Gibson's Hank Ettel demonstrates Gibson's pickups in a unique double-neck Epiphone guitar at GearFest '08 on May 31.
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PG contributor Tom Butwin details RAB Audio GSRS – a studio racking system purpose-built for guitarists looking to declutter, customize, and elevate their creative space. Whether you’re a pedal enthusiast or amp collector, RAB Audio has a solution for your recording setup.
Matt Sweeney (far left) knew that if he got his friends Stephen Malkmus (second from left), Emmett Kelly (second from right), and Jim White (far right) in a casual recording environment, the four of them could make something awesome together.
The two musicians and songwriters have been part of the same cohort since Malkmus’ band Pavement took off in the early 1990s. Pavement went the way of indie-rock royalty, defining an entire new generation of slightly left-of-center guitar music. Sweeney slugged it out for years inbands like Chavez and Zwan, that never reached those levels of influence. Still, he was an indispensable sideman and in-demand collaborator. But it wasn’t until just before the pandemic that the two friends recorded together, on Malkmus’ solo acoustic record, Traditional Techniques. It went well—really well.
So when Sweeney suggested they get together again, Malkmus was game. But this time, Sweeney invited some friends. He knew the guitarist Emmett Kelly from their time playing with Will Oldham, aka Bonnie “Prince” Billy, and the two developed a bond over a mutual aesthetic sensibility on the guitar. And Kelly played in a duo called the Double with drummer Jim White, another serial collaborator best known for his instrumental Australian group Dirty Three. So, White and Kelly got invites. (It turned out that Malkmus was a fan of Kelly’s lo-fi weirdo-folk project Cairo Gang.)
The Hard Quartet - "Earth Hater" Official Music Video
They all met up at Strange Weather, a Brooklyn studio where Sweeney was working. The studio was on its deathbed: The buildings on either side of it had been demolished, and it was slated for the same fate to prep the way for a new condo build. The owner and house engineer, Daniel Schlett, was depressed. Sweeney figured some fun, no-stakes sessions—committed to the studio’s original vision of total artistic freakness—were called for. “The idea was like, ‘Let’s go and try recording, everybody bring songs and we’ll see what happens, and if it sucks, we don’t care because it’ll just be a nice thing to do in this beautiful studio that’s going away,’” he explains.
When the foursome initially met at Strange Weather in early summer 2023, there were no plans and no expectations. Over a year later, we have the Hard Quartet and their self-titled debut record, an epic, 15-song double LP that captures the spirit of adventure, imagination, and unedited, base instinct that unites the four musicians. When time came to pick a name for the project, Malkmus suggested they use the word “band” or “quartet.” “Matt was just immediately like, ‘Hard Quartet, because we’re hard as fuck,’” laughs Kelly.
“Finding phrases that make it sound not boring is the basic idea: simple things with twists.” —Stephen Malkmus
Sweeney’s boldness, in both the band name and in pulling all the players together, is perhaps the key to all of this. “Matt’s always confident, or at least he likes to pretend he is, in a good way,” says Malkmus. “He knows that’s how music should be sometimes. Most people that make music actually are confident or they wouldn’t do it. They like their own music and they’re confident it’s good, and then they have to kind of act. They’re also needful and worried that people won’t like it, and want people to like it but also think that it’s good.”
The Hard Quartet is heavily indebted to ’90s indie and alternative rock, but the 15-track double LP dips into Americana, country, and weirder territories, too.
Maybe Sweeney was being tongue-in-cheek, but more likely, it’s just the honesty of a group of musicians who can’t be bothered to affect an air of deep reasoning or artsy symbolism. Though, Hard Quartet isn’t terribly hard music. It moseys through different guitar-based genres, most of it fairly lo-fi and garage-ish. There’s plenty of Pavement-leaning indie-rock, charged with clever wordplay, edge-of-breakup chording, and general slacker charisma. There’s a certain Guided by Voices sensibility to it all, too; the feeling that guitar rock doesn’t need to be perfect or cohesive or together to be good.
