A Space Outside Myself: Kim Gordon Interviewed

Kim Gordon’s creative instincts are coalescing. Adapting to her rediscovered West Coast environs, she’s breaking with the past to grapple with the new.

Kim Gordon is still adjusting. Initially raised on the West Coast, she travelled to New York in the late 70s to pursue her passion for visual arts, finding a city being reshaped by the smouldering energy of punk. It’s these embers that birthed Sonic Youth, her bass playing and infinitely cool vocals transforming this shy but resolute woman into an underground icon.

Now, though, she’s solo, and based once more in Los Angeles. It’s not quite full circle; the city she knew has shifted, and the person she’s becoming is still unclear. Throwing herself into a multitude of projects, CLASH catches Kim Gordon a few days prior to her latest exhibition opening; in a couple of weeks she’ll host a book launch – a collection of works left by her late brother, but curated by Kim herself – and it’s just a few months since the release of her titanic new solo album, ‘The Collective’. As we say: she’s adjusting.

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“I mean, I still feel a little in a bubble,” she says, when CLASH asks if she’s re-rooted herself in Los Angeles. “Aspects of it are totally familiar to me. As far as the art world goes, I’m still finding my way, and finding my people within it.”

Kim Gordon is interacting with the world on her own terms. 2019’s ‘No Home Record’ – technically her debut solo album – ripped apart expectations, presenting a seismic break with the music she had created before. Crafted alongside producer Justin Raisen, it offered damaged electronics that seemed to shake apart the systems they were being played on; for her part, Kim Gordon’s observational lyrical eye uncovered the unsettling and surreal in the prosaic and the everyday.

The pandemic knocked her touring plans but when CLASH finally caught Kim Gordon in 2022 at London’s KOKO, we witnessed a spirit unleashed – the chained up energies of lockdown ripped apart onstage. For Kim, the relief was palpable. “Oh, it was great!” she recalls, breaking out into a smile before self-consciously checking herself. “During the pandemic, we weren’t able to perform or travel or anything. So it felt like we were catching up on that sort of thing. It was very joyous.”

That visceral energy is what powers her excellent new album ‘The Collective’. Steered once more alongside Justin Raisen, it steps into the breach fostered by her debut but develops those still further. It’s more detailed, perhaps even more daring. Remarkably, in her fifth decade of making music, Kim Gordon is in the process of redefining herself.

Working instinctually, Justin Raisen would develop beats – leaning on SoundCloud rap tropes, and the kind of prodigal productions dreamed up by adolescents completely unaware of sonic norms – before handing them over to Kim. “We would talk about different beats I liked, from hip-hop and other things. With this record, I wanted to have more beats,” she explains. “And then we’d design stuff, and I’d decide if I could do something with it. I’d go in and make guitar parts, and then bring in lyrics. Some of it is improvised, also.”

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“It’s very free for both of us,” she explains. “I know for him, he likes it because it gives him a chance to do things he can’t do with other people. I want it to be pretty free and adventurous. I think both of us like fucking with technology, and destroying it a bit.”

In a way, the record taps into the pattern her life has taken; it moves back to the shock of the No Wave era, but refuses to intersect with the past. For Kim Gordon, the future is the only option. “Like a lot of people I fell into music during post-punk in the spirit of anti-corporate thought,” she points out. “I moved to New York to become a visual artist, so I still feel like I’m a visual artist in a band or making music.”

Her role as a non-musician allows Kim Gordon to move past rules other (more trained) mindsets would think are insurmountable. Finding kinship in hip-hop’s refusal to obey audio restrictions, ‘The Collective’ emerged from a dense, intense array of studio sessions.

“To me, it’s all just vocabulary,” she notes. “In any genre there are formalisms – people cling to it, but you don’t have to. In hip-hop there’s no verse-chorus-verse. And then in Sonic Youth we didn’t really work that way either. We felt a little bit of a kinship with Public Enemy when we recorded ‘Daydream Nation’ and they were recording at the same studio, but they were layering dense sounds. It was a little similar.”

Coming out of the pandemic presented its own challenges. Justin Raisen’s time was in-demand, both professionally and with his young family. Sessions would be staggered, but this meant that Kim was afforded time to apply laser-sharp focus to her vocal performances.

“When you record vocals, you usually have headphones on, listening to the track,” she says. “There’s something about the sound of my voice, through the board, through the microphone, then into my headphones. It doesn’t sound like my normal voice, in a way, but it kind of gives me… it gives me a certain confidence to say or sing things that I wouldn’t ordinarily… if I was acapella singing in my kitchen, or something. It transports me to a different place; a space outside myself.”

At times, the lyrics on ‘The Collective’ are caustic, leaving these acidic stains on all they touch. Just listen to ‘I’m A Man’ with its pastiche of 21^st century ultra-machismo. A blistering character study, it also roots itself in the mythos of vintage Hollywood. The line “it was good enough for Nancy”, we suggest, clearly echoes one-time cowboy actor turned Republican President Ronald Reagan. “He destroyed the school system here!” she exclaims. “It used to be free!”

