by Khagan Aslanov (@virgilcrude)
The name Lee Ranaldo hardly needs explaining, and, in fact, is probably lodged somewhere in the neocortex of even the most casual music listener. After all, the chameleonic and highly dexterous guitarist and multi-instrumentalist has been a crucial part of one of the most important and eminent bands around – Sonic Youth. Throughout his sonorous decades with Sonic Youth, Ranaldo’s shimmering fretwork often acted as the only connective tissue between the industry’s mainstream realm and the deepest, most squalid parts of the experimental underground. As his big stage ambitions played out across the world, Ranaldo’s penchant for abject noise, avant-tunings and highly modified equipment also staged the foundation for his exquisite and fearless lifelong dive into drone-work.
To celebrate the life’s work of one of the most enduring avant-gardists in music history, we trace Ranaldo’s career across 7 Vitals – spanning everything from ubiquitous radio waves, knowing circles of like-minded iconoclasts, obscure, bespoke underground labels, and the privacy of his own loft.
Sonic Youth - “Mote”
There are any number of Ranaldo-led Sonic Youth songs that could have found their way onto this list. “Hey Joni,” “Skip Tracer,” “In the Kingdom #19,” and a dozen others would fill the criteria with dissonant ease. But “Mote” has always held an especially important place in the band’s catalogue, in no small part because Sonic Youth seemed to have spent the 90s somewhat in flux. For the first time since crashing through the music industry, Sonic Youth looked like they were in search of identity, trying to carve a space for themselves in the burgeoning alt rock scene that they had helped forge. Beginning with Goo’s 1990 release, they entered a metamorphosing phase, vacillating between clean-lined indie, early post-rock, beat poetry, and even a stab or two at some cerebral grunge. Despite concentrated attempts to crack into the mainstream proper, the no wave nihilism that defined the band was slithering its way through at every turn. Somewhere there, they found their footing in fine style, on the vast and fearless Washing Machine. But throughout that decade of relative uncertainty, it was often Ranaldo who quietly supplied the band’s most steadfast, timeless songs.
“Mote” isn’t just a great Sonic Youth song, or a great alt rock song – it’s one of the best songs of the 90s. Just beneath its clean and fairly conventional frame roil all the elements that made Sonic Youth such a crucial and singular presence on the scene – a swarming rat nest of overlapping harmonics, sustained drones and wide overtones. It packs big crystalline verses and a mid-section deeply saturated in noise. Ranaldo’s voice is also an off-set to the band’s avant-slants. His low tenor, infused with a boyish earnestness is unapologetically melodic, mirroring the song perfectly. Even after all these years, listening to it raises a giddy, crackling joy in your chest. “Mote” remains a forever gem.
Text of Light - “052202 Tonic”
This sprawling (35 minutes), free-form piece was recorded by a veritable supergroup of minimalists and avant-gardists, with Ranaldo at its helm. Text of Light formed on a patently post-modern basis – their performances were held during screenings of the strange and stellar silent films of experimental director Stan Brakhage, where Text of Light, through collective improvisation, would score them in real time. To those paying attention to the rosters of outsider art and contemporary classical, the line-up of Text of Light alongside Ranaldo was something to behold – multi-faceted guitarist Alan Licht, saxophone experimentalist Ulrich Krieger, highly kinetic percussionist and poet William Hooker, and DJ Olive, the Brooklyn turntablist who plied his abstracted trade in what he called “illbient,” a mash of ambient, hip-hop and sound collage.
After nearly 12 opening minutes of a nervy, thronging mass of sound that brings to mind a multitude of staccato lines overlapping each other, the piece slides into an empyreal drone, punctuated by gusts of see-sawing guitars, sax skronk and synthetic pulses. Hooker’s reactive drumming is the glue here – he creates an agile foil to the dense drape of noise Ranaldo and company mount. Extended cymbal work, sharp accents, washes and wildly fluctuating dynamic changes generate impetus, as the main body of “052202 Tonic” begins folding in on itself.
To give context to the visual aspect that the group composed to, the actual film Text of Light was presented as a time-lapse sequence of aesthetic objects and phenomena – visual art, refracted light and various textural surfaces, all filmed through the prismic contortion of a beveled glass ashtray. Opinions of the film, like most of Brakhage’s work, was firmly polarized. Though his artistic intention was never in doubt, the curt transitions and jittery camerawork, intentional or not, proved too difficult to sit through.
Text of Light was perhaps Ranaldo’s most committed plunge into abject outsider art. This is music that is as contemplative as it is demanding, and its harsh, tantric, and irresolute procession, much like Brakhage himself, was not really built for general consumption.
Glacial - “On Jones Beach”
Glacial was a free improvisation trio consisting of Ranaldo on guitar, Tony Buck of post-everything ensemble The Necks on drums, and David Watson on highland bagpipes. The title piece, an even more expansive undertaking at 48 minutes, changes many masks through its run, inducing a series of increasingly jarring effects with every phase it enters. It builds slowly, over a crepitating metallic guitar loop for a third of its length, with Watson’s pitched lung-work finally snapping the reverie.
Ranaldo falls into dizzying interplay with the bagpipes, and despite the fluid improvised nature of “On Jones Beach,” everything feels somehow minimalist and hermetic. The percussion leans heavy into tumbling rolls, and the overall moment Glacial reach here is a supremely heavy opaque drone, patient and astonishingly beautiful.
Of course, atmosphere is everything here, and much like most of Ranaldo’s ventures, it isn’t a matter of simple layering. Rather, the instruments blur their own boundaries, overlapping and eventually fusing with one another. There is also an oddly familiar feeling one gets when listening to the piece, and it’s only on the third or fourth run through that it becomes obvious how much the chimes and melancholic notes Ranaldo slips in here and there sound like his work with Sonic Youth.