Songs on Hard Quartet shamble along loosely between movements and moods, and often, they sort of dogleg and fall apart after wanky outros, just like the end of an in-person jam. Opener “Chrome Mess” is a thrashing, dark, noisy piece of indie-grunge, followed by the quirky, fuzzy alternative of lead single “Earth Hater” and its nursery-rhyme chorus. “Rio’s Song” is like a gentler, college-rock rendition of T. Rex, featuring Sweeney pulling off a Marc Bolan vocal character. Another Sweeney-led joint, “Killed by Death,” is driven by White’s snare-roll shuffle and plucky Americana guitars. The back-to-back of “Six Deaf Rats” into “Action for Military Boys,” both with Malkmus on lead vocals, pull the record into more borderless, atypical grounds. Hard Quartet feels deeply, profoundly artistic not in production or complexity, but via a feeling of total artistic freedom and intuition.
“It’s not magic, it’s actually just work and saying, ‘Do it again.’” —Stephen Malkmus
“When you’re doing a first thing, it’s not so bad to go simple,” says Malkmus. “Like, you know, to have these adherents of the Velvet Underground and the Stones. These songs are like, I wouldn’t say simple, they’re complexly simple to give us some credit.”
Malkmus has been watching a YouTuber who switches between two chords on piano while playing nearly limitless inversions of each chord. “He takes the mystery away from things that I do that I think are really clever or something,” he continues. “At any rate, that’s what we’re doing too. But pianos somehow have less magic because you can’t bend the notes too much. It’s all math, almost. Of course there’s feel and there’s going off the grid, but with the guitar sometimes it feels more magical. Those real simple little moves you make with the bending of the strings. It’s chops and it’s also ideas, creativity. Finding phrases that make it sound not boring is the basic idea: Simple things with twists.”
Stephen Malkmus's Gear
Stephen Malkmus, performing here with his band the Jicks in 2018, has known Matt Sweeney since the beginning of Pavement. After he invited Sweeney to play on his 2020 acoustic record, Sweeney had the idea to take things a step further.
Malkmus likes to dig around for different voicings, but he prefers to do his digging by feel. “What you don’t know is a good thing,” he says. “Too much knowledge, I think it can hurt you at that early time instead of just being sort of primitive.”
The four members of Hard Quartet share a “musical language,” according to Malkmus, which made it easy to create without much structure to their initial sessions at Strange Weather. “I don’t think any of us wanted to spend the whole time saying, ‘It goes like this,’” says Malkmus. “We just kind of wanted to start messing around, having fun.”
“There’s a throughline in everything I like, that is this aspect of harshness, or bloodiness. Things need to be bloody for me to like them.” —Emmett Kelly
Part of the three guitarists’ shared language on the instrument is a passion for wonky sounds. Kelly explains the aesthetic in-depth: “We really connect on things sounding like shit, kind of. I love the sound of the guitar when it sounds like it’s about to die or it’s broken. We love this music that’s like fucked up and damaged, like the rawest, most screwed-up thing. There’s a throughline in everything I like, that is this aspect of harshness, or bloodiness. Things need to be bloody for me to like them. We just want to sound fucked up and terrible, but it’s gotta sound really good, you know what I mean? You pass through this pain threshold, and that’s when you start to hear all these beautiful, weird harmonic things, especially with a damaged amp or a really insane overdrive or fuzz. You just start to hear aspects of harmonic series come shooting out in really interesting ways. Sometimes you’ll hear phantom notes, things that ring-modulate the sound a little bit.” One time in a studio, Kelly’s friend pointed out a pedal that he said was the least useful pedal of all time. “I immediately went home and bought one,” says Kelly. “I mean, none of this shit’s useful. Should we be plumbers?”
Matt Sweeney's Gear
Matt Sweeney and Emmett Kelly became close friends while on tour with Will Oldham. Here, they flank Oldham on a tour supporting 2022’s Superwolves.
