Mistletone

KIM GORDON ~ THE COLLECTIVE TOUR DATES:

SYDNEY: Thursday July 18: Volume at Art Gallery of NSW with Eleanor Jawurlngali Triad. Tickets on sale here.
Friday July 19: Volume at Art Gallery of NSW with Tina Havelock Stevens and Liberty Live. * SOLD OUT
ADELAIDE: Saturday July 20: Unsound at Illuminate Adelaide, Dom Polski Centre.TICKETS
BRISBANE: Sunday July 21: Open Frame, Brisbane Powerhouse with Rusted Satellites DJs. Tickets on sale here.
MELBOURNE: Wednesday July 24: Northcote Theatre with Teether. * SOLD OUT
MELBOURNE: Thursday July 25: Northcote Theatre with The Native Cats. Tickets on sale here.

Mistletone & Triple R proudly present legendary musician and multi-disciplinary artist Kim Gordon, bringing The Collective tour to Australia.

Kim Gordon’s second solo album The Collective (out now on Matador) advances her world building with producer Justin Raisen’s (Lil Yachty, John Cale, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Charli XCX, Yves Tumor) damaged, blown out dub and trap constructions playing the foil to Gordon’s intuitive word collages and hooky mantras, conjuring communication, commercial sublimation and sensory overload.

“On this record, I wanted to express the absolute craziness I feel around me right now,” Kim Gordon said. “This is a moment when nobody really knows what truth is, when facts don’t necessarily sway people, when everyone has their own side, creating a general sense of paranoia. To soothe, to dream, escape with drugs, TV shows, shopping, the internet, everything is easy, smooth, convenient, branded. It made me want to disrupt, to follow something unknown, maybe even to fail.” 

Since co-founding the seminal Sonic Youth in the early 80s, Kim Gordon has remained at the nexus of music, art and (more recently) books and film. To quote Kathleen Hanna: “Kim Gordon is kind of like a shark, in that she needs to keep swimming. She needs to keep making art. It’s just who she is. What Kim’s doing is totally, absolutely normal. What’s not normal is when women or people who are marginalized in other ways have stopped making art for reasons having to do with ageism or sexism. We’re not witnessing a miracle, we’re witnessing what happens when the thing that’s supposed to happen is just allowed to happen.” 

Kim Gordon’s debut album No Home Record (2019) received wide-ranging critical acclaim from The New York Times (“The art star queen of New York cool”), The Guardian (***** “brilliantly weds noise textures to pop dynamics”), Sunday Times (“brutally good – Album Of The Week”), Vogue (“immediate, loose, and liberated….as ferocious as she’s ever been”) and Pitchfork (“thrilling solo debut lives at the vanguard of sound and performance – Best New Music”). Her artistic output includes her 2015 memoir Girl In A Band which debuted in the #1 spot on the NY Times Bestseller List; acting in Gus Van Sant’s film Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot; making music as one half of Body/Head alongside Bill Nace; opening multiple solo exhibitions at internationally renowned museums; and hosting a public sale of her iconic wardrobe, with all proceeds going to the Downtown Women’s Centre in Los Angeles.  

“What Gordon has proved in this past decade is that her art, her life, her cool…has never been contingent upon anyone else. With time, and through continued art-making, she has righted her own ship and pointed it once again in the direction of thrillingly uncharted waters.” – NEW YORK TIMES

“The new album’s daring beats and improvised guitar are marks of a lifelong radical still at the peak of her powers.” – NEW YORKER

“vicious and brilliant..a maelstrom of mundane thoughts and funny asides and flashes of pure rage whipped into a heavy, unnerving fog.. Few are better equipped than Gordon—who, at 70, is still cooler, smarter, and more fearless than most—to guide us through” – PITCHFORK

“This album is an act of legacy mutation. The idea is to obliterate the brand. Unless, for a hero of the counterculture like Gordon, obliterating the brand is, in fact, the brand.” – THE WASHINGTON POST

“By turns surprising and disconcerting, listening to Gordon’s radically inventive songs on this album play as an apt distillation of what it’s like to live right now” – NPR

“For decades in Sonic Youth and on her own, Gordon’s exuded her own kind of avant-garde cool, but forging her own lane through thrashing, trash-rap? We are not ready for this shaking hell.” – NPR

