Sonic Youth's Goodbye Twentieth Century tour (and album of the same name) was a special one-off, intended as a tribute to some of the twentieth century's avant-garde composers. It was recorded, and played live, in collaboration with William Winant, Jim O'Rourke, and others.

The first piece of the night was Having Never Written A Note For Percussion by James Tenney. A gentle sustained note simply built up to a slow, enormous crescendo, getting ridiculously loud as a gong and other percussion pushed the sound into pure noise, then receding ever so slowly and dying away to nothing. As well as being impressive and beautiful in itself (the composer's intention was to make the musical equivalent of a Zen koan) it was a big solid statement that the main event had begun, that there was going to be some serious music for listening to.

Some of the audience were clearly unsettled, even this early on. A minority obviously hadn't noticed that this wasn't going to be an "ordinary" Sonic Youth gig, and, fed up, talked through the music and shouted for old songs like 100% and Teenage Riot. It was a bit annoying, but it comes with the territory that the band staked out in the late 80s and early 90s when they were such a guiding influence for grunge.

Some of my favourite parts of the show were the pieces which allowed SY to explore/show off their own contributions to twentieth-century music. Delicate layers of harmonics, feedback, tremolo notes, and glockenspiel; extraordinary, beautiful stabs of mutilated guitar (lots of those!); brilliant, dirty use of effects pedals; jazz-informed drums and notes. These were brought to Six and Four6 by John Cage, Treatise by Cornelius Cardew, Burdocks [excerpt] by Christian Wolff - pieces the whole band played together, often having a degree of freedom/uncertainty to them allowing the band to play around with the sounds.

Laetitia Sadler (of Stereolab) and Susan Stenger (an excellent flautist) joined the six onstage to make a 'double quartet' for a gorgeous rendition of Four6, the centrepiece of the set at half an hour long. The length of the song made room for lots of sonic exploration. Out of an arhythmic pool of random sounds a frantic jazz beat might jump, and then be swallowed up in very strange squeaking feedback. The next thing you know, the feedback is replaced by some pleasant guitar chords, over which Kim Gordon shouts "Let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go!" and William Winant goes crazy on the timpani. - Just a snapshot from the half-hour adventure.

What was strange was that it seemed like the band 'rewarded' us for sitting through Four6 with some more easygoing tunes than in the first half - they closed their main set with two songs from their recent album NYC Ghosts and Flowers. While those songs weren't bad, they were of course more 'rocky' than the 'classical' music, and my ears were so attuned to concentrated listening that SY's own music felt disappointingly linear and unrewarding.

The band played an encore, beginning with Piano Piece #13 (Carpenter's Piece) by George Maciunas, which is featured on the Goodbye Twentieth Century CD with video footage of the recording session. It's a concept piece in which the band hammer some nails into the keys of a piano. On the album the thing is completely pointless. The sound is no more or less than you'd expect, and neither the sight nor the sound is interesting or enjoyable. When performed live to a full auditorium, however, it resurrects the comic absurdism which I hope was in the mind of the composer. I could only laugh at the daftness of the situation; a surprisingly large portion of the crowd didn't seem to know how to react and resorted to angry heckling. (I learnt much later on that Maciunas probably did have this absurdism in mind - a biography of Maciunas states: "The public was always the target for his particular sense of art/humour which he termed fluxus. His sister Niole, recalled the time George and his friends dressed in dentist outfits, went to the well known Plaza Hotel in NYC. They all knelt down in front of the hotel, took out tooth brushes, and started polishing the sidewalk.")

While the rest of the band finished hammering, Thurston Moore picked up his guitar and introduced the whining drone which begins Side2Side (from NYC Ghosts and Flowers). This song worked really well, starting quite understated but building up menacingly with harsh harmonics and stabs of twisted guitar. Kim Gordon's disjointedly yelled vocals ("Wear your ... favourite ... underwear!") added brilliantly to the atmosphere. It was all getting a bit scary; and then all of a sudden it stopped and the show was over.