Sonic Sleuths

Thurston Moore teams up with free-jazz sax man Mats Gustafsson in search of new sounds (and old records).

by Shaun Brady

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Published: Jan 28, 2009

EXPERIMENTAL JET SET: In Mats Gustafsson (left), Thurston Moore may have met his jazz-world alter ego.

The emergence of Sonic Youth in the early 1980s marked the ascendancy of the record geek. As the Scorseses and Coppolas and De Palmas in the '70s had become the first film-school generation of filmmakers able to speak a modern language while acknowledging and liberally quoting from the entire history of their medium which they had spent their lives devouring; so SY called a truce to the West Side Story-like turf wars between punk and prog, rock and jazz, affirming that one needn't burn down the past to blaze a trail to the future. 

Guitarist Thurston Moore, in particular, was remarkable in being adept at not only incorporating influences from the entire musical spectrum into his own raucous sound, but in being able to wield his ax in those individual contexts, alongside influences and peers in avant-garde jazz, noise music, punk rock. In saxophonist Mats Gustafsson, Moore may have met his jazz-world alter ego, a player just as aggressive, a collector just as obsessive and a musical polymath just as broad-reaching.

Moore initially became acquainted with Gustafsson through his interest in free improv. "I'd become a really staunch collector of improvised music, especially European improvised music," says Moore, on a break from recording the new Sonic Youth album. "I was coming to it out of loving jazz, getting into this music that came out of jazz improvisation but distinguished itself completely. It was using the idea of improvisation as a musical form but was much more clinical than any Afrocentric spirit music. A lot of it was really academic, and appealing to me as such. The first recording I heard of Mats was a duet with Barry Guy, a very established bassist from London, so I thought he was an older gentleman, part of that pipe-smoking, bearded, cardigan-wearing gang of improvisers."

The two finally met, appropriately, in a record store. Moore was on a vinyl hunt in Stockholm while on tour with Sonic Youth, and at one well-stocked destination the eccentric proprietor had his assistant escort the guitarist around the shop. Finally, a stack of new purchases under his arm, Moore realized he was late for sound check and the assistant offered to drive him. 

"So I'm riding with this guy, and we were just talking about music, music, music," Moore recalls. "He knew all about European free improvisation and seemed to know all the same people I knew, and it was fascinating. At some point I said, 'Have you ever seen Mats Gustafsson? I hear he lives in Stockholm.' And this kid just looks at me and says, 'That's me. I'm Mats Gustafsson.' At that point we were already pals, and we immediately made plans to play together."

Their first duo performance came via a new music festival in Chicago and was, Moore says, "a heavy throwdown." At the same time producer/experimentalist Jim O'Rourke was becoming involved with Sonic Youth, and he, Moore and Gustafsson formed a trio called Diskaholics Anonymous at an arts festival in Sweden. "All we did was steal away looking for vinyl in the nether regions of Sweden," Moore says. "Then we did a tour of Japan predicated upon the fact that we would go there and play shows but spend our entire days searching for vinyl in Japanese record stores."

While their entire collaboration may seem founded on digging through dusty record racks, Moore and Gustafsson do share onstage traits as well. Gustafsson is a saxophonist with a decidedly punk-rock sneer-shout in his sound, an extremist who often seems on the verge of exploding his instrument from within.

"Mats can be a fairly savage player," Moore says. "He can really chomp on the reed, but he's such an idea man. I think the one place we really meet is that we both know that there's this experience that happens with improvised music that can create this magical moment of interplay in sound and dynamics. So we're constantly thinking about how to get there, investigate it while we're there, and keep it going without ever treading water or, God forbid, jamming."

Given Gustafsson's ferocity, he seems more at home playing with the likes of Moore than with many of his jazz-influenced peers. "I know that he has no fear or can ever be threatened by the power of electricity," Moore laughs. "I've played with a few reed players, and sometimes they step away from somebody using high-volume feedback as a musical element. They find that it's just way too much. But Mats is like, 'Bring it on.' We certainly don't play at that level at all times. We've done shows with a much more introspective kind of playing, almost pretty. It's really not an imperative for us to come out and tear the fucking place apart with noise and free-blowing madness. But most likely we will."

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

Mats Gustafsson and Thurston Moore play Sat., Jan. 31, 8 p.m., $25, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 866-468-7619, arsnovaworkshop.com.

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