Thurston Moore

From the founding member of Sonic Youth, a passionate memoir tracing the author's life and art--from his teen years as a music obsessive in small-town Connecticut, to the formation of his legendary rock group, to thirty years of creation, experimentation, and wonder Thurston Moore moved to Manhattan's East Village in 1978 with a yearning for music. He wanted to be immersed in downtown New York's sights and sounds--the feral energy of its nightclubs, the angular roar of its bands, the magnetic personalities within its orbit. But more than anything, he wanted to make music--to create indelible sounds that would move, provoke, and inspire. His dream came to life in 1981 with the formation of Sonic Youth, a band Moore cofounded with Kim Gordon and Lee Ranaldo. Sonic Youth became a fixture in New York's burgeoning No Wave scene--an avant-garde collision of art and sound, poetry and punk. The band would evolve from critical darlings to commercial heavyweights, headlining festivals around the globe while helping introduce listeners to such artists as Nirvana, Hole, and Pavement, and playing alongside such icons as Neil Young and Iggy Pop. Through it all, Moore maintained an unwavering love of music: the new, the unheralded, the challenging, the irresistible. In the spirit of Just Kids, Sonic Life offers a window into the trajectory of a celebrated artist and a tribute to an era of explosive creativity. It presents a firsthand account of New York in a defining cultural moment, a history of alternative rock as it was birthed and came to dominate airwaves, and a love letter to music, whatever the form. This is a story for anyone who has ever felt touched by sound--who knows the way the right song at the right moment can change the course of a life.

A Memoir

Sonic Life

Byron Coley

Provides a visual chronicle of the collision of art and punk in the New York underground of 1976 to 1980, focusing on the architects of No Wave from James Chance to Lydia Lunch to Glenn Branca.

Post-Punk. Underground. New York 1976-1980

No Wave

Mix Tape

Photographer Michael Lavine captures the Grunge revolution during the eighties and nineties.

Grunge

Alabama Wildman

The Art of Cassette Culture Edited by Thurston Moore

John Kinsella

The Weave is the second book collaboration between Thurston Moore and John Kinsella - dubbed a 'work in progress' by the two poets, the book guides readers through a world in decay, crafting an invigorating language of spontaneity and survival out of the destruction. Moore and Kinsella aren't just observing - they implicate us all in the harms of global capitalism and environmental disaster, charting a back and forth between the individual and the crowd. ROSIE LONG DECTER These poems start in Dolphy's key + end with a quarryman's dream. In between secrets are stored. See how many you can find. CLARK COOLIDGE

The Weave

'Were you there? Well this is as close as it gets! Thurston Moore's compelling and spirited account of the streets, the songs, the clothes, the clubs and the contenders! A sensitive and authentic testimony to Moore's life lived through art and music. Beats with the heart of a true artist and mutineer.' Viv Albertine 'Downtown scientists rejoice! For Thurston Moore has unearthed the missing links, the sacred texts, the forgotten stories, and the secret maps of the lost golden age. This is history-scuffed, slightly bent, plenty noisy, and indispensable.' Colson Whitehead A music-obsessed retrospective, beginning with his childhood epiphany of rock 'n' roll in the early 1960s into an infatuation with the subversive world of 1970s punk and no wave blasting forth from New York City - where he eventually runs off to join a band in 1978. By 1981 Moore would form the legendary and notorious experimental rock group Sonic Youth, who proceeded to record and tour relentlessly for almost 30 years, always progressing, always exploring. Along the way we meet a constellation of artists and musicians who colluded and collided with Sonic Youth including Velvet Underground, Stooges, Patti Smith, Television, Sex Pistols, Clash, Nirvana, Hole, Beastie Boys, Neil Young and a cavalcade of other musical visionaries, as well as figures from the art world - Jean Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Gerhard Richter. Simply put, Thurston Moore and Sonic Youth changed the sound of modern alternative rock music and opened the minds of a generation of artists to new possibilities within the form. This is essential reading. 'I thoroughly enjoyed Thurston Moore's trip down the gauntlet of memory lane, dodging beer bottles and pools of blood as he balances the demands of art and survival. Plus I'm a sucker for anyone who name-checks Saccharine Trust. A raw, rollicking document.' Nell Zink

