Listen closely: On “Principles,” the jarring penultimate track of Kim Gordon‘s new solo album, The Collective, are the words she’s wailing “an actress of life”? Or is that last word “light” or “lies” or “live” or something else? The line transmits differently if you listen to it on a big stereo, expensive headphones, a beach speaker, shitty AirPods, and shittier iPhone speakers, since she’s buried it so deeply in atmospheric reverb and industrial clanging. You gotta open up your earholes. With vocals mixed so opaquely, listening to The Collective is an act of discovery.
Gordon, who began her career as a visual artist before co-founding Sonic Youth, understands that every deep concept requires multiple perspectives. So there are many ways to hear the album.
The songs come off as avant-garde, trap, old-school hip-hop, noisy, or musique concrète depending on where you drop the needle. Producer Justin Raisen, who co-produced Gordon’s 2019 solo album, No Home Record, has stacked up credits recently on tracks for Lil Yachty, Kid Cudi, Teezo Touchdown, and Drake. Here, he and Gordon create a sound that recalls the noise-loving avant-garde rap that groups like Clouddead and Dälek were making 20 years ago but with more modern rhythms and Gordon’s breathy apostrophizing. Raisen and drummer Anthony Paul Lopez even took credits on the record for “foley” — capturing sound effects as if for a film — to open up the textures in unusual ways. The audio swirl sounds spacious or claustrophobic depending on the moment, and when it all congeals into a throbbing rhythm, e.g., the rap-like “dolluh, dolluh” rattle of final track “Dream Dollar,” it really hits. It’s in those moments where Gordon’s goals are clearest.
For decades, people saddled Sonic Youth’s outré musical techniques and song structures with the word “experimental,” and the band even used the word (ironically?) in an album title 30 years ago. But the description was unfair since most of the experimenting (unusual guitar tunings, weird rhythms) took place before the band entered the recording studio — they intended their music to startle — and the group saved its most daring experiments (Anagrama, Goodbye 20th Century) for its SYR vanity label. So Gordon’s intent to make rhythmic and unsettling avant-garde hip-hop is what drives The Collective. (In fact, the album feels like the inverse, like a photo negative, of her 2000 SYR release, a collaboration with DJ Olive and Ikue Mori, titled ミュージカル パ一スペクティブ, since formlessness and total space was the goal then. But even that trio pulled off the songs live at least once.)