The Sonic Youth guitarist is coming back to India after a decade, this time with his partner’s joint project involving hanging guitar, images and more
Lee Ranaldo and Leah Singer are folks you can talk to about art. In reading their responses to emailed questions, there’s a deep commitment that goes beyond music movements and trends or eras.
After all, their work Contre Jour has been around since 1991 when it was called Drift and it involved not just Ranaldo – the guitarist of seminal noise-rockers Sonic Youth – playing his guitar in the most intentionally unconventional ways, but also multimedia artist Leah Singer (also his partner) working on their shared interest in analog film.
After taking it around the world to spaces that Ranaldo describes as “both intimate and extravagant,” Contre Jour makes its way to India for Ziro Festival of Music in Arunachal Pradesh. It marks a somewhat experimental project taking the stage at Ziro amongst the likes of actor-singer Farhan Akhtar, classical artist Pandit Vishwa Mohan Bhatt and singer-songwriter Taba Chake, but Ranaldo is a familiar name in that he came to headline the festival a decade ago with The Dust.
Below, Ranaldo and Singer talk about bringing Contre Jour to India, which also has shows slated to take place in New Delhi and Kolkata, the influences behind their work and what’s next. Excerpts:
Has it been more than a decade since you’ve been taking Contre Jour to different spaces around the world? How do you look back at when you started out at the New Museum in New York and what the work has become today?
Lee Ranaldo: When we started working together, around 1991, with analog film projectors, we called it Drift. Over 30 years the character of the work has evolved, and we’ve re-titled it accordingly. Some of its basic aspects – our shared interests – have not changed, but technical aspects (e.g. from film to video) and musical aspects (e.g. from spoken word recitations to multiple drummers to suspended guitars) have. In the early 2000s, we began using the screen as a sort of mirror, and called it Sight Unseen. In the last years, Contre Jour – reflecting our current interest in light and shadow.
Leah Singer: When we started in the early Nineties, I worked with 16mm film and used modified film projectors that allowed for the change in the speed, direction and duration of the film. I used two projectors in tandem, very much like a DJ would scratch vinyl records with two turntables. In my case, the projectors were like improvising tools or instruments if you like and I used a set of predetermined films from a library of images that I shot and collected over a long period of time. The difference today is that I no longer use film but digital files and I don’t manipulate the imagery live anymore – instead I create sequences from my library of images – some from performances we have done previously that I fold back in to create a new presentation.
Is the allure of the show to create a sense of mystery and unpredictability?
Ranaldo: What we do is both a cinematic presentation and a live music performance, simultaneously. The film doesn’t aspire to narrative but rather to poetry and abstraction. The performance is improvised and therefore different each time, gauging the sound of the room, the vibes of the audience and the mood of the performer(s). Although we have certain thematic elements that we work out, there is a lot of freedom for me as a performer.
In the early days, the film was more unpredictable, as Leah could improvise on the special 16mm projectors she used. These days the film is more fixed and provides a kind of score for my performance. Because there is a lot going on, between the visuals and live performance—with sounds that I’m making live along with others on tape—each audience member perceives the show based on what they focus on, so it’s a slightly different performance for each person, ideally.
Singer: The show has always operated with a welcome element of chance or unpredictability and that is also a given with live performance where anything can happen. Our show is not structured in a predictable linear fashion and so the audience drifts along with it not really knowing what will come next. It is episodic.
One of the older interviews you’d done, Lee, you mentioned that Contre Jour is closer to poetry and collage rather than any narrative. I wanted to hear from you both about have there been any recent (in the last two years?) influences in the poetry/sound and visual/literary space that you could bring into the work?
Singer: I read W.G. Sebald during the pandemic and responded to how he approached the complexities of memory and its amorphic state, often by creating evocative spaces and landscapes to absorb these stories with all their layers. I also read Thomas Bernard’s book Old Masters and liked how the writing had a lot of repetition-sometimes sounding like a rant. You had to slow down and be patient with the reading as you read the repetitive passages again and again. There is repetition and self-referential references in my work and I am drawn to it in other people’s work.
Ranaldo: For a long time I’ve been using poems, or spoken word, as part of our performances. In the early days I was reading things I’d written myself.
