SYR 4: Goodbye 20th Century

This is an Enhanced audio CD, which contains regular audio tracks and multimedia computer files.
Sonic Youth: Kim Gordon, Lee Ranaldo, Steve Shelley, Thurston Moore.
Additional personnel: William Winant, Jim O'Rourke, Takehisa Kosugi, Christian Wolff, Christian Marclay, Coco Hayley Gordon Moore, Wharton Tiers.
Producers: Sonic Youth, William Winant, Jim O'Rourke.
Recorded in New York, New York from March-August 1999.
New York's premier alternative band has been releasing "experimental" material on the sly on its private label, SYR, for a few years now. But this fourth release, a homage to a handful of highly influential experimental composers such as John Cage, Cornelius Cardew, and Pauline Oliveros, qualifies as a major Sonic Youth album. There's formless experimental music and then there's formless experimental music. This bona fide modernist rock & roll band knows the idiom so well and has been playing so well together for so long that the group's finely honed guitar textures (and familiar voices) make for a surprisingly revealing addition to the mix. These are no musical amateurs. Cage's music in particular demands a kind of haiku-like perfect placement of musical elements and the band demonstrates on no less than three tracks that it knows where to put what and when. Even Steve Reich's "Pendulum Music", a composition for a swinging, feedback-prone microphone and speakers seems somehow sweetly melodic in the loving hands of these millennial kids.