A couple of weeks ago I started my sabbatical - 3 months of anything but work :) I've been hoping to see alot more live music (as well as get a chance to play more), and in keeping with that spirit, I flew down to Berkeley last week to see Sonic Youth performing the Daydream Nation album at the Berkeley Community Theater. Daydream was my favorite album for the better part of a decade, so flying to the bay area was a small price to pay. And seeing it with my best mate Dave, from the second row - priceless. We were literally right beneath Thurston (literally 5 feet away), and 15 feet from Kim. Worth every penny we paid StubHub :) There's a great article on Pitchfork about how hard it was for the band to figure out how to play an album they made so long ago (it's been almost two decades..) Thurston plays almost every song in a custom tuning, so he had to go back and look at pictures of himself playing to figure it out.. I have to say, they totally nailed it. Here are some photos I took, and here is my YouTube video of Teen Age Riot . The sound quality isn't good because we're mostly picking up Thurston's amp and not much else, but the proximity is unbeatable :-)
Read More...