Eventually I began using recordings of voices I’ve collected of many different people – artists, writers, poets – as a substitute for my own voice, creating a sort of fractured narrative, or using the voice of someone important to me, such as Robert Smithson or Raymond Carver – in a more personal way.
Recently we attended a poetry reading where some of the verse was AI-generated, with some interesting results, so I’ve been playing around a bit with that as well.
Contre Jour seems like it’s meant for an intimate audience, but you’re also taking it to Ziro Festival as a headline act. Is it a leap to have this on a bigger festival stage, for an audience that’s probably more used to melodies and riffs and that sort of thing?
Ranaldo: This actually is a performance that we have presented in venues both intimate and extravagant. It’s a unique, unusual performance, and can be adapted to many situations, inside or outside. We’ve presented it in the round in an Italian piazza, and onstage in a proscenium theater at a film festival in Argentina.
Singer: Contre Jour adapts to its environment. It’s unclear how the audience will respond, especially if they have a different expectation of the show in their mind. But the performance is commanding and the imagery provides stimulus – so I’m sure the experience will ignite people. We hope so.
You’re also going to be performing this in Delhi and Kolkata, I’m guessing that would be way more different. I know with Lee Ranaldo and the Dust, there were a few other club shows in India around Ziro. Did you think India had a space (and audience) for this kind of noise-and images work like Contre Jour back then?
Ranaldo: I’m still not clear on what type of audience will come out! I imagine there are some who know Sonic Youth and the scene we came out of – probably even more know about Nirvana, and our association to them. I know there are pure sound artists in India, and certainly a long history in the cinema, hopefully many different artists interested in the experimental side of cinema and new music will come out to see us perform.
For our part, we are interested in seeing what we can while we are in India, and to meet artists, writers and musicians wherever we go.
Singer: I think the Internet offers so much information about what is happening in music and art and culture that it wouldn’t be surprising to find Indians with a vast knowledge of the avant-garde in America. I remember going to the Soviet Union with musicians in 1989, just before everything changed — ironically Lee was there a few months before with Sonic Youth—and this was before the internet and social media and many people I met knew about artist circles in New York and some idea of what was happening. They were really hungry for it all. I’m sure audiences in India have a capacity to respond well to this type of show.
Is this going to be Leah’s first time to India or did you get to come by last time or any other time? I wanted to get both your thoughts on coming to India, specifically Ziro because it has changed so much in terms of infrastructure, accessibility and all that since you last visited about 10 years ago?
Ranaldo: I’m interested to see the change in Ziro since I was there 10 years ago. The place made a deep impression on all of us when my band The Dust were there. On our last afternoon we met with local ministers who told us that the area was going to change quickly, with new roads, etc. I guess they were correct.
Singer: I have never been to India but did spend time nearby in Nepal in the late Eighties. I heard all the stories of the long car travel to get to the Ziro Valley 10 years ago but it does seem like our trip will be much shorter with less driving, thanks to a new airport access. It’s incredible to see progress – sometimes the density of a city hides progress but in rural areas, you can really see the change and the difference it makes.
Do you have any other plans outside of the shows while you’re here?
Singer: There are too many great things to see and do in India and I hope I can come again and again to see it all. On this trip, we will take one week around the Golden Triangle of Jaipur, Agra and Delhi with some side trips to Chand Baori and Chandigarh.
Ranaldo: We both have an interest in Indian culture, music and art. We’ll have some time to ourselves after the tour and we are looking forward to doing some exploration of our own. I’d like to visit some musical instrument shops and see some textile dying. The country is so vast, with so much to see – like the US – that we know we will only scratch the surface.
What else is coming up for both of you individually and jointly through the rest of 2023?
Ranaldo: For me, I’m working on material for a new solo album and mixing a few projects that have been backing up. I’m hoping to also find time to work more on my visual art as well. My plan for 2024 is to travel as little as possible and work on developing new ideas and projects.
Singer: I conduct oral histories with visual artists for the Smithsonian Museum and I have a few interviews coming up. I am also a regular writer for the international magazine Apartamento and I’ll be working on a story on photographer Pedro Guerrero who documented the early work of the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. I’m also working on a series of prints called the Ruby Drawings and I’ll continue to develop those.
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