Lee Ranaldo Quotes

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

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.

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

OPN is completely off the grid. Its like the slime underneath techno and other synth-oriented music.

I'm jamming 'Black Sabbath Vol. 4' all the time. Zappa's 'Cruising With Ruben & The Jets.' A lot of Gong lately. Some Hawkwind. The Residents' 'Duck Stab' is amazing. Some Fugs. Lots of stuff, man. I'm pretty schizophrenic with records.

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

I mean, most of it is probably more obscure and just more noisy than either of those two bands, but Thurston has stuff all the time that he's involved with that is fairly obscure and experimental.

I'm definitely a cult artist.

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

I was doing the Klaus Schulze noise-kid thing before it became interesting to people.

There would not be Skaters or Emeralds or any of these bands if it weren't for Double Leopards.

It turns out that there's a huge community of African-American musicians whose main influence is Throbbing Gristle.

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.

Lately, I'm spending more and more time working with non-rock musicians and leaving the mainstream - almost dissolving into another world, musically.

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

A lot of the music I listen to is indie rock. It's not on the radio.

I'm not a mass-appeal artist.

A lot of punk rock is not going to be in the mainstream. It's below the radar. The beauty of it is that you're not supposed to always know. It's subterranean.

Electroclash is good because it's stayed underground.

That's what I love about our music - it'll never be a hit because you can't dance to it.

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

I was an absolute idiot, wearing polo-necks, reading Kerouac, watching Woody Allen movies, and jazz fitted right into all of that. My interest in that whole world became very genuine, but perhaps started off a bit affected - a mixture of right and wrong reasons. I was always drawn to non-commercial music, perhaps pathologically so.

Mars is really different, into art. Lydia Lunch is more energy. James Chance is more commercial in a different way, in funk and jazz. They were all doing original things, trying to create their own sound and music. I think they're all great.

I was always heavily interested in underground musical movements, the post-dubstep scene; Mount Kimbie were coming out, and bands like that.