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Kim Gordon Announces Body/Head Double-Album ‘Coming Apart’

Kim Gordon

Kim Gordon’s Body/Head project will release a full-length album this fall. Coming Apart drops in North America on September 10 and lands in the U.K. and Europe on September 16 via Matador Records. The upcoming record will come in CD, digital, and double-vinyl formats.

SPIN spoke with Gordon about the fast-approaching LP last night (June 25), during a special screening of John Cassavetes’ 1974 film A Woman Under the Influence at Brooklyn’s Nitehawk Cinema. The iconic Sonic Youth co-founder introduced the movie, which was lovingly restored in 35mm format by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and presented by Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation in partnership with VICE

Body/Head is her “scripted improvisation” project with free-noise guitarist Bill Nace. When the duo first formed, their work was mostly instrumental, but according to the label, Gordon sings a great deal on the new effort. “[Her] vocals now have become an intrinsic part of their musical architecture,” the statement reads. “They have even started writing and playing ‘songs’ now, compositionally distinct from their purely aleatory origins, but still featuring lots of built-in improvisational space.” 

Gordon and Nace have put out a few limited-press collections before, but Coming Apart will be their most widely distributed release to date. Body/Head began after Gordon and husband/Sonic Youth bandmate Thurston Moore announced they were separating in late 2011, which, at best, has left the future of that legendary band unclear.

The reasons behind the split were kept private until earlier this year, when Gordon discussed the separation with ELLE. “We seemed to have a normal relationship inside of a crazy world,” the musician and painter said. “And in fact, it ended in a kind of normal way — midlife crisis, starstruck woman.” She clarified further, saying that Moore was carrying on a “whole double life” with this other woman and described him as “a really lost soul.”

“I got a lot of positive feedback from the ELLE piece,” Gordon told SPIN. “I basically talked about it because I felt like I wanted to clear the air… and I don’t feel the need to really talk about it beyond that.” 

Speaking about Body/Head, which recently played Yoko Ono’s Meltdown Festival in London (the bill also featured Moore’s new band, Chelsea Light Moving), the art-punk visionary said, “It feels a little like rebuilding or starting over in some way, but I have a whole kind of vocabulary of music and experiences to bring to that.” She added, simply, “It’s just music — just more music.”