistant, who tells Moore that his next interrogator is waiting on Line 2. “I talk too much,” he says, but not before confirming, albeit indirectly, that The Best Day is also a reaction to his 2011 split with long-time partner and Sonic Youth bassist Kim Gordon. Seeking comfort in distressing times is the record’s dominant theme, often expressed through images of the natural world.

      “It’s not so much seeking it as acknowledging it,” he says. “It’s acknowledging that it’s there, and that is the salvation. Realizing that the world can be so upside-down for not only yourself, but everyone around you, and how to acknowledge and meditate on that which is benign. Everything, from the record through the cover, is all about that.”

      The Thurston Moore Band plays the Biltmore Cabaret on Friday (October 3).

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