We are fascinated by the club and the dancefloor; we are also fascinated by very nuanced sonic experiences, and somehow we are convinced that we can bring together these two contradictory forces and create some kind of sonic supernova. This would be the candle that has always been at the center of our project.
One of the key guitars in my career has been an early-Seventies Fender Telecaster Deluxe that I had before Sonic Youth started and that I played pretty much throughout Sonic Youth.
Sonic Youth was not a singer-songwriter band. It was an electric collective. And, whatever else people's perceptions of Sonic Youth were, it was always about putting together a time-based composition - and that is exactly what songwriting is, in its classic form.
I've always been an acoustic guitar player, and I've pretty much continued to play acoustic guitar throughout all of the Sonic Youth periods. My material for Sonic Youth often started on acoustic guitar.
The first 'Star Wars' film was enormously important. I grew up right smack-bang in the sweet spot of all of those. It's true cinema magic. It's fair to say that, as a kid, I would have been very happy to be Han Solo, and I would have been happy to have gone out with Princess Leia.
For the second series of 'Luxury Comedy', I tried to drop the 'Noel Fielding' from it. I thought that would make it less like a solo project and more like a show. Also, it would probably have been easier to take the reaction to the first series if it had been a project rather than my name and face!
When I was really little, we used to play Sega Genesis, and my older brother would play 'Sonic The Hedgehog 2,' and he'd be playing as Sonic, but he'd leave an unplugged controller for me to play with, and the whole time I thought I was playing as Tails.
It's very hard to take a character out of nothing, and put a hook on it, especially because it's only sonic. Futurama is a sonic world, and everyone's attention is focused on that sound and that little cartoon image. You can change it.
There's only so many small shows you can do. A lot of the smaller things are more side project things. Not everything is appropriate for Sonic Youth to do.
I take inspiration from books, movies, television, music - it all goes in the hopper. Depending on the project, I'm drawing from this or that piece of art that has stayed with me. Toni Morrison, George Romero, Sonic Youth - they are all in there.
I'm not saying Sonic Youth was a conceptual-art project for me, but in a way it was an extension of Warhol. Instead of making criticism about popular culture, as a lot of artists do, I worked within it to do something.
Each member does whatever they want with the song and it totally changes it from whatever idea I hear around it. It turns it into a Sonic Youth song and completely away from it being a solo song.
I think self-portraits are very difficult. I’ve always seen mine as straightforward, very stripped down, hair pulled back. No shirt. Whatever light happened to be available. I’d want it to be very graphic – about darkness and light. No one else should be there, but I’m scared to do it by myself. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. The whole idea of a self-portrait is strange. I’m so strongly linked to how I see through the camera that to get to the other side of it would be difficult. It would be as if I were taking a photograph in the dark.
As far as we're concerned, we're always Sonic Youth, and we're always making a Sonic Youth record. We just see it so much more as a continuum than a periodic thing. We're just in the studio making the next record, and we don't relate it to anything other than what's going on at the moment.
I dont separate my work with the band from this solo project-Im sure the group could have recorded any of these, and they would have if the Fleetwood Mac project had come up at this time. I dont have any finished songs lying around.
I don't take on a project unless I know the end result is going to make me happy. If I can't give 100 percent to something, I choose not to do it because it's very difficult to have so many pots on the fire at one time.