Thurston Moore webchat – your questions answered on black metal, the Fall and the joy of disco

I feel like I could engage in conversation all day in regards to certainly music and culture and people's interest in my experience with it, and I can only say that at this point in my life, I release music to be socially engaged in communication. So in that respect, music is for me an entirely political interconnection, a political act. I find now while we're dealing as a community with being in a situation where we're being asked to work together socially while in isolation, it's a real challenge, and I think the communiques of media, journalism, and music through recordings online and offline are extremely important for connectivity. So I appreciate speaking to you!

I was always into heavy metal from the early 70s, and even getting into punk rock, the relationship between the raging guitars in a lot of the punk rock music of the Ramones or Pistols or the Clash was correlative to what I liked in heavy metal: Judas Priest, Sabbath, the Stooges. As far as more contemporary metal, I was a huge enthusiast of the band Venom when they first appeared, out of Nottingham I think – there was something about Venom and even some New Wave of British Heavy Metal bands that had a bit of a good connection with what I liked in underground hardcore music. They've always been part of my enjoyment of music. I was certainly the one person in Sonic Youth who flew that flag. And encouraged more metallic action in Sonic Youth. I knew about black metal quite early on, hearing about the church burnings in Norway when Kerrang! reported on it, and hearing Mayhem, and being amazed about what they were up to - it went beyond metal, and punk rock, and became this other music that was in defiance of being genre-ised. It was so curious - it existed almost as a noise music. So I always followed the black metal scene to the point where it became so international and completely underground, where the most important recordings existed through a community of cassette dealers. I started amassing cassettes from the Soviet Union to Greece, France, South America, all these different regions had different flavours of the black metal world. I didn't want to be part of the universe though, I was happy to sit apart. I was happy to meet Necrobutcher though because I wanted to publish his memoir, which we did.

For me I was always interested in music that worked on the extreme margins of culture, and black metal prided itself on being so extreme that a lot of the artists refused to actually document themselves, for fear of being confused with music. For me that was far more radical than the Sex Pistols saying they weren't into music but instead chaos - this was a community that said, we have nothing to do with music, we're something else entirely. Ok, how do I process this? You're using guitars and drums and amplifiers, but it's entirely something else. I was looking for artists who were issuing cassettes that sounded like the recording microphone was attached to the back of a wild dog running around the studio. Who would make a record like this? Sometimes it would just be a blur of insanity.

If you look at the legions of black metal artist names, there's thousands of them. How many have actually played a gig, or are real humans? We don't know! It's a world unto its own. It's a world that wants nothing to do with the standardised world of humanity. Maybe they know something we don't!

It may very well be the first Patti Smith 7-inch of Hey Joe backed with Piss Factory. I sent away for it as soon as it was announced in small ads in some New York City music papers, there was a magazine at the time called Rock Scene where I possibly saw this ad. I was intrigued because I knew her to be a writer, and I read her record reviews since the early 70s in Creem and Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy and Fusion and Hit Parade and Rock Scene. And she made a record, with another rock writer Lenny Kaye, and I was very curious about what a rock writer would sound like making rock. She was so intriguing with her writing and her poetry was published in these magazines too. I got a 7 inch in the mail, and she had signed the white sleeve. Hearing that record was a life changing event – it was so raw and minimal and stark, when most music was so overblown and grandiose. And so the fact that it had this poetic recitation on the record, it really set itself apart from anything else. It was so underground, like being on a street corner on New York City rather than riding with the Valkyries with Uriah Heep or something. I still have that 7-inch with that signed sleeve, in my 7-inch box. Boxes.

That's emotionally. Monetarily, I don't know what the most expensive precious record is, to tell you the truth. I always wanted to find the lost cylinder of Buddy Bolden, the jazz trumpeter of the 1920s. I'm still looking for that. He's the great New Orleans jazz trumpeter that Louis Armstrong talks about hearing as a child, he's considered to be the father of jazz and popular music in the USA. He recorded a cylinder recording early in the century that's yet to be found – that's on my want list.

There's a record from the late 70s, early 80s, the first album by Dr Buzzard's Original Savannah Band. It was the group where a lot of recognised important African-American contemporary funk and pop artists came out of, particularly August Darnell. They were a bit of a disco band who came out of the Bronx in New York, they had a very urban vibe which I liked, living in New York. They had a dance hit, Cherchez La Femme. I bought that record because it was this cool, Bronx, New York record and they were playing the same venues downtown as No Wave bands like DNA – I remember talking to Arto Lindsay about them, and he agreed: "yeah that's a critical record". I think people would be surprised a stone classic disco album is one of my favourite records of all time.

But I was always pro disco. Punk rock had this anti disco sentiment being expressed quite a bit, and I understood why that was because disco referenced an embrace of wealth and glamour at a time when punk was about kicking against that and extolling the glory of its poverty and its resistance to monied allusions. But disco to me was community oriented, and brought together a lot of energy from not only the African-American communities of America but also the gay communities of America. The fact that music went global, and was from a gay aesthetic, I thought that was fantastic. I think that is reason alone for the music's significance. Disco, like punk rock, continues to be an ongoing source of inspiration for so much of popular music, so I find it fairly eternal. Can you be fairly eternal?!

I didn't realise quarantine hobbies was a thing! I have taught myself how to record music on a digital recording machine, at home, I never was interested in recording at home, I always liked the idea of going to a studio and working in collaboration with its engineer, and keeping that process outside of my home. I found that I needed to take care of this situation since quarantine prohibited me from using a studio. So I have a small digital 8 track machine, and I learned just enough to record and mix on it with the most minimum of effort. I use the same reverb effect on everything I do, and I like it! I'm a big fan of economy, when it comes to recording. So I've been enjoying that - it has become a hobby. I've been recording a lot of new music on this little digital machine.

A lot of music I've been making is instrumental music for a film project that a young British artist has asked me to be involved with. So that's what I've primarily been doing. I would love to tell you who... but I know enough not to say anything until names are signed on pieces of paper. The first thing I recorded on this machine as soon as quarantine happened is a song called Strawberry Moon, because at the beginning the moon was in a phase called strawberry moon, so I put up the instrumental on my Bandcamp page as the first thing I'd done during quarantine – so that is out there.

I've also been writing a book, about music, and my own personal experience with it, and trying to talk about my discovering and inspirations and intrigues with being a musician and starting Sonic Youth in 1980. So I've been writing that, and I hope to publish it on the other side of the quarantine age. It's titled Sonic Life.

I have a brother who is five years older than I am, and so when we could procure record albums Jimi was pretty early on. My brother is a fantastic high technique guitar player, unlike myself, I'm completely self-vocabularised. But I gleaned everything initially about guitar from him. And he brought Jimi Hendrix to the house.

The song by Hendrix that stuck with me was Crosstown Traffic. I think a lot of it had to do with Jimi's singing and lyrics as much as his guitar virtuosity. There's one line that went "tyre tracks all across your back, I can see where you had your fun". As a 13 year old I wasn't quite sure what that alluded to but it sounded really exciting! Like, what is he talking about? But I love that song, the way he sings do-do-do-do with his guitar going do-do-do too. A beautiful, crazy, rock-pop tune by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, for sure. I liked all the fun allegories he had in that song, like the traffic jam straight up ahead, the signals turning green to red. It was a primer for me in terms of how to have fun with lyrics, whilst shredding.