Photo by Tim Bugbee/tinnitus photography
Guitars
1958 Martin 000-18, strung with flatwounds
Vintage Fender Esquire
Vintage Gibson ES-335TD
1970 Martin dreadnought acoustic
Amps
Austen Hooks Bell and Howell Filmosound amp
Effects
Blackstrap Electrik Co. fuzz pedal
Hard Quartet’s debut record is also shaped by the fact that none of the players brought their own gear to the studio; Malkmus, Kelly, and Sweeney all opted to use whatever guitars, amps, and pedals were kicking around at Strange Weather, and later at Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La studio in Malibu, where Sweeney secured the group a few days of extra sessions. A late-’50s Fender Jazzmaster, ’60s Gibson Explorer, vintage Höfner Verithin, 1958 Martin 000-18, Squier Bass VI, and purple Guild S-100 were among the tools used to create Hard Quartet. Malkmus says he didn’t even want to bring his own guitars. “I like to use new shit all the time,” he says. “It’s just fun to hear the little tonal differences. I don’t really have a sound. I just want to try new things and I’m not afraid to do that. And we all know it’s in your hands.”
“I don’t even feel like it’s a guitar record, but obviously that’s all we fucking know how to play.” —Matt Sweeney
“I’ve gone through the whole gamut of identity crises with guitar and I’ve gotten to a point where I really just want something that won’t break if I check it on an airplane,” Kelly says. His main guitar is a 1988 Japan-made Fender Stratocaster, with the middle pickup removed and a TBX circuit instead of the traditional tone control. Kelly is skeptical of too much attention put on gear. “There’s a lot of artifice in music and gear and it all seems to be related to this whole kind of like, rehashing, redoing; sort of like the AI conversation,” he says. “It’s like, just play fucking music. It doesn’t matter.”
The three guitarists often played through one of Sweeney’s amps, built by amp tech Austen Hooks and housed inside an old Bell and Howell Filmosound projector. But it was mostly a matter of convenience—the amp was simply ready at hand. “I think me and Steve are similar in that when you’re making the thing, you’re not thinking about the gear,” says Sweeney. “You’re grateful that there’s stuff there that you can pick up and play.”
Emmett Kelly's Gear
Hard Quartet (from left: Kelly, Sweeney, Malkmus, and White) bonded over an affinity for deliciously crappy guitar tones. Their debut record is a treasure trove of lo-fi 6-string sounds.
Photo by Atiba Jefferson
Guitars and Basses
1988 Japan-made Fender Stratocaster with middle pickup removed and TBX tone circuit
Fender ’68 Custom Deluxe Reverb with added master volume
Peavey Roadmaster with 2x12 cabinet
1950s Supro
Ampeg B12XT
Effects
Crowther Double Hotcake
Crowther Prunes & Custard
Death By Audio Octave Clang
Fredric Effects Verzerrer
Strings & Picks
La Bella Pure Vintage (.011–0.50)
La Bella Silk & Steel
La Bella Bass VI Stainless Flats
Given the players’ combined ethos, it’s not really a surprise to learn that they rarely, if ever, discussed who would play what instrument on any given song. Leads were improvised and swapped at random, and the bass guitar was passed around from song to song. Some songs and parts would come together quickly; others required massaging. Having to plug away at something doesn’t make it any less valuable than an instant hit, says Malkmus. “It’s not magic,” he says. “It’s actually just work and saying, ‘Do it again.’”
The equal-footing, collaborative nature of the Hard Quartet has been a bright spot for Kelly, who was getting burnt out on the emotional anxiety and tension of being a bandleader. With Malkmus, Sweeney, and White, there are combined decades of camaraderie that equate to an open, trusting ease. “It’s probably safe to say that the Hard Quartet is about the continual relationship between each two people,” says Kelly. “Everyone had a strong connection with each other in some way so that new relationships could then develop.”
In the end, Sweeney’s little jam experiment has paid off. “I’m happy with what we did on it guitar-wise, and that’s because we played together,” says Sweeney. “I don’t even feel like it’s a guitar record, but obviously that’s all we fucking know how to play.”
