Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore paid homage to an avant-folk forebear with a Michael Chapman cover last week, but now he has a full LP’s worth of music inspired by one of the most influential writers in rock. Finding a point of liftoff in William S. Burroughs’ last words (“Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is.”), Chelsea Light Moving is a new group realizing Moore’s long-held goal “to form a band that played Burroughs Rock,” an idea that first occurred to him while visiting the late Beat Generation legend’s Lawrence, Kansas home in the mid-’90s. The quartet — Samara Lubelski, John Moloney, Thurston, and Keith Wood — put the set to tape quickly over the course of just one weekend last month, and will play their first three gigs this week in Montana and Colorado. Hear/download our first taste from their “amphetamine sonnet for the on-the-loose lovers of the world” below:
