Kim Gordon has a signature guitar. Fender's Limited Edition Kim Gordon Jazzmaster is out now, built around a 2008 Mexican Standard she was given on Sonic Youth's final tour of South America, its colors inverted and its hardware reworked with input from friends and collaborators. The bridge carries a Seymour Duncan humbucker; the neck keeps a conventional Fender single-coil. Gordon called the combination "kind of unique," and noted the single-coil is "a sound that a lot of people like."
The Jazzmaster has a long guest list: Elvis Costello, J Mascis, Tom Verlaine, Robert Smith, Kevin Shields. Gordon joins it from a different door. She came out of the early eighties downtown scene, watching no wave bands and listening to jazz and free jazz, and she names Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham as figures using tunings to pull overtones out of multiple guitars. Her first instrument arrived by accident, handed over by a roommate after a breakup. Jeffrey Lohn of Theoretical Girls showed her how to fret half a jazz chord. That guitar later passed to Thurston Moore, who used it on "Burning Spear," threading a drumstick through the strings and striking them with another.
"I just played by ear and never properly learned," Gordon said. "I never really thought of myself as a musician." The admission sits oddly against the object in question. A signature model is a manufacturer's argument that a player's approach is worth copying, and Gordon's approach has always been hard to copy: sound as texture, noise as shading. She remembers when the word was an insult. "When we started out, the term 'noise' was used as a derogatory term," she said. "For us, it was a shading or a colouring."
Her current record, Play Me, pushes further from the guitar. It runs on beats and a trip-hop haze, and Gordon says she barely plays six-string on stage for it, leaving replication and invention to guitarist Sarah Register while she concentrates on singing. "We made two or three new songs recently," she said of what comes next. "We might end up in the same place, but we're thinking about starting in a different way."
The video for "Play Me" is below. Watch what Register does with the guitar lines Gordon has stepped away from, and what Gordon does with the space that opens up. A signature instrument usually certifies a sound. Here it arrives at the moment its owner is dismantling it.
Gordon plays Hipnosis in Mexico City on Saturday, then Clockenflap in Hong Kong in December, Japan in January, and Kilby Block Party in Salt Lake City in May. Her ROMBO tag page collects the trail, including the Hipnosis lineup announcement.
