Words and Media by Andrew Parks
“Is that who I think it is?” whispered someone in the Endless Summer taco line on Saturday night.
Indeed. The man who just asked for a plastic bag and pushed a pair of professorial glasses off his nose before walking away in silence was Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth. He does this a lot. And by this, we mean show up in Brooklyn–or in the halcyon days of Tonic and the Knitting Factory, downtown NYC–for barely announced appearances at noise shows that remind ‘the kids’ who their daddy is.
This evening’s neck-strangling performance was a release party for the No Fun debut of Emeralds, a prolific trio of young Krautrock revivalists from the economically-depressed environs of Cleveland, Ohio. While they aren’t extreme in the same sense as No Fun alums like Merzbow and Prurient, Emeralds’ ambient excursions did provide a nice, soothing conclusion to a night of fret pounding and frayed electronics. Speaking of, Moore’s collaboration with No Fun owner Carlos Giffoni–a deviant duet guided by the former’s thoroughly abused guitar–wasn’t the only marquee draw for masochists. Eric Copeland of Black Dice also stopped by to sling sine waves and scrambled samples via a couple of Minidisc players and lots of knob-twiddling. Check the video clips and photos after the jump for a survey of all the self-destruction …
