Thurston Moore: Guitar Explorations of Cloud Formations
National Concert Hall, Dublin
★★★★☆
The Irish weather can always be counted on to do its worst, and so it proves as Thurston Moore, the legendary indie-rock guitarist, materialises in a haze of dry ice at the National Concert Hall.
Best known for the art-rock pyrotechnics of Sonic Youth, Moore is debuting Guitar Explorations of Cloud Formations, a suite of compositions that pay thunderous, if unlikely, tribute to the magnificently miserable meteorology of Ireland and Britain, and that premieres at the NCH as part of the New Music Dublin festival.
The stumbling block is that summer has arrived too early, contradicting the music’s unspoken thesis that nowhere is more permanently shrouded in gloom than Ireland and the surrounding islands. “It’s a cloudless day in Dublin,” Moore exclaims at the end of this gorgeously meditative performance. Blue skies over Ireland? His shock is obvious.
He doesn’t let sunshine spoil a beautifully overcast set that draws on his experience with northern European climes, in all their glorious unpredictability, since moving from New York to London in 2013. Brooding one moment, bucolic and balmy the next, the compositions debuted at the NCH are the Irish weather captured in music. You never know what’s around the corner.
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In Sonic Youth, Moore was as an architect of delightful chaos. Emerging from the New York no-wave scene of the early 1980s – a sort of studiedly nihilistic offshoot of punk – the group pushed noise to brutal and bewitching extremes. Among their innovations was a habit of jamming screwdrivers and drumsticks in their instruments – part of their mission to push beyond the limits of what is commonly understood as guitar music.
They later became accidentally caught up in the grunge explosion when championing some of its leading lights. It was Sonic Youth who invited Kurt Cobain and Nirvana to play in Cork as support in 1991. People who were there recall that before Nirvana took to the stage, Moore was watching from the crowd, telling audience members that what they were about to see would blow their minds.
Sonic Youth outlived both Nirvana and grunge but unravelled when Moore separated from his then wife, the bassist Kim Gordon. There is little prospect of Sonic Youth getting back together: Moore has remarried, and his second wife, Eva Prinz, helped conceive Guitar Explorations of Cloud Formations.
Still, there is a thread of Sonic Youth’s thoughtful anarchy in the new cycle, which begins in an anxious hush as Moore, the guitarists Alex Ward and Jennifer Chochinov and the drummer Jeremy Doulton arrive framed in enough dry ice to fuel an entire season of 1980s-vintage Top of the Pops.
Minutes in, everything moves up a gear as Doulton weighs in with a crashing drumbeat that lands like a crack of thunder interrupting a sun shower.
A lanky, slightly goofy figure, Moore moves between heavy-metal chugging and delicate cascades of guitar. At one point he wedges a drumstick into the neck of his instrument and taps it off the ground – techniques he first explored playing in his youth with the avant-garde guitarist Glenn Branca. Later he plunges into a soft-rock riff that recalls the Boston song More Than a Feeling, a spiritual predecessor of Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit.
“The idea of this whole thing about clouds is that at one point we used to always talk about the weather,” he says as the lights go up, explaining that these new pieces were written to encourage awareness about the fragility of the environment. “It was very conversational. But now it’s very important to talk about the weather, obviously ... Let’s consider Mother Nature.”
His remarks are a poignant afterword at the end of a concert that confirms instrumental music can be every bit as emotive and cathartic as a protest singer telling you exactly how you should feel about the issues of the day. (Let’s call it the Thurston Moore/Christy Moore divide.) There is a sense of crashing to earth after a journey somewhere strange and slightly frightening that has expanded the listener’s horizons in all sorts of fascinating ways.
