Top 60 Sonic Quotes

If someone says ‘grunge‘ or ‘punk,’ you know what the sound is, but if you say ‘No Wave,’ it’s kind of mysterious. That was the most interesting part and should have been the most inspirational thing about it… here’s this collective sonic insanity, and none of it sounds anything alike.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’ve been lucky enough to be in this amazing band, and to me, a band is really a collaborative unit, and that’s definitely been what Sonic Youth has been.

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.

Each member does whatever they want with the song and it totally changes it from whatever idea I hear around it. It turns it into a Sonic Youth song and completely away from it being a solo song.

When I was super young, I had an Atari and used to play ‘Space Invaders.’ Then I fell in love with ‘Mario Bros.,’ ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ and ‘Yoshi’ on Super Nintendo. I was quite a bit of a gamer as a kid when I think about it.

All time faves would be ‘Smash TV,’ ‘NHL Hockey,’ ‘Grand Theft Autos,’ ‘NBA Lives,’ ‘Sonic.’

When Sonic Youth wrote music, we would rehearse for months before anybody heard anything.

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

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’m glad that people realize that I am a songwriter. I just want them to take away the fact that I’m honest, and that I’m putting in work on the sonic side.

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 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.

If the nose has become a deeply disillusioned and grief-stricken organ in the modern world, then what of the ear? The poor little ear – such an innocent, intelligent and sensitive creature; in these times of such flagrant sonic brutality, the sense within the ear has much to contend with.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 was a collective. There’s something fantastic about the idea of making music is a social activity.

The SynthAxe enables you to achieve a whole world of sonic textures that you cannot get with a guitar. There was nothing like it before and nothing like it since.

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.

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.

My idea is to take the improvisational excitement that takes place with Carnatic music and juxtapose that in different sonic contexts.

‘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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

Sonic Youth is one of my favorite bands.

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.

For me, I always have looked at ‘indie‘ as a term of ‘independence.’ Never associated a sonic gesture with that in the same way that pop music has always meant ‘popular‘ to me; you know, it didn’t define a sound.

Lyric writing is an interesting process in Sonic Youth. There’s three people writing now, and we’ve all had a lot of interest and involvement with expression through words.

I’ve always been an acoustic guitar player, and I’ve pretty much continued to play acoustic guitar throughout all of the Sonic Youth periods. My material for Sonic Youth often started on acoustic guitar.

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

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

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.

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

Yes, indeed, in fact I would tell you that we go out of our way to be true to the original feeling and sort of sonic and musical pallet that we painted with back then.

My first album, ‘Get Lifted,’ was a hip-hop soul album that had some of its roots in the church, as far as the sonic choices, in the way that I sing and write songs. I have always had that as part of my background and part of my influence when I am making music.

Sonic Youth has a very democratic process for the most part. It almost doesn’t matter who brings in an initial idea; everything gets worked over by the band and kind of co-written by everyone in the end because everyone’s ideas get contributed to it.

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.

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

Pan Sonic sound like they are playing music of the future made with the electric instruments of yesterday.

Sonic Youth was not a singer-songwriter band. It was an electric collective. And, whatever else people’s perceptions of Sonic Youth were, it was always about putting together a time-based composition – and that is exactly what songwriting is, in its classic form.

Sensitivity isn’t being wimpy. It’s about being so painfully aware that a flea landing on a dog is like a sonic boom. I enjoy a lot of mystery.

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.

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.

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.