“That song was inspired by right wing politicians acting like they’re victims of feminism, and whining. But I’ve always been interested in this notion of the traditional role of men in the 50s and 60s; this cowboy, Reagan-esque, John Wayne, ‘I’m going to save you! I’ll rescue you! I’m the provider!’ When that went away men became lost, they didn’t know what to do so they became consumers like women. That’s the point of that song. But people can read into it whatever they want.”

Kim’s lyrics come from a multitude of sources. One song emerged from a dare, with a friend inviting her to write a song about bowling. “I always liked that Warhol asked people around him what he should paint. That’s what happened. I asked my friend, and she said: what about bowling trophies? As a challenge, I mostly collect phrases, or things people say. Signage. Y’know, just things that seem interesting. And then see if I can use them in and around the subject matter.”

She’s both the cold, clinical observer, and the central character, shaping the world around her. There’s a certain freedom to ‘The Collective’ however, that allows it to drift into some unexpected areas. ‘Dream Dollar’ “started basically as a hardcore song,” she explains, “and then just became its own thing.”

“I didn’t want to make a song that sounded like that, it just came out that way. I was like, OK, this is unexpected,” she laughs. “I don’t even remember what my first intentions were. But it’s similar to making a painting – an abstract painting – it goes through different formations. Sometimes you think it’s horrible, then it looks a bit better, and it ends up being something that hopefully comes out OK.”

As Kim freely admits, this period of her life has witnessed her various artistic practices coalescing. Music functions within visual art, for example, and the lyrics often feel like mini-movies: these stunted, lysergic narratives. ‘Psychedelic Orgasm’ finds the stoned narrator wandering past kids fixated by TikTok videos, neither party comprehending the world around them – the West Coast, after all, acts as both the cradle of the 60s counterculture and a modern tech hub. “That song is about how there is this momentous shift, a normative culture towards escapism,” she notes with a palpable bite in her voice, “because things are really kind of shit now. It’s like, let’s take drugs and escape. That’s our way of checking out and no, we’re not going to vote in the election. We’re not even listening to the news.”

Through her art, Kim rejects this. She’s worked too damn hard, for too long, to simply check-out. The unadorned moments emerge before the record takes detours slicing through this. It’s noisy, abrasive and thrilling – in its own way, it’s punk. “I suppose it’s confrontational,” she admits, with a half-hearted giggle. “It’s also kind of a dance record!”

Released earlier this year, ‘The Collective’ made a huge impact. Curiously, for a record that so often deals with our love-hate relationship with technology – down to the mobile phone on its cover art – it also spawned a TikTok moment, with the single ‘Bye Bye’ going viral on the ultra-addictive visual platform. “It did, just for a second!” she exclaims. “And that’s how TikTok works – it moves on, every second.”

Like most of us, Kim Gordon has a contorted relationship with social media. A friend recommended Twitter to her in a bid to stem loneliness. “I hardly ever go on Twitter now,” she shrugs. “When I was there, it wasn’t as politicised, or people weren’t quite as reactionary as they are now.”

Preferring instead to use Instagram – visual arts remains her core, after all – Kim is the first to note the strange landscape musicians are currently operating in. Expected to be their own promotional hub, the money from these social media platforms is effectively funnelled up to about three people. The us vs them dynamic of the post-punk underground has been fragmented, and endlessly granulated. “It is,” she demurs. “The attitude for a lot of young musicians starting out, they don’t think about any of the DIY stuff. That kind of goes around in the late 70s, 80s, through to the 90s. It’s kind of about making something, not waiting for some corporation to tell you what you should be listening to.”

Pushing back against expectations, Kim Gordon is embracing evolution, and seizing upon chance. This year alone brings a collaboration with choreographer Dimitri Chamblas, an unexpected move into the dance world. The new book Keller finds her curating her late brother’s unpublished works, a labour of love years in the making. “He had these notebooks that were filled with writing that you really can’t read. It looks like an abstract painting. Occasionally you can pick words out. He was a Shakespearean scholar, and he studied Greek and Latin, and he became schizophrenic. You can see this jumble or things you can understand, or not. They’re kind of beautiful pages. And he had these funny drawings in the notebook, too.”

Continuing to focus on her visual art endeavours, Kim Gordon and Justin Raisen have already begun work on a few new songs – oh, and she also has the small matter of transatlantic live shows to attend to this summer. “I mean, hopefully there’s some spontaneity to it,” she says with typical under-statement. “There is something about performance. I still like performing. Sometimes you can understand the songs better live than on the record.”

“There’s a physicality with playing music . The songs do take on a certain different life,” she notes. “You can only have this experience once, and then it goes away.” 

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Special thanks to Aralda Vintage and Paumé Vintage. As seen in CLASH Issue 128. Order your copy here.

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