SHOWS featured, kim gordon, twig harper, ventura music hall Rob Shepyer April 6, 2024 0 Comments

Tonic Truth and Collective Consciousness: Kim Gordon at Ventura Music Hall

In her latest reinvention, Kim Gordon deepened her trip hop digs and redefined her signature noise rock stylings into a pure avalanche of disruption to pull our eyes out of our phones, whether to pay attention or escape into a headbang, so we may listen to what she has to say.

This was my 2nd time seeing Kim Gordon live, my sole-previous experience was witnessing her headline Mosswood Meltdown 2022. Since then, she’s released The Collective the most defining album of her solo career and the Ventura Music Hall was the perfect place to perform. The venue is a uniquely chill hanger, resting in a uniquely chill slice of California. A true gem of the 805, it’s one of the best places to see a band for its great sound quality, acoustics, bar, kitchen and staff. Blessed by a painting of The Last Supper featuring the cast of The Big Lebowski in the darkened right corner of the room, every show is innately intimate at Ventura Music Hall.

related content: Glorious Leader, Kim John Kill: Mosswood Meltdown 2022

The first track on the Collective, “BYE BYE”, was both Kimlet’s opener and closer for this tour. The song is a farewell to a toxic routine running off the need to consume. The lyrics have the narrator listing off the many brands, products, and rituals that occupy their routine and sap it of meaning. Whether it’s makeup, meds, or a vibrator, these are the things that must be purged to move forward. Brandishing her guitar like an Old West does a shiny silver revolver in the Old West, she performed it with a massive uproar of distortion, playing off the many skilled musicians in her demolition team, to make the venue quake before ushering in her message to a crowd she just snapped out of their hypnosis.

Being elevated from noise guitar virtuoso into art icon, Kim has earned the right to venture into the elegant, moody, enlightened world of trip hop and escape the flannel dirge associated with 90’s alternative. One can speculate as to what she means by The Collective, but I imagine the people that participate in elite art community nightlife who offer lifelong membership, but lifeless conversation. Whichever collective she’s calling out, she makes it clear, she’s not interested in joining.

Tribalism is a prevalent theme for the terminally online, yet something avoided in rock music these days. Online phenomenons are rather boring, most rockers figure. Yet, because we are mostly online in some capacity, we are mostly all effected. Whichever side you’re standing on, one ought to consider stepping away and choosing to be alone instead of being a part of a collective.

For the most part, Kim’s live set followed the tracklist of The Collective, so as I listen and feel out each track, I can recall everything from the smell to the hearing loss of her show at Ventura Music Hall. Having my ears lubricated for punishment by noise artist Twig Harper before Kim went on, I was ready for an artistic experience that would move me, in one psychic direction or another.

I live for concerts like this, for unexpected, thought provoking spasms of weirdo-bardo breaking into reality. Kim perhaps shares this sentiment with the next track, “I Don’t Miss My Mind”, a track that exists as a through-line from Sonic Youth to now, from her upbringing as a punk and modern beat, with lyrics that read like Kerouac, Ginsberg, or Burroughs poetry. Kim Gordon was birthed from a world of an artistic authenticity so pure, she couldn’t help but inspire whole new worlds of music simply by acting as a conduit between the old guard of beat mystics and the avant-garde of sludgy electro-hipsters. The Collective described in the album’s closer, “Dream Dollar”, prioritizes one prerogative in the new generation’s creative endeavors: “Cement the Brand”. In a world where people make content, not art, Kim Gordon is doomed to be an eternal outsider. Even when The Collective is begging her to join, she doesn’t see her place among the many people inspired by her aesthetics but not inspired to heart by her art’s values.

Once wrapping up the album portion of her set, Kim performed 5 songs from previous solo albums before saying “Bye Bye”. This portion of the show was much noisier and more metallic than the previous, causing me to rearrange my vertebrae into an unhinged banging machine, allowing my head to effortlessly rock back and forth with every crunchy blast of noise rock guitars.

Sonic Youth was an important band for me. I still blast “Bull In The Heather” when it blesses my shuffle and I’ll never forgive my friend Jeremy for being so late to pick me up for Coachella, that I missed them play in 2007. Kim Gordon’s signature vocal style, which I have always associated with coolness, black shades, blacker coffee and European ennui and cinema, experimental poetry, cold narration, and sexy white leather boots, is a fixture in rock and roll that will live on forever in her recordings and the many artists she inspired. One might think her cadence suggests she’s apathetic to the world, as if she’s simply reading the room from the outside, and yes, she is an outsider, but not because she doesn’t care about the world’s outcome but because she simply refuses to participate in any sort of rat race, even if it calls itself an art scene.