YouTube It
The Hard Quartet have a ’90s-style, apartment-stoop jam in this video for the Sweeney-fronted, alt-rock-meets-alt-country tune, “Rio’s Song.”
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Thurston Moore is back with some new ideas on his ninth solo release, saying that he feels like a perennial apprentice in the world of music.
Photo by Vera Marmelo
On the cover of Thurston Moore’s new solo effort, Flow Critical Lucidity, sits a lone metal soldier’s helmet, spiked with an array of tuning forks jutting out in all different directions. The image, a piece from the artist Jamie Nares titled “Samurai Walkman,” seemed to Moore an apt musical descriptor of the record.
“There’s something very elegant to it—the fact that the helmet sort of denotes a sense of military perfection, but that it has tuning forks on it as opposed to any sort of emblem of aggression,” he tells me, Zooming in from his flat in London. “If music is, as Albert Ayler would say, the healing force of the universe, then so is the tuning fork. I thought it was just a thing of beauty.”
It also dovetails with a theme that runs through Flow Critical Lucidity, an album that Moore describes as “an expression of hope.” But characteristic of the Sonic Youth guitar icon, there are additional layers at work here. One would be that Nares is, like Moore, an alumnus of the downtown Manhattan no-wave scene, having played guitar in an early iteration of James Chance and the Contortions. “It felt right to use one of Jamie’s pieces, because we kind of came up together through this musical micro-community in New York City,” Moore says.
Another layer, I suggest, might be that the many tuning forks are a self-referential poke at Moore himself, who has made something of a career out of deploying myriad out-there tunings in the service of some of the most innovative and influential music of the past 40 years. “So, they’re ‘alternative-tuning tuning forks,’” Moore reasons, then smiles. “Maybe I could have written C–G–D–G–C–D on it.” Which is, in fact, the actual primary tuning he employed for his guitar parts throughout Flow Critical Lucidity.
Why this tuning? “I like it,” Moore says, simply. “I find it to be a good one to write in, and I’ve gotten used to it. So it’s been a mainstay for the last six years or so, and on the last couple of albums. I actually feel like I need to put it to rest a bit, because that low string tends to create this kind of droning low C on almost every song now. Maybe I’m getting a little too comfortable.”
You wouldn’t know it from Flow Critical Lucidity. Moore’s ninth solo album overall, the collection is an enchanting, transportive, and deeply creative work: There’s cadenced spoken word over clanging, chiming soundscapes on “New in Town”; gorgeous guitar and piano commingling in “Sans Limites” (with Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier dueting on vocals); feral, percussion-heavy rhythms pulsing through “Rewilding”; a no-wave callback in the jagged four-note guitar stab of “Shadow”; hypnotic, liquid guitar lines punctuating “The Diver.” There are electronics courtesy of Negativland’s Jon Leidecker, lyrics penned largely by Moore’s wife and collaborator, Eva Prinz (working under the pseudonym Radieux Radio), and, on several tracks, extensive use of prepared instruments, such as guitars with objects placed under or on the strings to modulate their tone. It is an album that is varied and vibrant, imaginative and idiosyncratic. It is, Moore has said, one of his “favorite” records in his solo catalog.
On Flow Critical Lucidity, Moore recorded with guitarist James Sedwards, bassist Deb Googe, keyboardist Jon Leidecker, and percussionist Jem Doulton. The record was mixed by Margo Broom.
“If music is the healing force of the universe, then so is the tuning fork. I thought it was just a thing of beauty.”
Though somewhat sprawling in execution, Flow Critical Lucidity came together in a uniquely focused manner, with Moore and Prinz settled at an artist residency near Lake Geneva. “They allow people to stay there for six weeks to six months to sometimes a couple years,” Moore says. “So I asked if I could lock myself away there and write—and specifically to write a new record. I had a couple guitars, a couple small amps, and a little Zoom digital recorder. Eva would throw lyrics in front of me and I would construct pieces around them.”
