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MIRROR/DASH
Le Weekend Festival
The Tolbooth, Stirling, Scotland
May 27, 2005

Mirror/Dash was the name used by Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon on their 1992 Ecstatic Peace single, Electric Pen/Gum. The name surfaced again in 2003 on the Mirror/Dash & Dan Graham single, Sweetface/Rom Supply Co.

In an interview, Moore said: "Kim and I have been doing Mirror/Dash for a long time. It came about because I have a record label I run from my bedroom called Ecstatic Peace, which I advertised in a magazine in the late '80s. There were a bunch of fake band names on the ad, one of which was Mirror/Dash, so the next thing I had to do was release records under these names to make the bands real. I was going to be all the bands myself but not tell anyone - that was the concept.

"So Kim and I put out a Mirror/Dash seven-inch single... We then played a couple of shows at a friend's loft in New York, and realised it was more interesting to improvise as a rock duo rather than return to these recorded songs. But it wasn't until last year that we decided to come back to Mirror/Dash as an active entity and take it on a small tour of the States. The first show was in Washington DC on Inauguration Day, and it was called Noise Against Fascism - all these other improvisational groups helped out, it was a lot of fun."

Knowing that this is half of the acclaimed New York band, does the duo sound anything like Sonic Youth? Overall, the sound is more experimental, it's also less frantic but the "avant-garde" guitars are still there.

And keeping with the experimental theme of the annual Le Weekend music festival, the tracks performed aren't poppy at all, as compared to some of the catchiest Sonic Youth tunes; in fact, the opening number could very well be included as part of the Paris, Texas soundtrack, so haunting and ominous is it. Note that this is a continuous 36-minute set which has been trackmarked for easy access. As far as we can ascertain, this audience recording has not been officially released before.

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