“Decades later, and forever, Gordon’s art is not for the faint of heart.” – ASSOCIATED PRESS

“She’s simultaneously remote and larger-than-life, a paragon of cool.” – V MAGAZINE

“A marvelously weird left-turn” – PAPER MAGAZINE

“An immersive, entrancing listen — music fit for both exhilaration and examination.”– STEREOGUM

“As rappers search to redefine rock stardom, Gordon is offering a path forward simply by reasserting her pedigree.” – FADER

“The Collective is an album that engages with the contemporary music landscape from the perspective of someone who couldn’t give less of a fuck about being accepted into it” – FADER

“perhaps the most caustic, confrontational music of her decades-long career.” – EXCLAIM!

“A potent distillation of the multifaceted nature of Gordon as a songwriter, auteur, and iconoclast.” – UPROXX

“The former Sonic Youth bassist’s concepts are intrinsic and rapturous on her second solo album, rendered in blankets of feedback and nonsense phrases that are expressionistic and accessible all the same.”  – PASTE MAGAZINE

“one thing is for certain: Kim Gordon will always be making fantastic music to lose yourself in” – PASTE MAGAZINE

“a monolith of creativity and a pivot away from pure noise rock into unique sonic territory that marks another highlight in her ever-growing legacy” – FLOOD MAGAZINE

“she’s not remaking herself to stay relevant — it’s the rest of the music and pop culture world finally catching up to her” – ALLMUSIC

“‘The Collective’ rivals that of Sonic Youth’s strongest albums” – GLIDE MAGAZINE

“Riotous” – TOWN & COUNTRY

“The indie-music icon is still making art after four decades, and she’s only gotten cooler with time” – LA MAGAZINE

The Collective:
There was a space in Kim Gordon’s No Home Record. It might not have been a home and it might not have been a record, but I seem to recall there was a space. Boulevards, bedrooms, instruments were played, recorded, the voice and its utterances, straining a way through the rhythms and the chords, threaded in some shared place, we met there, the guitar came too, there fell a peal of cymbals, driving on the music. We listened, we turned our back to the walls, slithered through the city at night. Kim Gordon’swords in our ears, her eyes, she saw, she knew, she remembered, she liked. We were moving somewhere. No home record. Moving.

Now I’m listening to The Collective. And I’m thinking, what has been done to this space, how has she treated it, it’s not here the same way, not quite. I mean, not at all. On this evidence, it splintered, glittered, crashed and burned. It’s dark here. Can I love you with my eyes open? “It’s Dark Inside.” Haunted by synthesised voices bodiless. Planes of projections. Mirrors get your gun and the echo of a well-known tune, comes in liminal, yet never not hanging around, part of the atmosphere, fading in and out, like she says – Grinding at the edges. Grinding at us all, grinding us away. Hurting, scraping. Sediments, layers, of recorded emissions, mined, twisted, refracted. That makes the music. This shimmering, airless geology, agitated, quarried, cries made in data, bounced down underground tunnels, reaching our ears. We recalled it – but not as a memory, more like how you recall a product, when it’s flawed.

She sings ‘Shelf Warmer’ so it sounds like shelf life, it sounds radioactive, inside our relationships, juddering, the beats chattering, edgy, the pain of love in the gift shop, assembled in hollow booms, in scratching claps. Non-reciprocal gift giving, there is a return policy. But – novel idea – A hand and a kiss. How about that. Disruption.

I would say that Kim Gordon is thinking about how thinking is, now. Conceptual artists do that, did that. ‘I Don’t Miss My Mind.’ The record opens with a list, but the list is under the title ‘BYE BYE.’ The list says milk thistle, dog sitter…. And much more. She’s leaving. Why is the list anxious? How divisive is mascara? It’s on the list. I am packing, listening to the list. Is it mine, or hers.

She began seeking images from behind her closed eyes. Putting them to music. But I need to keep my eyes open as I walk the streets, with noise cancelled by the airbuds rammed in my ears. quiet, aware, quiet, aware, they chant at me. What could be going through Kim’s head as she goes through mine?

– Written by English artist Josephine Pryde