Lee Ranaldo

Born Lee Mark Ranaldo in Glen Cove, a city on the north shore of Long Island, New York, he grew up listening to a steady musical diet of San Francisco psychedelic bands like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, whose sprawling guitar workouts would have a profound influence on his own playing. He began his musical career while studying art at SUNY Binghamton; there, he played in an experimental group called the Fluks, which took its name from the Fluxus art movement. Ranaldo relocated to New York City in 1979, where he played in a series of groups, including Plus Instruments, which released the album February-April 1981, and the guitar orchestras of avant-garde composers Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham. While playing with Branca, Ranaldo met Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon, who invited him to join a group they had formed called The Arcadians. With the addition of drummer Richard Edson (followed by Bob Bert and, later, Steve Shelley), the band adopted the moniker of Sonic Youth and released their first self-titled EP in 1981. A debut album, Confusion is Sex, arrived in 1983, but it would take several more years before the quartet's blend of aggressive noise and complex musical structure and arrangement would catch on with audiences. By the early '90s, albums like Goo (1990) and Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star (1994) would mint Sonic Youth as one of the leading musical acts in the growing alternative rock scene. Ranaldo would perform on all of Sonic Youth's releases, from their 15 studio efforts to their SYR series of improvisational material. Though not as prolific a songwriter as Moore or Gordon, he contributed a small but memorable collection of tracks to their catalog, most notably the hypnotic "Eric's Trip" from Daydream Nation (1986), which featured semi-spoken-word lyrics based on Eric Emerson's drug-fueled monologue from Andy Warhol's "Chelsea Girls" (1968). His most significant role within Sonic Youth was to add structure and craft to Moore's tectonic plates of sound. When merged together with Gordon's basic but precise bass playing, Sonic Youth was an exhilarating display of guitar interplay, at once formless and intricate and explosive. Critics and musicians alike praised Ranaldo's work with Sonic Youth, which led to acts like Babes in Toyland employing him as producer for their own records. In addition to his duties with Sonic Youth, Ranaldo maintained a secondary career as a solo artist, beginning in 1987 with From Here To Infinity, a collection of short experimental pieces that, in LP form, ended each track with a lock groove, which allowed the listener to continue to listen to the song in an infinite loop until they lifted the needle to the next track. He also collaborated frequently with jazz drummer William Hooker on an array of recordings and live performances that mixed improvised music and poetry, and with his wife, musician Leah Singer, in the duo Drift, which employed live installation pieces in combination with guitar and recitations. In 2001, he formed Text of Light, an improvisational group featuring avant-garde composers Alan Licht, Christian Marclay and Ulrich Krieger, along with Hooker and Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley, who performed with films by underground pioneer Stan Brakhage. Ranaldo was also a prolific writer and editor, publishing some 50 books on a variety of subjects, from his own poetry to a collection of journals penned by members of Sonic Youth, Pavement, Hole and the Jesus Lizard written during their tenure on the 1995 Lollapalooza tour. Ranaldo continued to produce his own music and writings at a steady pace into the new millennium while remaining a steadfast force with Sonic Youth as they reached the height of their mainstream popularity with The Eternal (2009), which marked their highest placement on the Billboard 200 by reaching No. 34. The album would also serve as the group's studio swan song, as marital conflict between Moore and Gordon would put the band on apparently permanent hiatus by 2011. Undaunted, Ranaldo relaunched his solo career, now with Sonic Youth's new label, Matador, which released Between the Times and the Tides in 2012. He then formed a new group, The Dust, which featured Licht and Steve Shelley, to promote the record with a tour, while also performing with the Glacial Trio with Australian and New Zealand musicians David Watson and Tony Buck. In 2013, Ranaldo and the Dust recorded Last Night on Earth, which received uniformly excellent reviews.