The future of Sonic Youth is still uncertain, and Thurston Moore has been loading up on side projects. his latest: He’ll be playing with black-metal supergroup Twilight. The band’s Blake Judd — who is also a member of Nachtmystium and whose new album Silencing Machine you can stream here — revealed the news in an interview with the 1st Five (via Pitchfork).
“Now that Sonic Youth’s broken up, and he’s essentially divorced, he’s got plenty of time,” Judd said, after explaining how he’s known Moore for a number of years (and likely causing a PR nightmare for Moore’s own publicist). Referring to the label releasing the LP, he went on to say, “Century Media could offer us a hundred thousand dollars to make that Twilight record and say: ‘Blake, you get 90 percent of that money but Thurston Moore’s not gonna be on the record, or, you can be on it and we’ll give you $10 grand and that’s what you have to make it work.’ And I would take the $10 grand and work with Thurston. That’s like how much I love Sonic Youth.”
The forthcoming album will be the Twilight project’s third release, following up 2010’s Monument to Time End. In the past, the group’s lineup has consisted of U.S.-based black-metal heavies like Judd, Krieg’s Imperial, the Atlas Moth’s Stavros Giannopolous, producer and Minsk member Sanford Parker, and Wrest, a.k.a., Jef Whitehead of the group Leviathan. Judd hopes to have Moore fully booked for the project next week, as well as guests like Isis’ Aaron Turner, Lichens’ Rob Lowe and Xasthur’s Malefic.
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In a 2009 interview with Decibel magazine, Moore addressed his love of the genre. “I didn’t really start listening to black metal until maybe the last 10 years or something,” he said. “I was into certain things, like the first Burzum record. I remember buying that in Scandinavia after I’d read about it somewhere. That record was cool because it was so unusual. It had this very displaced kind of quality to it. It was more avant-garde compared to most metal — it was almost alien.” When asked about if he ever liked death metal, he went on to say, “I’d much rather hear… the guys who get into heavy, long-tone black metal drone stuff.” Then he named two erstwhile members of Twilight: “I really got into the West Coast stuff, too — Leviathan, Xasthur. They’re the two big wigs, and their stuff is great.”