When it came time to record, Moore assembled his current band—Leidecker, former My Bloody Valentine bassist Deb Googe, guitarist and multi-instrumentalist James Sedwards, and percussionist Jem Doulton—at Total Refreshment Centre (“a funky little studio”) in his adopted home city of London. A key architect at this stage was Margo Broom, who mixed the material. “She was really able to put it in a place that I don’t think anybody else could have so successfully,” Moore says. “For instance, while she was mixing, I was talking to her about how to treat my vocals a bit, because I never liked my vocals so much—I’m kind of key-challenged when I sing. But Margo was able to finesse that. She said to me, ‘I’ve been listening to your vocals since I was 16 years old, so I know what I’m doing here!’ I was impressed by that.”
Moore, now 66, often records with his tried-and-true alternate tuning, C–G–D–G–C–D.
Guitar-wise, Moore continues, “Margo was able to create a lot of space, which is something that I’ve never really felt has happened so successfully, even all through Sonic Youth, because of the desire to always have a lot of guitar layers happening in the songs. But she was able to find definition there, even where there was a lot of mass information going on.”
To be sure, there’s plenty of characteristic Moore guitar work on Flow Critical Lucidity, particularly in the extended instrumental sections of songs like “The Diver” and the gently chugging “Hypnogram.” But as far as the actual gear he used in the studio, Moore kept things streamlined—one guitar, one amp.
“It was all Fender,” he says. “I used an early, pre-CBS Jazzmaster, a ’62, I think, and a Hot Rod DeVille.” Moore is, of course, a longtime Jazzmaster aficionado—in the early days of Sonic Youth, he says, “We started acquiring Jazzmasters before they became so collectible. You could go to the guitar stores in midtown New York and find one for a few hundred dollars. We had been using Harmonys and Kents and Hagstroms—whatever we could get our hands on—and the Jazzmasters and Jaguars were a step up. I gravitated more towards the Jazzmaster because the neck was slightly longer than a Jaguar’s, and for my height it worked nicely. I also liked other aspects of it, like being able to investigate behind the bridge more readily than with just about any other guitar.”
“I had a couple guitars, a couple small amps, and a little Zoom digital recorder. Eva would throw lyrics in front of me and I would construct pieces around them.”
Moore has many Jazzmasters, including one that he says is “one of the first ’58 production models,” and that Sedwards has been using extensively. But the Jazzmaster that Moore is playing now “has been my go-to for the last couple of albums. And a lot of that was defined by the one I played previously getting stolen. And then one previous to that getting stolen, too. So the record is all this guitar, and it’s all, I believe, in that same [C–G–D–G–C–D] tuning.”
Thurston Moore's Gear
Moore became famous as co-guitarist and one of three vocalists in Sonic Youth, seen here performing in 1991.
Photo by Ken Settle
Guitars
Circa 1962 Fender Jazzmaster, tuned to C–G–D–G–C–D
Circa 1958 Fender Jazzmaster (used by James Sedwards)
Amps
Fender Hot Rod DeVille 410 III
Effects
Pro Co Turbo RAT
Dunlop Jimi Hendrix Octave Fuzz
Xotic EP Booster
Electro-Harmonix Metal Muff
Electro-Harmonix Cathedral Stereo Reverb
TC Electronic Hall of Fame
Strings & Picks
D’Addario NYXL (.012–.054)
Dunlop .60 mm
Except for one song, that is. “‘New in Town’—I couldn’t even tell you what the tuning is,” Moore admits. “That song will not be played live, because it just can’t be.” The reason why, he explains, is that he performed it on prepared guitar, altering the Jazzmaster’s sound by placing objects under or between the strings and retuning the instrument in real time.
“The idea of using guitars that are extended with different implements is something that obviously I’ve been working with since the early ’80s,” he says. “But ‘New in Town’ was probably the most expansive effort of it in terms of creating a song where the preparation of the guitar was in a place of improvisation while we were recording. On that song, I’m actually moving the strings around with the tuning pegs to a point where I’m not really notating what I’m doing, and I’m furthering that by putting different implements between the strings—not just under the strings and in front of the fretboard, but actually sort of woven within the strings. Like, maybe sort of midway on the neck and then over the pickup area, and then playing in the middle between the two.”
