Monday 10 September 2018, 7.30pm
An intimate evening with Lee Ranaldo performing songs from his recent records and telling stories from his early days in New York City, his years with Sonic Youth, and more, including a Q&A session with the audience plus short films.
Singer-songwriter, visual artist, record producer and co-founder of Sonic Youth, Lee Ranaldo is an iconic guitar player with a solo discography that spans three decades. We're very pleased to welcome him back to OTO for his first show here in four years following the release of his 2017 album, Electric Trim.
"When Last Night on Earth gets it right, the results are magical – the searing ‘The Rising Tide’ is the highlight of any post-Youth output to date – and whilst we’re likely to be denied the special alchemy that the four of them seemed capable of conjuring up with such consummate ease for so long for the foreseeable future, we still have the opportunity to hear genuine pioneers of alternative rock making music on their own terms – we should cherish them while we can." – The Line of Best Fit, review of 'Last Night On Earth'
"This record represents a fairly radical departure for me in terms of working process. Whereas my last record – Last Night On Earth – was basically the product of a band playing ‘live’ in the studio, Electric Trim took a very different path. This record was constructed by myself and co-producer Raul ‘Refree’ Fernandez of Barcelona, utilizing the studio in quite a different manner. Over the course of a year, from April 2015-May 2016, Raul and I built these songs from my rough acoustic demos. Using the studio as our tool, we layered guitars, drums and sampled sounds and electronic beats, and were excited by what we heard growing up around us. Working without a band, the songs were given room to grow as they each needed. It was a pretty fascinating process. Raul was pushing me and my music into all manner of new territory. It was a good challenge and came at a perfect time.
The sessions also incorporated the work of many players associated with my recent music. The members of The Dust, Alan Licht, Steve Shelley & Tim Luntzel, all played a hand in these recordings, as well as old friend Nels Cline and more recent friends Kid Millions and Sharon Van Etten, who sings on 6 songs, including a duet with me on "Last Looks".
The studio process was an exciting one –these sessions were some of the most challenging that I have ever been involved with, the most rewarding, and the most FUN as well. Holding up such great studio-crafted records as Pet Sounds and Revolver (for instance) as our models, we sought not to imitate but to be inspired by those sessions to see what we could do ourselves in terms of making maximum creative use of the studio environment. I feel the nine songs on Electric Trim represent my best work to date." – Lee Ranaldo on Electric Trim
