Lee Ranaldo
From Here To Infinity

Placed in the Sonic Youth context, as is well-known, Lee Ranaldo is capable of astonishing. But outside of it... I believe he is even capable of shocking.
The album in question (if album is the appropriate term), occupies that intangible space, that limbo, where all those works that celebrate genres like progressive, ambient, and new wave are relegated, while being light years away from them.

The first example that comes to mind when listening to From Here To Infinity is Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, a comparison immediately refuted by the way the sounds try to take shape once the CD player is started: an expressionist nightmare.
It begins. In "Time Stands Still", the sounds are immediately extremely disjointed, tainted by a layer of mild esotericism that accentuates the coldness of the soul to the point of taking one's breath away, and one immediately intuits the objectives Lee wants to achieve: the progressive abstraction of the mind. And I must confess he succeeds very well.
Continuing with the later tracks, the doubt becomes a clear certainty, even if "Destruction Site" and "Ouroboron" appear less clear (in the true sense of the word!), in which it seems to capture the vision of the Metropolis for what it truly is to the eyes of the spirit, a wasteland of wandering souls serving that coldness that lurks every day in the darkest alleys of the mind. Lairs of bewilderment. And now the picture becomes complicated. Repetition. Atmosphere. Condensation.
I discover I am not truly seated, in front of a monitor. I see it, I am inside. The sky lowers irreversibly, its reverberation shocks and torments me with "Slo Drone," an echo that seems endless until suddenly "New Groove Loop" breaks the state of absorption I had plunged into, shaking me concentrically until the exhaustion of rationality.
The journey continues inside "Florida Flowers," a temporary change of skin, foreign to the course's thread, from which one soon exits to emerge in "Hard Left." "Fuzz/locust" brings back to listening that sacred theme that had manifested at the beginning, a true turning point. But the skin crawls, I swear, with "To Mary": a discharge of karma passes from one eardrum to the other projecting the gaze towards the way outside the lair. A voice, a scent that calls seductively and corrosively, fading temporarily only to die in a blind alley.
Engulfed in that tar puddle, which in my opinion constitutes "Lathe Speaks," one gasps and it's like dying only to reincarnate immediately in "The Resolution," a track that intensifies the most famous noises of "Confusion Is Sex." Walking along the avenue of bare trees one encounters the last desolate beach, beyond which the horizon is not caught: "King's Ogg," a track whose task is to ferry the listening towards the shores of the real world, by crossing an ocean of incalculable depths. Drifting from this last "polar" piece, one returns to oneself.
On waking up, one still feels the scent of a world to which one does not apparently belong, but that in reality, is the same that we tread every day, unaware that it observes us, that it lives and feeds on our sensations, our fears.

There are no further conclusions, or needless comments to be made regarding this.
If listened to carefully, these sounds can transform into images. Real projections and caricatures of our mind made lethal by the cold that only Ranaldo's haunted guitars can offer.
An ingenious album, not innovative (a hint of Einstürzende Neubauten can be detected, microscopically), but undoubtedly inimitable for the ease with which each track connects to the other in an asphyxiating manner. Strongly discouraged if listened to hastily, it should be savored slowly.