{"id":974382,"date":"2020-01-13T06:00:02","date_gmt":"2020-01-13T13:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/?p=936609"},"modified":"2020-01-13T06:00:02","modified_gmt":"2020-01-13T13:00:02","slug":"how-lee-ranaldo-throwing-chairs-at-a-wall-became-a-song-about-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/music-news\/how-lee-ranaldo-throwing-chairs-at-a-wall-became-a-song-about-love\/","title":{"rendered":"How Lee Ranaldo Throwing Chairs at a Wall Became a Song About Love"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Lee Ranaldo<\/a> and Rosal\u00eda collaborator Ra\u00fcl Refree are extremely talented guitarists, but for their new song \u201cLight Years Out\u201d they turned to an old cassette of Ranaldo throwing chairs against the wall for instrumentation instead.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe found some tapes at the studio in New York that Lee recorded many years ago,\u201d Refree tells Rolling Stone<\/em>. Ranaldo says he created them nearly 20 years ago for a tribute album to Japanese noise band Hanatarash on a cassette player made by the Library of Congress for blind people. \u201cWith this cassette and some of the others we found, we created this texture. It was a fresh experience for us,\u201d Refree adds.<\/p>\n

\u201cLight Years Out\u201d is the second single off the pair\u2019s upcoming album Names of North End Women<\/em>, out February 21 via Mute; the title track<\/a> dropped at the end of 2019. This is the duo\u2019s second collaboration \u2014 following 2017\u2019s Electric Trim<\/em> \u2014 and marks a decided turn toward the experimental.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe idea with the last record was to take my music \u2014 which has been, for so long, in Sonic Youth and after Sonic Youth, based around this format of a rock band \u2014 and expand it,\u201d Ranaldo says. \u201cPut the music in some different settings. When we got together to make the follow-up, we thought we would start in a similar vein. I came in with all these demos and we stockpiled all this modern, electronic beat-making equipment that Ra\u00fcl had been working with in the last year and we just went off on a different path.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLight Years Out\u201d is what Ranaldo calls \u201cthe weirdest\u201d song on the record. It starts off with a voiceover, a snippet of a poem Ranaldo had on hand: \u201cI wanna look like a man that has nowhere to go,\u201d Ranaldo intones. \u201cNowhere he\u2019s gotta be. At large, in the 21st century. Light years from your smile, a light rain is falling on my head.\u201d Then the song starts to glitch out.<\/p>\n

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Popular on Rolling Stone <\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cWe wanted to build it from something very sparse: just a voice,\u201d Ranaldo says. \u201cThat was an exciting idea to us. There\u2019s then a lot of bits of fragmentary dialogue. We cut the lyrics to the point where they\u2019re kind of unintelligible in a way \u2014 like you\u2019re listening to a radio and it\u2019s going in and out of focus. You hear stuff falling downstairs and clanking and voices breathing heavy. Then it builds to a point where the beat drops and it becomes more conventional.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis song is about the possibilities of love, lovers and loving in our expanding universe,\u201d he adds. \u201cAbout the bonds between people and how they strengthen and loosen.\u201d<\/p>\n

The accompanying video tends toward the experimental as well. Ranaldo teamed up with an old classmate from Binghamton University in New York, Matt Schlanger, who happened to have a basement full of analogue video gear in upstate New York. It\u2019s a simple affair, featuring a glitched-out version of Ranaldo\u2019s face.<\/p>\n

Ranaldo and Refree approached the album-making process in a collage-y fashion. They mixed electronic with analogue, new recordings with old. They also tapped past collaborator, author Jonathan Lethem, for lyrics. \u201cRather than be linear or narrative about the lyrics, I would prop up a whole bunch of sheets on music stands \u2014 some of Jonathan\u2019s, some of Raul\u2019s, some of mine \u2014 and just kind of freestyle a bit and see what worked best with these tracks,\u201d Ranaldo says.<\/p>\n

They also tried to hew closely to the concept of the album, inherent in its title: Names of North End Women<\/em>. Ranaldo came up with the title after wandering through a neighborhood in his wife\u2019s hometown \u2014 the North End of Winnipeg, Manitoba \u2014 and seeing a series of streets named after women:  Lydia, Kate, Dagmar, Harriett, Juno, etc. These women became a metaphor for how people pass in and out of one\u2019s life. Someone named \u201cAngela\u201d crops up in \u201cLight Years Out\u201d \u2014 a woman the narrator lusts after.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis album loosens the bonds from the idea of what songs can be, and both Ra\u00fcl and I are excited to see where we can push it further,\u201d Ranaldo said in a statement.<\/p>\n

Once the album releases this fall, the duo plan to hit the road for a brief European tour. There\u2019s no word yet on U.S. dates.<\/p>\n

via:: Rolling Stone<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lee Ranaldo and Rosal\u00eda collaborator Ra\u00fcl Refree are extremely talented guitarists, but for their new song \u201cLight Years Out\u201d they turned to an old cassette of Ranaldo throwing chairs against the wall for instrumentation instead. \u201cWe found some tapes at the studio in New York that Lee recorded many years ago,\u201d Refree tells Rolling Stone. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[76],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-974382","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-music-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-27 20:01:17","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KFMU Solar Powered Radio","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/974382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=974382"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/974382\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=974382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=974382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=974382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}