Live Review: BodyHead

Kim Gordon and Bill Nace’s Body/Head project is easily the most experimental and avant-garde work the former Sonic Youth guitarist has been involved in for many a year.

The group’s 2013 debut record, Coming Apart, is striking in its form and effect; channelling no wave, noise, minimalism and tension into something unique and wonderful. For the duo’s premiere Sydney performance though, as a part of the Sydney Festival, the crowd was greeted with an inauspicious start. Technical difficulties plagued Gordon throughout the opening track, with her guitar dropping out entirely for long stretches, leaving Nace to cover the sonics. Once this was fixed though, there was no stopping the duo, whose abstract guitar work served as backing to Gordon’s haunting, moaning poetry. It was easy to forget we weren’t in a 1982 New York dive bar when Kim Gordon begun wielding her guitar not as an instrument, but as a weapon- slamming it into the ground, shoving it into the amp and knocking it around like a jilted lover.

As easy as it is to fetishise Body/Head as being the Kim Gordon show, what with her notoriety and indeed vocals dominating the discourse, Bill Nace is just as vital to the act. Indeed, it was Nace who provided the more daring and exciting guitar work of the show, with Gordon’s almost monotone strumming serving more as rhythm to Nace’s shoegaze-cum-noise feedback-driven jamming. Body/Head is more than just abstract noodling though, as set highlight Actress proved. The song was the closest the pair come to traditional guitar work, but surely and steadily evolved into an asynchronous no wave strum-off. Free-flowing and uniquely feminine, this duo represents some of the most honest-to-god genuine and challenging music of Gordon’s magnificent career, and it really comes into its own in the live context.