Kim Gordon Coming To First Avenue 6/24
The one and only Kim Gordon will be stopping by First Avenue for the Play Me Tour on Wednesday, June 24th.
Kim Gordon’s vision of art and noise has come sharper into focus just as readily as it’s changed—a paradigm of possibility that, four decades on, still feels like a dare. Releasing her debut solo single, “Murdered Out,” in 2016, Gordon launched a now-decade-long collaboration with Justin Raisen, an L.A. producer (Charli XCX, Sky Ferreira, Yves Tumor) with a preternatural grip on her “minimal, trashy” aesthetic. “He has a real anti-establishment attitude, and I’ve always felt pretty anti-corporate,” Gordon said; they’re both prone to a fuck-it embrace of intuition and risk. “We both enjoy the freedom that we feel when we’re working.” In 2019, Gordon’s debut solo LP No Home Record proved she was attuned as ever to vanguard sounds, mixing avant-rap and footwork into her sonic conceptual art. The Collective, in 2024, was brick-heavy and even more daring, led by the tectonic industrial clatter of her packing-list-cum-ragerap banger “BYE BYE” and earning two Grammy nominations.
Gordon has referred to her music as a depiction of the modern landscape that carries an implicit critique of the culture. Her writing has the feel of found poetry or a cut-up, collaging the detritus of modern life—embodying the disoriented texture of contemporary existence. “I’ve always thought about things more sociologically,” Gordon says. Play Me, her third solo album, processes, in Gordon’s impressionistic way, the collateral damage of the billionaire class: the demolition of democracy, technocratic end-times fascism, the A.I.-fueled chill-vibes flattening of culture. Gordon is never literal; as author Rachel Kushner writes in her introduction to the 10th anniversary edition of Gordon’s bestselling memoir Girl in a Band, “She surfs the inscrutable.” Amid Play Me’s rabbit-hole reality bricolage—pitch-shifted vocals; shadowy layers of dissonance; “Fuck!”; is that Darby Crash? —her songs are still clear, in their own oblique ways, about the attention they pay to a world that would rather distract us into oblivion. “I have to say, the thing that influenced me most was the news,” Gordon says. “We are in some kind of ‘Post Empire’ now, where people just disappear,” she adds, echoing the title of one of Play Me’s songs.
The Fiery Furnaces will be opening up the show so get there early! The Fiery Furnaces is the long-running collaboration between siblings Eleanor and Matthew Friedberger. Renowned for their dense, allusive lyrics, formally inventive compositions, and unpredictable live shows, the band occupies a singular space in the landscape of experimental pop.
Tickets for this show are still available HERE!
