The fruitful collaborative partnership between Kim Gordon and Olivier Assayas
Kim Gordon rose to prominence as Sonic Youth’s effortlessly cool bassist and occasional vocalist, often imbuing the band’s lyrics with a fearless feminist sensibility that helped them to stand apart from their contemporaries. Yet, her work with Sonic Youth, which disbanded in 2011, is just one of many projects she has explored over the years.
Gordon has engaged in many side projects, such as Free Kitten and Body/Head, and now she focuses on a solo career, which consists of two acclaimed albums: No Home Record and The Collective. She’s also honed a career as an artist and a fashion designer, releasing the clothing line X-Girl back in the ‘90s. Then there’s her experiments as an actor, too. While her filmography is slim, she has starred in various films and television shows under the direction of celebrated filmmakers like Gus Van Sant (Last Days), Todd Haynes (I’m Not There) and Olivier Assayas (Boarding Gate).
It’s Assayas whom she seems to have a deep connection with, citing him as an inspiration on various occasions. Their collaborative relationship began when a Sonic Youth song was used in his iconic 1996 film Irma Vep. The film, starring Maggie Cheung, features ‘Tunic (Song for Karen)’, which perfectly suits the moody atmosphere it soundtracks. After meeting, Assayas decided to ask Sonic Youth to create an entire score for Demonlover, released in 2002, to which they obliged.
Assayas told The Quietus, “We met when I did Irma Vep. We had a common friend, Michael Shamberg, who was running Factory Records US at the time. He brought Thurston and Kim to the screening at the New York Film Festival and we really got along and stayed in touch. When I was preparing Demonlover, I had a notion that it was something that connected with whatever Sonic Youth were doing in terms of improvised music. So I suggested a method whereby instead of music being a secondary or latent part of the process, it became an organic part of making the film.”
The filmmaker described the process of making the film and the score as very loose and collaborative. “Every week, we would send them images, a selection of dailies, and they would send back music, noises, whatever those images inspired them. I gave that stuff to the actors, I listened to it myself, and so there was this kind of organic cooperation between scoring the film and making the film.”
While Gordon seems to be a fan of all of Assayas’ films, she once picked out Clouds of Sils Maria as the one that significantly inspires her the most. Talking to Variety, she explained that she loves the way the main characters’ relationship is explored within the film, citing a scene featuring a Primal Scream song as her favourite. She elucidated, “It suddenly turns into a sort of overlayed collage of images mimicking a music video, portraying her nausea. Is it from the curving road or her relationship to Maria?”
Gordon’s love for Assayas’ style, which is often elusive and blurs the lines between reality and fiction—sometimes even taking audiences on an abstract journey that is hard to decipher upon first watch—reflects her experimental approach to making music. “I really like Assayas’ filmmaking. He always has this global economy thing going on,” she told Interview.
