Still Noisy After All These Years

FORMER SONIC YOUTH BASSIST/VOCALIST/GUITARIST KIM WILSON BREAKS DOWN HER SOLO DEBUT, A TRULY WILD RIDE CALLED NO HOME RECORD

- Joe Bosso

THANKS TO HER 30-year tenure as bassist and co-front person for avantgarde noise-rock pioneers Sonic Youth, Kim Gordon has been hailed as an icon and a legend, the “It” girl of the post-punk generation. Asked if such heaped praise has ever seemed a tad too generous — or unearned, even — Gordon laughs and says, “I really don’t know what to think when people use those kinds of terms in relation to me or Sonic Youth. They seem so over the top, you know?”

Without any kind of prodding, however, she notes that she has been noticing a certain aspect of the band’s influence more and more. “I am hearing a fair amount of dissonance in music these days,” she says. “If that’s something we added to the vocabulary of indie rock, from a legacy standpoint, that’s pretty cool. Not that we were the first to do it — Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd were putting dissonance in their music in 1968. I guess you could call them indie rock, too.”

Sonic Youth’s breakup in 2011 coincided with Gordon’s messy divorce from bandmate Thurston Moore, both of which she detailed in unsparing detail in her 2015 book,