In/Out/In

The multi-dimensional mayhem of instrumental Sonic Youth

The track that’s most likely to get skipped over on Sonic Youth’s just-out instrumental-rarities EP In/Out/In is called “Social Static.” Recorded at the band’s Echo Canyon studio in 2000, during the brief period when sonic renegade Jim O’Rourke joined the fray, it’s an 11-minute drone with feedback and noise bursts.

Those who caught Sonic Youth live will remember excursions like “Social Static:” Out of the tapering last-chord moments of one of the band’s vocal songs, guitarists Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo would conjure gale-force torrents of erratic guitar sound. These were sometimes built from single notes, sometimes chords, sometimes octaves, sometimes string noise, and the two would massage and sustain these planks for long periods of time. It could be unsettling – partly because the feeding-back signals grew seriously loud (that tour they did with Neil Young is etched inside my middle ear), and partly because, despite occasional detours and single-note stabs, the mass of sound seemed like it could ebb and crest forever.

“Social Static” has the duration, but it doesn’t capture the tension or the subtle ripples of dissonance that made the instrumental moments of a Sonic Youth show so riveting. Maybe the quest for altered states could only get airborne in performance? Maybe Sonic Youth needed human witnesses for its magic trick of making meaning out of noise?

The flatline dreariness of “Social Static” is unfortunate: When this band was at peak, which was regularly during the first two decades of its existence, it gathered tactics from metal, rock, the classical avant-garde and the New York noise underground into something fantastical and wholly original, waves of sound that could be abrasive and addictive at the same time.

Sonic Youth made music that hits on a physical level first: At times on the closing “Out & In,” the tandem guitars conjure the sonic percussion of helicopters in the distance, or oceans of sludge, or a facial scrub with coarse steel wool. Moore and Ranaldo seize on each texture as it arrives, doing their best to develop themes and variations and further extensions of drones from them. Even when the peaks and valleys of Sonic Youth’s explorations follow familiar (in/out/in!) paths, you never quite know what kind of menace might develop on the other side of the next severe chord. Gotta take the ride to find out.

In the various online reactions to this very good if disappointingly brief EP, fans talk wistfully about a Sonic Youth reunion. Given the acrimonious split between Moore and bassist/vocalist Kim Gordon in 2011, that’s misplaced energy. A slightly more realistic request: It would sure be great to hear more studio and live rarities devoted to the instrumental side of Sonic Youth. Here’s hoping.

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