Top 55 Sonic Quotes

‘Love’ has that Kubrick tonality to it, but this is not a Stanley Kubrick movie – there will never be another. At the same time, ‘Love’ has a modern feel. For example: In one scene, these astronauts go through a wormhole sequence, and you feel like you’re being slapped around inside your head by a sonic boom.

I think people would describe a lot of Sleater-Kinney as unsettling. And I don’t think our best moments have sonic assonance to them. I think that we are best with a little bit of… a caustic attitude and tone.

I completely understand the responsibility I have in continuing the sonic style that I have created.

I think that certainly, whenever you have a new band, the first record always has a certain energy to it before you know what you’re doing. I think some of the early Sonic Youth stuff was maybe like that.

Orchestras are like people. They’re the sonic embodiment of their community.

We were like psychedelic folk combined with Sonic Youth’s noise.

I like Sonic and all those types of games, and Sega Genesis.

Obviously, Sonic Youth has been a huge part of my life for many, many years, and I love all those guys dearly.

Sonic Youth played one show before we even had a drummer. It was just me, Kim, and Thurston. The lights slowly went down, and the set was just 30 minutes of feedback.

Music can provide a much-needed break from life’s harsh moments, but Eddy Current Suppression Ring has no interest in creating a sonic fire escape for the distraught. Instead, the band embraces the real world, wrapping its arms around the beautiful and the ugly alike.

The goal with a show is to push forward the passion in a visual and sonic way. It all comes out in a trance-like way, fast and pulsating. Then people can go home and think about the lyrics later.

Choosing an acoustic guitar for a live setting can be different from picking out one for recording. One doesn’t always work for the other. The sonic properties can be vastly different.

It’s about the stories. If I write 14 stories that I love, then the next step is to get the environment of music around it to best envelop the story, and all kinds of sonic goodness – sonic goodies.

R. Murray Shcafer is a Canadian composer with a twist. Aside from writing incredibly ethereal music, he is also an acousitc ecologist, fighting for the sonic space on this planet to be beautiful – a rare and shamefully underrated cause.

Every kid has a laptop; everyone can make music, so in order to stand out, I think it’s important to find that sonic identity, I think my sonic identity – and mine is finding these weird sounds that may not necessarily sound that musical, and make them sound musical.

I try to make it a sonic experience so that when you put your earbuds in or when you’re in your room, it sounds like an enveloping feeling. I think that is the most important thing, that wherever you are, it is wrapping you up and making you feel safe and comfortable.

Both of my books, ‘Love Is a Mix Tape’ and ‘Talking to Girls About Duran Duran,’ are about how music gets tangled up with all our other emotional memories. Since I’m an obsessive music fan, I’m always seeking out new sonic thrills.

By the time Sonic Youth formed in 1981, my musical tastes had left the Dead behind, but I was always very proud of the fact that we had three different singers singing individually from different points of view, like the Dead.

Robin Williams understands sonic performances. He understands what it’s like to change your voice up.

Pixies and Sonic Youth were so important to the eighties.

When the Grateful Dead needed a quality sound system to deliver our sonic payload, I learned electronics and speaker design.

I think, as an artist, you want to keep going – you want to keep taking challenges; you want to be pushed, in a way – and I think Sonic Evolution does that, it makes me feel a little uncomfortable and get out of my comfort zone.

One of the key guitars in my career has been an early-Seventies Fender Telecaster Deluxe that I had before Sonic Youth started and that I played pretty much throughout Sonic Youth.

It’s important to me to not stay too confined to any specific sonic space. There is something really magical about straight folk music – it’s not that I don’t like it, it’s just that I like so much music, I hear so many different things, and I want to try more. I don’t want to be confined.

Sonic Youth could never really get it together acoustically – quite frankly, it wasn’t something we were really that interested in.

As far as we’re concerned, we’re always Sonic Youth, and we’re always making a Sonic Youth record. We just see it so much more as a continuum than a periodic thing. We’re just in the studio making the next record, and we don’t relate it to anything other than what’s going on at the moment.

