Kim Gordon – Play Me

Kim Gordon Play Me Lashing out against tech bros and algos, the former Sonic Youth lynchpin brings shimmering guitar and motorik drums to an all-too-human new solo album PLAY ME by Kim Gordon Kim Gordon is seething. Throughout Play Me there’s a deep-seated ra…

Kim Gordon is seething. Throughout Play Me there’s a deep-seated rage which seems primarily directed at artificial intelligence moguls and the rich and powerful. She’s fighting a wave of machine learning on her own terms: going straight to the source and ridiculing the tech bros battling to change our ways of life. Full of ire and desire she requests that the “Dirty tech boss” “talk dirty” to her during ‘Dirty Tech’ and, over the low-end grind of ‘Subcon’s dirty-as-hell bass, she asks “You wanna go to Mars… and then what?

” Spotify’s algorithmic playlists aren’t safe either with Gordon using the title track’s jazzy trip-hop to reel off playlist names like “Chilling After Work” and “Rich Popular Girl”, reframing their “Play Me” request into a desperate plea and highlighting that the “Feel free” sentiment of the chorus is noticeably different to actually being “free”. She’s lancing the nerdaggedon, averting death by a thousand algorithms, yet her fury isn’t just reserved for billionaire technology tycoons and streaming sites; it’s doled out in a range of directions.

The samples in ‘Busy Bee’, which refer to potentially suing a previous band called STP, might be considered a warning dig towards a certain ex. Later in that song she switches her focus, with pitched-up snippets riding in on a rough and ready bass lick, smirking about a friend who couldn’t handle the laidback life, claiming that “the pressure to relax was too much for her.” She might be calling out AI peddlers, but Gordon is no luddite.

She’s incorporating sounds and techniques that – and apologies for bringing age into it – most other septuagenarians would recoil from. Play Me’s palette is awash with trap music, with industrial dub, with distortion so thorny it’s bordering on noise. The instrumental backing on ‘Square Jaw’ alone sounds like it could have been lifted from a recent Run the Jewels record. This is Kim Gordon’s fifth record in a little over six years, during which time she’s also managed to squeeze in working as an actress, a fashion designer, and a writer.

It’s fair to say that she’s in industrious form. So, she might be forgiven then for leaning a little on the past on this one. Whirling guitars coupled with her aching vox can’t help but lend ‘Girl With A Look’ a Sonic Youth flavour and ‘No Hands’, with its creaky gates and quivering hi-hats, calls back to the masculinity skewering ‘I’m A Man’ with its “Take my hand” line. The finale, a re-do of The Collective’s closer, kicks off with distorted slabs and chest-threatening bass and drums in the style of The Body.

It’s dub from a warzone, updating ‘ByeBye’ with new terms added to the list of words that terrify Trump. Phrases such as “Bird flu”, “Peanut allergy”, and “Men who have sex with men”. The halcyon shine of album centrepiece ‘Not Today’, however, is a much welcome backwards glance towards shoegaze days of the past. Emerging through shimmering guitar and motorik drums, it hits just right as the sun rears its golden bonce.

It’s a propulsion of optimism even as Gordon adds a little extra grit to the romping distortion, a little extra desire to her sigh. And her sensual delivery of “Skippin’ all the way down” stretches her voice into areas not heard for some time. Something that AI just can’t compete with. This Woman’s Work is a collection of music writing by and about women,edited by Kim Gordon and Sinéad Gleeson.

Clare Archibald reads between the lines With Album Of The Year fever already in full gear, we look back at Kim Gordon's No Home Record, one of the standout LPs of 2019. Words: Anna Cafolla. Photographs: Natalia Mantini JR Moores' summer psych-rock recommendations. Plus, your questions answered! (sort of) On their debut album Coming Apart, the seething guitar noise of Kim Gordon and Bill Nace's Body/Head project possesses a strikingly raw emotional force.

Petra Davis speaks to the duo about the meditative improvisational processes that went into its making The Southbank Centre's annual Meltdown Festival took place this month, curated by Yoko Ono. We sent a crack team of writers to cover events, which explored themes of activism, feminism and the future. Words by Emily Bick, Charlie Frame, Chris Roberts, Steph Kretowicz, April Welsh, David Bennun, Tristan Bath, Joe Kennedy and Maddy Sparham.

Photos by Katja Ogrin Feminism has been mainly absent in popular music for the last decade, says Steph Kretowicz, until now… With Bad Brains frontman H.R. in tow, serial collaborators New Age Doom fuse metal, hardcore, punk and reggae into new forms of spiritual music A collaboration between Liv.e and Karriem Riggins proves sweetly seductive (perhaps even a little too much so) In this month's antidote to the algorithm, Christian Eede shakes tQ with the heavy sounds of 90s and 00s Slovakian techno, and the scene around the U.Club (pictured below) Dispel the winter gloom!

Our subscribers can catch up with all the music we wrote about last month In this month’s Low Culture Essay, Jennifer Lucy Allan considers nostalgia and the Japanese idea of kona in the work of electronic pioneer Susumu Yokota. Featuring an exclusive playlist for our Subscriber Plus tier.

Summary

This report covers the latest developments in artificial intelligence. The information presented highlights key changes and updates that are relevant to those following this topic.

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