As it changes out of sparseness into a thick smog of frequency and harmonics, Ranaldo and Glacial make it seem like they’re conjuring a leviathan.
Ranaldo/Hooker/O’Rourke/Gebbia - “No Apples Fell”
As the last name group billing may suggest, this ensemble tackled free improvisation with distinctly avant-jazz aplomb. The album documenting this ‘97 live performance is titled Clouds, and here, Ranaldo was joined by an old reliable henchman, the brilliantly omnivorous Jim O’Rourke, who supplies bass and electronics, and who has played with, produced and written for just about every major experimental talent of the past four decades.
True in name, spirit, and execution, “No Apples Fell” is formed in the tradition of volcanic free jazz bandleaders like Albert Ayler and Charles Gayle. It starts off with Gianni Gebbia’s squealing alto sax and then quickly coalesces into a tense free-form hellscape. Spontaneous interaction is the rule of way here – after the first cue, the quartet play strictly in the form of reactions to one another, and the ensuing burst of haywire multiphonics is blinding. There is a momentary pull-back midway through the piece when the listener is teased with an ambient break. But it quickly dissolves into more chaos.
Naturally, the improvised live nature of the piece does little to curb how knowingly and tightly these pros plait into a cohesive ball of havoc, and there obviously isn’t a dearth of talent to be found on Clouds. But it’s Ranaldo’s highly textural guitar that coats the entire album in sonic resin, both a binding agent and a pool to drown in.
It’s difficult to pick a favourite off Clouds, as the entire performance is a phenomenal study in off-the-cuff collaboration. But “No Apples Fell” just about takes the prize, for both its unremitting desire to create agitation, and because it’s one of only three pieces where the entire quartet plays together.
Lee Ranaldo- “In Virus Times, Pt. 4”
In practical terms, Ranaldo’s Covid-era EP was about what you’d expect from a lockdown record. Over the relatively brief course of In Virus Times’ four part movement, it is just him, an acoustic guitar and some spare ambient sounds. Despite the fact that this is unmistakably a miserable work, chronicling a person coping with a world suddenly ill, there’s a certain sweetness to In Virus Times. Untethered and unplugged, at least proverbially, Ranaldo willingly sinks into his early folk influences, before Glenn Branca came along and shattered what sound was like. He favours open tunings and long hanging chords, and the way he lets the melody meander isn’t the same as when he produces blazing electric monsters.
He kept the window open throughout recording in his apartment, naturally grafting some field recordings and found sounds into the songs, and none of it feels forced or overdone. The minimal final mixing also allows the guitar to keep most of its angular resonance intact. It’s a small record that sounds much bigger than its composite parts would suggest.
Like the best acoustic songs, what truly elevates “In Virus Times, Pt.4” is that it feels like the listener is intruding, that you’ve wandered into a sincere privacy, a person alone, fucking around on their instrument, in an attempt to extricate some grief.
Lee Ranaldo & Rob Menard - “Sky Hauling (Sunken Ships)”
2024’s Ascension Sound was a split LP with drone and feedback artist Rob Menard, and though there is some overarching aesthetic unity between the two musicians, Ranaldo’s opening side was a wholly consuming stand-alone experience. And “Sunken Ships” is another gargantuan soundscape he sculpts, a half-hour drone-work replete with texture and woozy psychedelic touches.
Though the foundation of “Sunken Ships” is his prepared guitar, Ranaldo creates contrasting tiers around it with a small repository of instruments. The Farfisa organ and marimba cloak the piece in a warm smothering pulse. Then there is the shimmering percussive melody of the tres, a Cuban guitar that plays a steady assertive pattern, acting as a harmonic and rhythmic anchor. It’s easy to imagine how clashing and awkward these instruments would act in someone else’s hands.
There is a stoic, hyper-composed quality to “Sunken Ships,” though its passion is never in doubt. It’s reflective but not brooding, deliberate but not didactic, elegant but not overly fussy. What it feels like is a long secular prayer, a vast appeal to an indeterminate restorative force.
Lee Ranaldo - “Notebook”
At some point, through NYC Ghosts and Flowers, Scriptures of the Golden Eternity and Dirty Windows, it became glaringly obvious that one of the biggest stylistic pivots for Ranaldo’s lyricisms was the 50s beat poet movement. Given his tendency to make ebbing and caterwauling, highly expansive instrumentals, with plenty of breathing room, it was no surprise when he began lending his spoken word to a string of both Sonic Youth songs and his own projects. And “Notebook” off the early 90s compilation Amarillo Ramp, is perhaps the finest of those moments. The entire album is a fantastic listen, the engrossing title track paying tribute to the colossal installation earth-work called Amarillo Ramp by Robert Smithson. The rest of the tracklist are songs written for arthouse soundtracks, a wistful cover of Lennon’s “Isolation,” and a collaborative piece made with Thurston Moore and Steve Shelley.
The 1991-penned “Notebook” sets his musings to a bittersweet guitar instrumental, melancholic arpeggios and clean single note runs off-set by harmonic drones and feedback-laden slides. Ranaldo’s libretto plays out as a doomed miniature of beat storytelling – loosely tied narratives of lost time, characters just as utterly lost, derelict minds trapped in derelict households, road tripping, regret, how both wonderful and malignant memory can be. Towards the end of the piece, when he intones “Where have you been all my life?,” it sounds less like a love declaration, and more like a desperate exhale of a stifled cynic.
In a way, “Notebook” plays out like the resigned un-vicious twin of “The Gift” by the Velvet Underground. It’s sad and deeply felt, and all of life’s knocks and cauterizations measured, simply a beautiful and evocative piece of music.