Lee Ranaldo and Brian Chase played The Stone

Brian Chase took over the programing at The Stone for the week of March 11-14 and played with Lee Ranaldo on Friday night.

Hailing from two of New York City's most legendary bands, Lee Ranaldo (of Sonic Youth) and Brian Chase (of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs) joined forces to bring out their experimental sides as they locked in and melded their sense of avant-garde fever with droning guitars and striking blasts of percussion. On stage left, Ranaldo sat behind an array of pedals and between his guitar and a wooden box that hosted deconstructed wind chime pipes which he'd attack with various mallets while fiddling with the knobs at his feet. On stage right, Chase sat behind his kit and wasted no time cobbling together rhythms from various parts of his drums and cymbals while also running maracas over the skins and using the mic to bring out various delays which he'd turn into intricate loops of sound. Clanging their sticks and mallets, the duo ranged in sonics from the simplicity of the wooden tools banging together all the way to waves of swelling drones that manifested in walls of noise and near calamity. With Chase often writhing behind the drums, his body riding the waves of rhythms, Ranaldo used the tools around him with liberty and dexterity, picking up various bells and chimes and swinging them through the air before twisting his the effects at his feet to achieve even more manipulated soundscapes. Feeding off one another, the two traveled the same trajectory, both pushing one another to the further edges of their sound and deviating from any resemblance of themselves at their most accessible. When Ranaldo finally reached for his guitar, you could feel the crowd settle in and prepare for those waves of feedback to over take the room, but he never hit the gas for full speed and rather used some restraint and would even play unplugged at times. Scraping the ground with the head of the guitar and banging the back of it to draw out more elongated sounds, it wasn't until nearly the end of the set before he reached for the bow while Chase began to drum up some straight-forward rhythms. Just before their finish, the two found a groove and locked in, if only for a moment, and really laid in to it as the sonic heart of the night but just as briefly as it spun up, minutes later they were back to their combination of drone and frantic patterns of percussion. Slowly winding it all down, Ranaldo appeared to play what seemed like Gregorian chants from his phone into his guitar strings which faded into a dull hum before disappearing altogether into the ether. Suddenly the sound had evaporated from the room and the two looked at each other in total satisfaction before the audience gave way and entered into thunderous applause.