[douglasdickel]

On the night of July 3, 1999, a tired equipment driver on his way to a music festival pulled his truck into the parking lot of a Ramada Inn in Orange County and checked in for the night. Sometime after 1 a.m., someone broke into the truck, hotwired it and drove off, taking with them a massive collection of instruments and gear that had been used for the past twenty years to produce and play some of the most important rock music of the era. Sonic Youth had been robbed.

Microphones, amplifiers, effects pedals, a drum kit and 27 guitars were taken, all painstakingly prepared and modified over the years to produce the band’s specific brand of noise rock. They’d later find humor in the fact that the gear was basically unsellable, so Frankenstein-ish in appearance and sonically retrofitted (some of the guitars had been modified for the purpose of playing only one song) that no one would have bought them. Still, the loss was traumatic. They persevered through a performance the next day at the festival with borrowed instruments, but starting from scratch in the studio would prove to be much harder, and the theft became the most jarring sign of a difficult new period in the band’s career.

(...) began recording their eleventh album at their Murray Street studio. It was a rough process: working uncomfortably with new gear and instruments scavenged from dusty corners of the studio, they felt like they were starting over. They tried to embrace it. (daqui)