**THIS PROGRAM IS CANCELLED**  

Thurston Moore, founding member of Sonic Youth, will discuss his passionate memoir tracing the author’s life and art—from his teen years as a music obsessive in small-town Connecticut, to the formation of his legendary rock group, to thirty years of creation, experimentation, and wonder.

Thurston Moore moved to Manhattan’s East Village in 1978 with a yearning for music.  He wanted to be immersed in downtown New York’s sights and sounds—the feral energy of its nightclubs, the angular roar of its bands, the magnetic personalities within its orbit.  But more than anything, he wanted to make music—to create indelible sounds that would move, provoke, and inspire.

His dream came to life in 1981 with the formation of Sonic Youth, a band Moore cofounded with Kim Gordon and Lee Ranaldo.  Sonic Youth became a fixture in New York’s burgeoning No Wave scene—an avant-garde collision of art and sound, poetry and punk.  The band would evolve from critical darlings to commercial heavyweights, headlining festivals around the globe while helping introduce listeners to such artists as Nirvana, Hole, and Pavement, and playing alongside such icons as Neil Young and Iggy Pop.  Through it all, Moore maintained an unwavering love of music: the new, the unheralded, the challenging, the irresistible.

In the spirit of Just Kids, Sonic Life offers a window into the trajectory of a celebrated artist and a tribute to an era of explosive creativity.  It presents a firsthand account of New York in a defining cultural moment, a history of alternative rock as it was birthed and came to dominate airwaves, and a love letter to music, whatever the form.  This is a story for anyone who has ever felt touched by sound—who knows the way the right song at the right moment can change the course of a life.

Thurston Moore will be joined in conversation by fanzine creator Don Smith. 

About the Author: 

Thurston Moore is a founding member of Sonic Youth, a band born in New York in 1981 that spent thirty years at the vanguard of alternative rock, influencing and inspiring such acts as Nirvana, Pavement, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, My Bloody Valentine, and Beck. The band’s album Daydream Nation was chosen by the Library of Congress for historical preservation in the National Recording Registry in 2006. Moore is involved in publishing and poetry and teaches at the Summer Writing Workshop at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. He divides his time between the USA and England.

About the Moderator: 

In their 1987-1993 fanzine, “Teenage Gang Debs,” Maryland-Native Don Smith (along with his sister Erin of Bratmobile) combined the tenacity and courage of the finest tradition of investigative journalism with the stylish subtlety and profound insight of the born writer to create a fanzine about 1970s Television and the Brady Bunch written from a punk feminist background.  But back in 1979, 11 year old Don caught local TV coverage of a film being produced right here in Maryland- John Waters’s Polyester.  For him and his suburban DC elementary school classmates, the explosion of punk rock and new wave music, movies and simply, alternative culture, was something brand new, exciting, and entirely their own.  Don was front and center to witness the artistic growth of Alternative Music as the Program Director of WMUC-FM at the University of Maryland in the late 1980s when the music industry started to pay attention to punk for better… and sometimes… for worse.  An inveterate storyteller of the 1970s and 80s, he is convinced that his parents drove the family past a line of 1970s punks waiting to get into Baltimore’s Marble Bar after leaving Memorial Stadium.