Back in the mid-1990s, when Sonic Youth started performing a new song called “The Diamond Sea,” whoever wrote out their setlists would etch the phrase “new neil-esque” next to the title, presumably in reference to Neil Young. This new 20-minute epic was the band’s Crazy Horse moment, their idea of a rock anthem that starts with a tuneful, melancholy song and then proceeds to deconstruct it with loud report. The studio version, recorded down in Memphis between trips to Payne’s Bar-B-Q, opens with a guitar that sounds almost eerily humanoid in its yoiyoiyoiyoiyoiy tone. Then, Thurston Moore sets the scene with one of the band’s best lines: “Time takes its crazy toll.” (“Neil-esque,” indeed.) After three verse-chorus repetitions, the quartet stop the song cold and set off in a new direction, churning out pure noise even as drummer Steve Shelley keeps everyone anchored. Gradually, they find their way through the din and dissonance back to the song, and when they hit that central riff again, it makes for one of the most satisfying moments in the band’s estimable catalog. Soon, the song unravels again, as though this cycle might repeat forever: noise overtaking song overtaking noise, ugliness overtaking beauty overtaking ugliness, until you can’t distinguish between them.
“The Diamond Sea” was, remarkably, the first single from Sonic Youth’s 1995 album Washing Machine, and because nobody was going to play a 20-minute song on the radio, the band created a five-minute edit that’s shallow shoals compared to the original’s Mariana Trench. They also released a 25-minute version, as though compensating for the truncated one. It’s not the longest song in the band’s catalog, but “The Diamond Sea” might be the most mutable. Listening to it 30 years later, the song still seems to be constantly changing, always shifting, never quite settling into itself. It should be one of their most popular and beloved tracks, right up there with “Teenage Riot” and “Kool Thing,” but they stopped playing it in 1996 and it remains a fairly deep cut.
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All of that makes the song ideal for the plunderphonic treatment. The band commissioned John Oswald, who coined that term back in 1985, to reconstruct “Diamond Sea” for a new vinyl-only release. He used more than 30 live recordings, which together comprise more than seven hours of material. And he deployed a very similar process to the one he used to turn more than 100 recordings of the Grateful Dead’s “Dark Star” into the triple album Grayfolded: listening to every track all at once—surely a heady experience—then whittling, filtering, synchronizing, mixing, remixing, and building back up. Eventually, he landed on two new iterations of “The Diamond Sea.” On the A side of this release is one version Frankensteined from 1995 performances, and on the B side is one made from 1996 performances (although he supplemented both with material from the studio original). Both of these “Seas” are the same length—20 minutes and 44 seconds—and sound very much like live cuts, complete with crowd noise, stage banter, cries of “Free Tibet!” and a dedication to Yoko Ono. Oswald brings something alien and disorienting to the surface of the song, but also makes it sound wild and beautiful and poignant.