“I never liked my vocals so much—I’m kind of key-challenged when I sing. But Margo [Broom] was able to finesse that.”
Some of the types of objects he used were “a small, cylindrical antenna; a drumstick,” Moore continues. “And then I’m picking between those two, or on either side of them, and finding a rhythm or a motif. And I’m doing this while James is playing piano and Jon is processing it and moving it around through his electronics. We recorded that, and then I took it and I cut it up and edited it to create the composition. So the actual performance—I don’t think I’d be able to reenact it again.”
For Moore, the structuring of the track was as much a creatively fulfilling endeavor as the actual performance of it. “I find that, for me, a lot of the experimentation that has rigor is in that part of it, rather than in the expanded technique on the guitar,” he says. “I feel like that’s something anybody can do, and that a lot of people do do. I mean, when I was younger and I brought the drumstick out, and I was swiping it across the strings, and it’s going through a distortion box, it sounded really cool, but it also looked really cool. I knew that there was something very performative about it. But the composition has to have value beyond the oddity of what you’re doing.”
“That song will not be played live, because it just can’t be.”
He laughs. “You know, I’ve seen comments on social media, like, ‘Playing guitar with drumsticks is stupid!’ Which I thought was a really great comment. Somebody was just not down with the program on that one. I was like, ‘Right on!’”
Which brings up a question: Does Moore immerse himself at all in the online guitar world? Is he, like the rest of us, endlessly scrolling through 30-second clips of bedroom guitarists performing jaw-dropping feats of 6-string technical facility?
The answer is, sort of.
After producing several albums with Sonic Youth, Moore began releasing solo works in 1995 with Psychic Hearts. This photo was taken in 2010.
Photo by Mike White
“I’m in that algorithm, so I will get these interesting tutorials from, like, hyper-tapping kinds of players,” he says. “And I will sometimes watch them, because I’m actually very enamored with high-technique guitar players. Even though I don’t really consider myself a high-technique guitar player—I find myself to be a very personalized-technique guitar player. And I’m okay with that.
“But I do like it,” he continues. “Whether it’s Hendrix or some guy sitting on his bed and shredding. Or someone in front of their laptop decoding a Zeppelin thing, like, ‘This is how you play “Misty Mountain Hop” correctly.’ To me that’s really interesting to see, because I love Jimmy Page. I’m never going to play like Jimmy Page, but to have someone decode it and then share that with the world, it’s like, ‘Thank you.’ If I had more time on my hands, I would tune a guitar to traditional tuning and sit down and learn it.”
“I knew that there was something very performative about it. But the composition has to have value beyond the oddity of what you’re doing.”
Most people, of course, don’t usually have to first retune their guitar to standard before they play. But then, Moore is not most people. “I don’t think I have a single guitar in that tuning,” he admits. “And it’s funny, because [Dinosaur Jr. singer and guitarist] J Mascis used to come over, and he’d tune all my guitars to traditional tuning. And it was like, ‘Stop doing that!’ you know? Would drive me crazy.”
At the end of the day, Moore’s intention is to remain creatively open. Even while he is in the throes of the album cycle around Flow Critical Lucidity—“I’m still coming to terms with what we did on this record,” he says—he’s already looking forward to what might be next. “I have it in mind, but I couldn’t say what it is. Sometimes I think I want to make a brutal, harsh, noise-wall record. Or maybe something that’s a super, super-dark metal record. Because I love that kind of stuff.”
There’s still a lot of ground, and music, to explore. “It’s all live and learn,” Moore says. “Even at 66 years old, I still feel like I’m in some place of apprenticeship with a lot of this. I don’t really feel settled. But I do feel more confident, that’s for sure.”
YouTube It
Thurston Moore, with Jazzmaster and Hot Rod DeVille, performs the Flow Critical Lucidity track “Hypnogram” live in Munich in 2023 in this fan-captured DIY video.