I’ve waited for the day my debut album is released my entire life, so naturally I’ve designed it to be listened to from start to finish – so every song flows into each other in a way that tells a sonic story.

‘Europe ’72’ was a super influential record full of fantastic songs and amazing experimental musicianship. I always valued both of those aspects in what Sonic Youth has done through the years – being able to get very abstract and very concrete within the same song.

I don’t know what the vintage Sonic Youth sound is.

A sonic logo on its own isn’t going to do very much. We get frustrated with smaller brands who come to us and say, ‘We need a bing-bong’. You just can’t encapsulate a brand for £500 in a three-second sound. It doesn’t work.

I’ve been trying to challenge myself to be more explicit. I’ve always liked punk rock and Sonic Youth. I make that music privately, but I’ve never released it.

But really important, perhaps most important is the craft; how you make your record, the creation of these sonic worlds you want your listener to hear.

I’ve been into Sonic Youth since junior high school. I think I kind of have ADD, so it’s good music for ADD because it just throws you in different directions all the time. I really like Kim Gordon’s voice and Thurston Moore’s voice, and I like the guitars going off on tangents.

Hip-hop has survived as a sonic practice more than anything else. It’s an approach to music-making based in sampling and rhyming over beats, that’s proven far more versatile than its detractors thought it would.

I really do prioritise humour in people. It’s a sign of intelligence. One of the most important things I heard that moulded me was Derek and Clive. That sense of release when I heard them for the first time, crying and laughing, was akin to seeing Sonic Youth for the first time.

In Sonic Youth, at the end of ‘Expressway to Yr. Skull,’ we’d tap on the backs of our guitars to get this low-level feedback, and if I leaned forward, and the guitar hung off my body, it would resonate differently.

I was a rapper and a DJ, and if you wanted to be involved in hip-hop, you had to be involved in the sonic, the kinetic and the visual aspects. The visual was graffiti.

I always like to say that the music I’d like to make is somewhere between Pan Sonic and Scott Walker. But I don’t sing anything like Scott Walker.

I think Thurston’s and my weird tunings lent Sonic Youth a very different sound from the get-go. In the band’s 30 years – aside from covers – there are maybe two or three songs we wrote using traditional tuning.

Composing gives me a chance to work in multiple dimensions and helps me pare down my melodies into what is essential. Learning new skills has always energized me and scoring has opened up a world of sonic possibilities.

When Sonic Youth writes music, we write everything in a very communal way. It doesn’t matter who brought something in initially; it all gets transformed by the band.

We never sit down before we start making a record and talk about this new sonic palette that we are going to try to explore. We always let the record kind of reveal itself to us over time.

When I was really little, we used to play Sega Genesis, and my older brother would play ‘Sonic The Hedgehog 2,’ and he’d be playing as Sonic, but he’d leave an unplugged controller for me to play with, and the whole time I thought I was playing as Tails.

During the whole time in Sonic Youth, I was happy to put my energy into that. It would have been very difficult to do a solo project.

Sonic Youth is one of my favorite bands.

When I went to college, I discovered the Sega console, and ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ became very dear to me.

At 18, I moved to L.A. with my heavy metal band Avant Garde, which was very much influenced by Metallica. At 19, I got a job at Tower Records, and everything started to change very quickly. I started listening to the Velvet Underground, Pixies, early Nirvana, Sonic Youth, and also earlier music like the Beatles.

First, I’m trying to edit down about 7 hours of material which I made prior to the Cop days and find some way to get it out. This stuff is pretty out there, mostly sonic collages and tape manipulations.

Part of the process of reading is constantly hitting the pause button, and now and then the rewind button, to ponder a word that’s been chosen by the author as exquisitely as the filmmaker chooses an image or a sound editor chooses a sonic clue – the tolling of a bell in the distance to evoke memory, for instance.