The past two years, like many of the 40 immediately preceding them, have been very good to Thurston Moore.
In October 2023, he published Sonic Life: A Memoir (Faber & Faber), a 496-page memoir of the first six-and-a-half decades of his life and — thanks to his group Sonic Youth’s having rubbed elbows with every significant and semi-significant contemporaneous noisemaker — of punk and its experimental offshoots.
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Then, 11 months later, he released his ninth solo album, Flow Critical Lucidity (Daydream Library), composed on the shore of Lake Geneva. With lyrics supplied mostly by his wife Eva Moore (née Prinz) and a band with a supergroup pedigree — My Bloody Valentine’s Deb Googe, Negativland’s Jon Leidecker, Nøught’s James Sedwards, Roisin Murphy’s Jem Doulton, since you asked — the project has lucidity and flow aplenty.
Critics are generally willing to give Thurston’s output the thumbs-up. Flow Critical Lucidity is no exception. “The whole record,” reads one review, “feels hauled from a dream space where you’re laid on your back letting the sky sink down to you.” Another says: “Moore’s ninth solo album is an intricate web of casual observations and artful references that’s bolstered by some of his boldest, most experimental pop arrangements in years.”
But before I can ask Thurston about any of this, he asks me: “Where are you?”
It so happens that I’m near Cleveland. It also so happens that whenever I think about Cleveland in a musicianly context, I think about the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, an institution that — despite inducting such balls-to-the-wall rockers as Joan Baez and Cat Stevens — has somehow managed to overlook Sonic Youth.
“You’re not really voted in by the listener,” says Moore from his London home. “You’re voted in by the cabal of music-industry movers and shakers, the people who sort of wield the forces of power in the monolith that is the music industry.”
Would Moore enjoy being voted in? Or like the Sex Pistols, who merit 27 mentions in Sonic Life, all positive, would Thurston tell the Hall where to get off?
“I don’t have an issue with it,” he says. “If that aspect of the music industry wants to recognize Sonic Youth for its years of service, I’ll put it on the mantle with the zero amount of awards that we have already.”
He’s laughing as he speaks. And there is something funny about considering the band that more than any other functioned as a multi-generation through-line running from no wave to grunge and beyond. And anyway, he doesn’t consider making music a job but a calling. To him, Flow Critical Lucidity isn’t a new beginning after Sonic Life’s clearing of the deck so much as another chapter.
“I make a record every year or so,” he says. “I would make three a year if it made any kind of sense. I have other recordings that I would love to put out on Bandcamp or on a private or a smaller label. But it confuses the distributors. ‘Which is the new record, this one or that one? Is it the one where he’s playing a chainsaw?’”
He laughs again, although given the sounds that he and his many cacophony-loving collaborators have made over the years, the dulcet tones of a chainsaw are no punchline. Even Flow Critical Lucidity’s cover art, a photo of Jamie Nares’s tuning-fork-studded helmet sculpture Samurai Walkman, reflects Thurston’s commitment to sonic innovation.
“That helmet actually works,” he says. “If you throw pellets or tennis balls at it, it will resound.”
Something else that’s no joke: Flow Critical Lucidity lyrics such as these from “Rewilding,” “So I’m singing for animals / Outside here just grazing / Turquoise sea grass is tickling my ass.” They might read funny, but Moore sings them straight-faced. Rewilding is a progressive conservation approach about which he is dead serious.
“Those lines,” he says, “are all about this idea of the preternatural genius of animal life, the preternatural genius of wildlife that we as humans can only really learn from, just the essence of the purity of animal life.”
And as the owner of two stabyhouns, a rare dog breed, Moore walks his talk. “I can’t tell you how holistic it is,” he says, “to have animals in your life.”
He continues about the album: “There’s something thematic going on. There’s this consideration of giving a very contemporary respect and dignity to our relationship with the natural world. And that, to me, is the primary situation of crisis that we have right now because without the world, we don’t exist.”
He realizes that his evolution into an environmental crusader might seem at odds with his reputation for plugging into big-city grids and cranking to 11, but he considers the urban-rural dichotomy largely illusory. Cities, he observes, are really just “us replicating the jungle,” with skyscrapers that “might as well be trees.”
I can’t hear “jungle” without thinking of Guns N’ Roses. But Thurston only mentions them once in Sonic Life (in a simile describing Iggy Pop’s 1993 touring band). He mentions hip hop a lot more, a style that he credits with keeping pop’s cutting edge serrated. “Hip hop is the most experimental music in the history of music to exist in the mainstream. It’s the most radical music. I give all due respect and love to that genre.”
Flow Critical Lucidity contains no rapping, but Moore’s vocals have a recitative delivery that brings out the lyrics’ more poetic qualities. This no doubt comes somewhat from his role over the last seven summers as a writing workshop instructor at the Naropa Institute’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. He fully embraces the philosophy of Naropa’s founder, the Tibetan Buddhist master Chögyam Trungpa. And he uses the word “enlightenment” in the liner notes to Flow Critical Lucidity’s second track, the Angela Davis-inspired “Sans Limites.”
One wonders: What does enlightenment mean to Moore these days?
“Being aware,” he says without hesitation. Also, he really likes the term “woke.”
“It’s been demonized,” he acknowledges, “but when I first heard about the culture of resistance and protest using the word ‘woke,’ I thought it was great because it equals ‘enlightenment.’ I consider myself to be a great enthusiast of woke culture.”
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