‘Cross the breeze is a song by post-punk avant garde band Sonic Youth from the album Daydream Nation released in 1988. The experience of listening to this piece of music is that of raw emotion and power, both conveyed by the voice (Kim Gordon’s vocals) and the instruments, (Lee and Thurston’s guitars) which perfectly captures the bands aesthetic.

The sound of the song is created by Lee and Thurston’s guitars which are not tuned to concert pitch, in fact they mainly use model or cross-note tunings which produce discordant intervals to create their atmostheric compositions. They also have an unconventional approach to playing their guitars, by using various items of hardware on the strings, such as drills and shoving drum sticks up under the strings they were able to coax many different howls and groans, squeals and drones from guitar set to specific tunings.

The band emerged from the underground scene of NYC- the music itself being like an abstract portrait of the city and its many cultures.

I first heard this song sometime in the 90s and the album was my first excursion into the world of Sonic Youth. Of all the cultural references of the band my favourite was their appearance on The Simpsons, which in fact started to burrow the bands presence into my social sub-conscious and made me always aware of the band and very curious about the band at the same time. I took the plunge and bought the album, which on first listening seemed so very familiar to me, even the cover art seemed to be already imprinted on me (or maybe that was because it was a painting by Gerhard Richter, one of my all-time favourite painters) the classic image of a candle, the flame still burning bright after all these years.

The song is like a journey through many genres and musical abstractions, the structure of the song is Avant Garde, but there is still a deep-rooted link to society and pop culture present within the material. The song form and structure do not adhere to traditional pop sensabilities, although Sonic Youth did achieve success in the early 90s and are a part of pop culture themselves. It is also important to note that the Grunge scene was also popular at the same time Sonic Youth were at their peak in terms of success and that they were instrumental in helping follow Grunge band Nirvana in signing a contract with Geffen.