026: William Hooker / Lee Ranaldo, “Celestial 1/1&2”

The aeonic avant-rock duo of our dreams.

This week’s recommendation is one song because the rest of the music is unstreamable, though you can find a couple handfuls of CDs available on Discogs. I haven’t grabbed one yet, but I should because I LOVE this one song.¹ I happened upon it in the course of doing William Hooker research while working on a review. (Just announced this week: William Hooker, David S. Ware, Alan Braufman, A Time Within: Live at the New York Jazz Museum, January 14, 1977. My capsule review: it’s very good! I love dual horns! More documents of loft jazz are always welcome! Full thoughts coming in the May issue of Uncut.)

I didn’t know that Hooker had made records with Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo!² He recorded an album with Moore in 1993 (Shamballa: Duets with Thurston Moore and Elliott Sharp) and then a handful of albums with Ranaldo. I chose to check out 2005’s The Celestial Answer³ because I liked the name, and the one track you can hear turned out to contain many of my favorite things: Lee Ranaldo listing things but only for like 30 seconds; long, drawn out fevered guitar noise; killer synths; intense, driving drums looming in and out of frame. It’s cosmic in the way of free jazz and drone, the hypnotic horror of eternity stretching out before you. A toss-up between distressing and comforting. I have to tell you what someone wrote in a customer review of this album on Amazon: “What we've got here is the soundtrack to a lost gonzo Star Trek movie directed by the Coen Bros.--or some such thing.” I don’t think that quite conveys how dark this music feels, but I like it! It’s funny and not inaccurate.

My Valentine to you is a bonus recommendation: Your Kisses Are Like Roses: Fado Recordings, 1914-1936. What could possibly be more romantic than the quavering strength of the fado singer, resigned to their wretched fate? The blues of the Portuguese working class emerging out of the 19th century.

Now Reading: Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon
Just Watched: True Detective, 1x06

1. The song title on YouTube is “Celestial 1/2&2” but the track appears to actually be called “Celestial 1/1&2.”

2. I really like this description in the biography on Hooker’s website:

By 1993, still moving the music forward, he met Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore and went into the studio with him. When his friend, writer Neil Strauss publicized their upcoming concert on Canal Street, a rock/free jazz hybrid in a local paper, William was stunned by the turnout. “I go down there, and there are all these people waiting with bated breath. Another friend, filmmaker Matt Kohn videotaped the performance and submitted it to MTV, which aired it. “So that was the advent of that rock/jazz marriage; the first time it was presented. Out of that came an entire scene; rockers and experimental musicians were all playing together,” he says. “That’s when I started playing with many of the people in the Sonic Youth and rock crews (including Lee Ranaldo, with whom he has toured and collaborated multiple times). My record Subconscious is on Thurston’s Ecstatic Peace label.” He describes it as a “very fruitful” period. “I learned a lot, traveled a lot and gained a whole other audience.”

3. Released on Xeric, a sublabel of the great avant-garde label Table of the Elements.