Kim Gordon and Bill Nace’s new Body/Head record is an abstract space for your own thoughts

Bill Nace and Kim Gordon would prefer that you arrive at their new Body/Head record The Switch with no pre-conceptions.

Accordingly, the album is filled with negative space – a blank canvas for listeners to project their own concepts onto.

It might make you think of surrealist disaster stories set in small town America. Or exploring a distant, abandoned planet. Or it might consume you whole – leaving you isolated in an abstract paradise, trapped in a squall of ringing feedback, siren like leads, and gravelly, deep-ocean guitars. Both Nace (with Vampire Belt) and Gordon (with Sonic Youth) have previous when it comes to obliterating accepted notions of songwriting and genre.

The Switch is a deep-dive into the duo’s collective mindset. Put together from improvised studio sessions (the band also improvises during their live sets), with only minor adjustment made in post-production, the record is a breathing, evolving, amorphous artwork that totally defies convention.

With an abstract, improvised record like this, do you approach it with a concept in mind?

KG: Bill sometimes says, why don’t we call the record “This is what it sounds like to be alive today.”

BN: Jokingly of course! This album was a little different. Coming Apart was the first record and there was a lot of narrative to attach to it if you wanted to. But now we’ve been around for a while. I don’t mind people attaching their own stories to it as they listen to it but in terms of talking about the concepts and ideas that went into it, I would rather people came to it without any pre-conceived ideas.

It’s an emotional investment to make a record. Do you feel like you leave an imprint of yourself in the music? Given that it’s improvised, it feels like a photograph of a moment in time?

BN: Yeah I think that’s always the case. I understand the snapshot thing, there’s an element of that but we don’t want it to just read as a document. I’ve made records like that. And I’m not totally sure why I don’t want this to be that way. But the intention is for it to be a rock record but not have it sound like “we were going through some stuff and this is what we played and here’s the record”. I still want it to sound like a record and feel like a record and move like a record. So it’s sequenced and there’s a lot of thought into the order of the songs – it doesn’t play out how it happened chronologically. It’s not an as-it-happened document.

KG: I think of this record as this kind of object in space where everything just hangs together more so than the last record in a way. There’s nothing consciously that we wanted to express because “we went through something together” or whatever.

When you are improvising – how do you decide where a song belongs? How do you know when it ends and this song belongs in The Switch and not in the next project?

BN: I think you just have to commit to what’s happening in the moment. It’s maddening otherwise. Especially right now because Kim and I don’t live in the same place – we can’t record together on a whim. We have to go all in and focus and say “this is the record that we’re making right now”. I think all that other stuff just gets in the way.

KG: Exactly. And We don’t use everything we record. We judge it on “does this sound interesting.”

Body/Head suggests an idea of separating the physical from the psychological. Do you feel like you switch between more intuitive, instinctive playing and something more considered in the recording or playing process?

KG: For me, I feel like the head is still guiding the body.

B; I try to leave my head out of it. We’re also friends and in each other’s lives a lot. So we’re always talking about these things.

KG: That feels like a lot of the work.

B: It’s like the preparation for being in the studio or a show.

Your personal relationship is borne out in the sound. You are intuitive to one another. Does either of you find yourself trying to take control or yield in a live performance?

BN: It switches up from minute to minute. That’s being a generous improviser. You let someone lead, or you lead or you push back a lot. You’re working together to make this bigger thing.

The negative space the record affords the audience is a powerful thing about an abstract record. Is there a hope or something you would want people to feel from experiencing this?

BN: I would want them to have an experience. You would hope it was positive, but even if it was a very strongly negative experience, I’d rather that then a tepid “whatever” experience.

KG: I feel like the world is in a weird place right now, and that leaves a space for weird music. I think right now people might be willing to let something in that’s more abstract when maybe five or ten years ago they wouldn’t have taken it seriously.

What is you feel has changed that has given this record an opportunity that it wouldn’t have had in the past?

KG: I think people are using more are using more dissonant sounds and rap music is attuning people’s ears to different sounds in a way that mainstream pop or rock certainly doesn’t. There are so many different kinds of rap music now – records that are conceptual and cerebral.

I think one of the ways that has also changed – is that you get paid differently now because of streaming. You can be paid on individual songs – so it matters how many songs you have on a record. I think they have to just be over a minute long. That’s possibly guiding people into making songs in a different way. Albums have become almost cut-out or collage kind of records. It’s very interesting.

Our songs are long – we’re not taking that direction, but we could.

KG: I just found that out! I didn’t know that either. I personally have never really made any money from music. The bar is pretty low for me. But I think the way it works is interesting.

You’ve both got a history of making experimental sounds and putting people in a different place. Do you feel like this is an extension of what you’ve done before? Or is this a unique chapter?

KG: For me I feel like it’s closer to music I was inspired by when I first wanted to make music. The No Wave bands I saw – I saw a tremendous about of freedom and creativity there. I hate the word “creative” but there was a way of looking at sounds that was like “this could be a song” or “this could be music”, just thinking about sound in different ways.

B: It’s interesting because the approach is similar to other stuff I do. But it doesn’t sound like anything else I make. It sounds very specific when Kim and I play together. I feel a lot of freedom and, more than anything, it keeps evolving.

Listen to Body/Head’s The Switch here