The new memoir from the Sonic Youth founding member

Raymond Pettibon

Raj Patel

Christopher Scoates

Ulrich Krieger

"1975 was a seminal year politically, socially, and culturally--the Vietnam War ended, the British Conservative Party elected Margaret Thatcher as its first female leader, Microsoft was registered as a trademark, Saturday Night Live made its debut, and Motorola obtained a patent for the first mobile phone. It also heralded a number of landmark albums: David Bowie's soul-infused Young Americans; Brian Eno's critically acclaimed Discrete Music; and Lou Reed's highly controversial Metal Machine Music, subtitled *The Amine b Ring. Following on the heels of Reed's Bowie-produced album Transformer (which included the hit "Walk on the Wild Side"), his concept album Berlin, and his highest-charting album Sally Can't Dance, Metal Machine Music came as a radical departure. Devoid of lyrics, melody, harmony, and any semblance of a traditional musical structure, the album was widely reviled by critics and consumers alike. While the album may have come as a shock to Reed's audience, its conceptual foundations were established more than a decade earlier. Reed had been at the epicenter of the New York underground since the early 1960s as part of Andy Warhol's Factory scene and as a co-founder of rock band The Velvet Underground. With Metal Machine Music, he saw an opportunity to establish his credentials as a composer alongside avant-garde figures such as John Cage, who famously incorporated chance and experimented with unorthodox instruments, and La Monte Young, who pioneered repetitive drone composition and is recognized as a groundbreaking practitioner of minimalism in music. Their collective approach to composition, rules of time, silence, and sound informed the musical landscape of Reed's album, which is composed of guitar feedback, distorted noise, and tape loops among its many unconventional elements. Today, forty years after its release, the album is recognized as a seminal composition in avant-garde music circles. In 2009, Reed collaborated with the acoustic specialists at the Arup Engineering SoundLab to record Metal Machine Trio, a concert inspired by Metal Machine Music and performed at New York's Blender Theater with musicians Ulrich Krieger, Sarth Calhoun, and guest John Zorn. Using state-of-the-art technology developed by Arup, the performance was recorded using a full-sphere surround-sound technique that captures the exact timing, strength, and direction of the sounds, as well as the true sound of the space itself. Lou Reed, Metal Machine Trio: The Creation of the Universe, published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name mounted at Cranbrook Art Museum in 2015, explores the historic and musical significance of Reed?s seminal album, and Arup?s process of capturing a full ambisonic recording of the 2009 performance."--Publisher's website.

The Creation of the Universe

Lou Reed, Metal Machine Trio

The Country Music Who's who

Alice Farley

"Looking at your pictures is like looking through butterfly wings." -Jimi Hendrix Between 1968 and 1971, in a loft on New York's Jefferson Street, the poet, photographer and filmmaker Ira Cohen created some of the most mythic images of the late 1960s. Inspired by his friends Jack Smith and Bill Devore, Cohen's initial experiments with black light developed into an experimental ritual space he termed the Mylar Chamber--a simple room of hinged boards hung with reflective Mylar film. Through his extended network, and with the support of artist and set designer Robert LaVigne, Cohen invited visitors to play another self within this small theater, among them Jimi Hendrix, William Burroughs, Vali Myers, Jack Smith, Angus MacLise, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Lionel Ziprin, Ching Ho Cheng, Petra Vogt, Charles Ludlam, John McLaughlin and the rock group Spirit. In December 1969, in a summary of the past decade, Life magazine declared that "few came as close to explaining the euphoric distortions of hallucinogenics" as Cohen through his Mylar Chamber photographs, but the full story draws upon much deeper ideas surrounding identity and the power of the image. This is the first book to explore Cohen's iconic Mylar Chamber photographs. Published on the 50th anniversary of the Life magazine feature, and with several gatefolds, it includes more than 70 images from this intensely creative period, each digitally restored from the original negatives by Cohen's friend and collaborator, Ira Landgarten. It also includes an interview with Cohen, excerpts from his poetry, critical writing from Allan Graubard and Ian MacFadyen and further reflections from Timothy Baum, Alice Farley and Thurston Moore. Ira Cohen was born in the Bronx in 1935. A countercultural renaissance man, Cohen made films, photographs and poetry, edited the magazine Gnaoua and authored The Hashish Cookbook. Cohen became well known for his 1968 movie using the Mylar technique, The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda, soundtracked by Angus MacLise, the original drummer of the Velvet Underground. In 2008 Nina Zivancevic, writing in NY Arts magazine, described Cohen's life as "a sort of white magic produced by an alchemist who turned his back on the establishment in order to find God, art and poetry." He died in 2011.

Into the Mylar Chamber

Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture is the first book to focus on the unique confluence of cassette culture, featuring stories, essays and images from tapes compiled by and for friends, family and lovers over the last twenty years.

Thurston Moore

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