There has always been a raw, visceral desolation in Kim Gordon’s work. It’s there in the post-no wave squalor of Sonic Youth; the dissonant, improvisational sprawl of Body/Head, her experimental guitar duo with Bill Nace; in the frenzied abandon of Free Kitten, her collaboration with Pussy Galore’s Julie Cafritz. And it’s there on “Sketch Artist,” the opener of Gordon’s solo debut No Home Record.
“Sketch Artist” begins familiarly enough with the melancholic sawing of a guitar, but it’s quickly overtaken by spasms of acerbic industrial glitches. “And the wind chimes strike/And your dead stare strikes… Like an old man in the day/In the sunlight dreaming in a tent,” Gordon murmurs coolly, as a rumble of distortion and blasts of feedback rip her words to shreds. These foundational images—sunlight, a tent, daydreaming—are her raw material, which she cuts up and reconfigures into stark new arrangements. “You’re a mystery, like a horse,” she remarks to no one in particular. On “Sketch Artist,” Gordon never fights the noise that engulfs her anodyne monotone—instead, she accepts the disquiet.
