Six years have passed since the first album, Coming Apart, and the Cincinnati visit is Body/Head’s first stop on its U.S. tour. The second, in Los Angeles, doesn’t come until the day The Switch is released on Matador Records. A mesmerizingly atmospheric early single, “You Don’t Need,” is just out and creating anticipation. It features Gordon’s tough, cool vocals and an ominously hypnotic riff that sounds a lot like Velvet Underground-influenced AltRock.
Adding to the anticipation for their appearance here is the fact that Gordon’s 2015 Girl in a Band, her memoir about life as a member of the influential Indie/Experimental Rock band Sonic Youth, was a surprise bestseller. The book also talks about the music, as well as the collapse of her marriage to its lead guitarist, Thurston Moore, after discovering he was having an affair.
“I had to do a lot of press, a book tour, and I had never done anything on my own that publicly,” Gordon says of the Girl in a Band experience. “It was a little difficult being around people all the time by myself. But I’m happy for the way (the book) came out; I’m grateful I had that opportunity. Truthfully, I wouldn’t have thought of it had not an editor approached me.”
Girl in a Band contained some personal passages, which was uncomfortable for Gordon.
“I didn’t actually talk about that in interviews so much,” Gordon says. “Basically, I said all I’m going to say about that in the book. I had tried to make (the book) portraits of L.A. in the 1970s and New York in the ’80s and not so much about me. But how could I write a memoir and not talk about myself? I just didn’t want it to be boring.”
No Response’s creators and previous operators of Northside’s Art Damage Lodge, Jon Lorenz and John Rich, are extremely excited about having Body/Head as headliners of this year’s festival.
“For me and probably a million other people, Sonic Youth was a huge gateway to Noise music, No Wave, Free Jazz, Drone and avant-garde art in general,” Lorenz wrote in a Facebook post.
The Switch is a very compelling album — its five tracks, which are predominately instrumental but do feature singing by Gordon, unfold with a kind of spacey, considered grandeur as the guitars produce overtones and droning effects. The soundscape created by the interplay is otherworldly, but never static — listening is as transfixing as watching a movie like Arrival or Interstellar.
It’s the kind of album you’d like to hear live. But both Gordon and Nace laugh when that observation is made during the interview.
“We utilize improvisation, so we’re actually not going to be replicating the record,” Gordon says. “We can’t do that. When we recorded it, we went in, set up, played like we were playing live, and then took that chunk of music and decided what we wanted to work with. We shaped that with some editing, mixing and overdubbing of a few vocals and some guitar. It’s not like we could reproduce that onstage if we wanted to, and we wouldn’t want to.”
“The nature of the band is improvisation-based,” she continues. “We know we each have a certain sound that we work with, but we’re also trying to move beyond that. And then there’s a point we come together with it.”
Nace explains that the live process is heavily influenced by the crowd’s feedback.
“Hopefully, there’s some kind of transmission exchange with the audience,” he says. “It (depends on) what the feel of the room is, and what we’re giving them and they’re giving back. And then we create this loop with it.”
Neither wants The Switch, or Body/Head as a group, to be regarded as a conceptual art project — not that there’s anything wrong with that.
“The spirit of it is as a Rock record,” Nace says. “Just because it has improvisation or has Noise elements, it’s not an intellectual exercise. We’re going in there to make a Rock record that people feel something when they hear, that they get excited about, that they have all the things they feel when they hear a Rock record.”
Nace is a longtime guitar experimentalist who runs the Open Mouth label. He and Gordon began working together in Northampton, Mass., where they live and which has a community of artists and musicians.
“It’s a fairly easy place to live, which means you can get a space to play as well,” Nace says. “It’s a really homegrown kind of thing, much like the scene that revolved around (Cincinnati’s) Art Damage.”
Nace and Gordon had first been doing some basement recording for themselves. They also discussed shared interests.
“We were both into the French filmmaker Catherine Breillat and I had this great book analyzing her films,” Gordon says. “We were looking at it and somehow Bill (saw) ‘body/head’ and said that’s a good name for a band. I said, ‘Well, we have to have a band if we have a name.’ ’’
Their first recording as Body/Head was for a 2011 limited-edition album on a Belgian label devoted to avant-garde covers of the song “Fever.” (Though popularized by Peggy Lee, the original version of “Fever” was recorded by Little Willie John for Cincinnati-based King Records in 1955.) Even though her record label has asked Gordon not to talk about it, she is moving toward making a solo album. She hopes to record it next year. And she’s also working on her visual art.
But is Sonic Youth forever in the past? Or might there be a return, despite the obvious personal personnel issues?
“I don’t know,” Gordon says. “I can’t answer that, actually.”
Body/Head is at the No Response Festival at Woodward Theater Thursday and continues Friday. Tickets/more information for the two-day fest: noresponsefestival.com,
