When recording his ninth solo album, Flow Critical Lucidity, Thurston Moore stayed local, holing up in a London studio near his home in Stoke Newington to lay down tracks. Yet while that process played out within walls thrumming with the sound of reggae, jazz, funk, and soul from neighboring musicians, the writing process took place further afield on Lake Geneva, where the Sonic Youth frontman reflected on the places that shaped him, like New York City during his No Wave days, as well as locations that serve as a call to action in protecting the planet, such as the rich nature of the Galápagos islands. Condé Nast Traveler caught up with Moore in the East Village earlier this summer to learn how nature informed much of the making of the album—and what life in 1980s downtown New York City, as captured in his recent memoir Sonic Life, was really like.
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One thing that struck me with this album is how many of the songs are imbued with such a sense of place, whether it be Switzerland or the Galápagos. Was that a conscious effort during the writing process?
This album was written in collaboration with my wife, Eva. We travel all the time and it’s really wonderful to experience all these places together—especially now, when the earth is going through such a crisis period. We talked a lot about how to approach this contemporary kind of alarm, which is why one song, “Rewilding,” talks about the act of rewilding as an opposition to this sort of dissonant human interaction we have with the planet. The pandemic showed us that: With fewer planes in the sky, you could hear birds in New York; people started seeing actual fish in the Venice canals. There needs to be less manicuring of the earth. In England, where I live now, there’s a concerted effort to let a lot of the parks take on their own life, like Hampstead Heath. English gardens are so weedy and wild, I love it. I’ve come to this realization that nature has its own dignity, and we should allow it so.
But there were incidental things that came into play during the process, too. We wrote these songs during an artist residence overlooking Lake Geneva in Switzerland, and while we were there, an exploratory diver was lost in the water. There were police boats searching for the body for a few days, and eventually they found him. He had run into trouble underwater and expired while exploring the deep, apparently in search of a better understanding the nature that lives down there. That was a very heavy thing to be around, and out of it came the song “The Diver.”
Some of the songs turn to more familiar territory, looking back at the venues of the US North American hardcore scene that you came up in as a musician. What brought on this nostalgia?
