Ikue Mori Quotes

I really want to do a book on the history of the no-wave music scene in New York, how it extended out and formed lots of other things. It was such a great visual culture.

When Talking Heads started, we called ourselves Thinking Man's Dance Music.

The music that I make, the younger musicians are referring to it as 'stretch' music.

I've been into Sonic Youth since junior high school. I think I kind of have ADD, so it's good music for ADD because it just throws you in different directions all the time. I really like Kim Gordon's voice and Thurston Moore's voice, and I like the guitars going off on tangents.

One of the most prevalent and undermentioned genres of music is what is known as noise. You can find it all over the world happening in basements, small venues and even some festivals. Often blown off or belittled by critics, the form for the most part goes unheard and unnoticed.

Hearing things like 'Wake Up' by Lora Logic, or the Raincoats' 'In Love' - that was something I wasn't prepared for. I couldn't hear anything that came before it in the music, and I didn't want to. I was absolutely in love with its out-of-nowhereness.

If someone says 'grunge' or 'punk,' you know what the sound is, but if you say 'No Wave,' it's kind of mysterious. That was the most interesting part and should have been the most inspirational thing about it... here's this collective sonic insanity, and none of it sounds anything alike.

I was real into Devo, Pavement, Captain Beefheart, and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.

It was a really interesting time in New York in the late 70s and early 80s, and the music scene was really, really interesting because you didn't have to be a virtuoso to make music, it was more about your desire to express things.

I think I came across Cecil Taylor a bit later, in 65 or 66. That really impressed me - Cecil Taylor is an amazing character... Both his music and the way he approaches the instrument are astonishing.

I had heard Ornette a couple of times, but I didn't really know where he was coming from until we started the record and it was beautiful, Fred. It opened up my mind.

We were like psychedelic folk combined with Sonic Youth's noise.

I'm into heavy duty, psychedelic, foreign music. That's what I like listening to.

Anything can become a musical sound. The wind on telegraph wires is a great sound; get it into your machine and play it and it becomes interesting.

Sonic Youth could never really get it together acoustically - quite frankly, it wasn't something we were really that interested in.

You look at somebody like Thurston Moore. Is he a noise dude? A punky dude? Is he a free jazz dude? He's a stimulation chaser, and I relate to that.

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.

Bands such as LiLiPUT and Essential Logic were just as unorthodox as Gang of Four or Wire, even taking their sounds a step further with shrieking vocals and saxophone.

I've always felt that all the music I've made is psychedelic, including Throbbing Gristle.

They are one of my favorite bands and one of my first musical loves: Devo.

Sonic Youth played one show before we even had a drummer. It was just me, Kim, and Thurston. The lights slowly went down, and the set was just 30 minutes of feedback.

The majority of the people think that noise is not music. I want to accept noise and even errors and glitches. I enjoy them.

To be in a band, at least according to the rules of rock in the 1970s, one must know how to play an instrument. But rather than waste time solving that problem, No Wavers ignored it. The point was simply to make music, not to learn how first.

When Soundgarden formed, we were post-punk - pretty quirky.

If it's me and yer granny on bongos, it's the Fall.