Sonic Youth
"Goodbye 20th Century" (1999)
by Vincent Bergeron

The fourth release of the SYR experimental series pay tribute to great avant-garde artists of the 20th century.

The band, helped by many other people (Jim O'Rourke, Christian Marclay...), cover pieces of these "not so obvious to follow" artists on this double cd set (total of 106 minutes).

At first listen, "Goodbye 20th Century" sound quiet bad, very little worked, like a bad improvisation. You need to pay attention to the music; even if it doesn't like Sonic Youth much of the time, in time it will give you satisfaction. In fact, it's the most experimental release of the SYR series!

Listeners that still don't get the third one should forget this one! SYR "3" was very ambient, near free jazz. This one is also very "free", but the subtle progressions are replaced by many surprises. It's also more noisy and busy than SYR "3".

At times, "Goodbye 20th Century" might be the best of it series, but Sonic Youth also make some true junk like the cover of the Yoko Ono "Voice Piece For Soprano" which is only 12 seconds (scream of Coco Hayley Gordon Moore, the couple's child), the one for George Maciunas in which the band put nails in a piano (!?..) and there's more that is not even worth discussing...

Fortunately, this pieces are very brief moments and this give us a 90 minutes of crasy sound wallpaper to discover, understand and love more and more... At the end, the biggest quality of "Goodbye 20th Century" is to never give the impression of being too long with two cd's of difficult hyper-abstract music. This is very rare in the experimental music world. For curious people in general.

My favorite pieces : Edges, Six For New Time, Burdocks, Four

Similar artists......John Cage, Christian Wolff, Glenn Branca

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