F^#-F^#-G-G-A-A

• OVERVIEW •

Highly unorthodox droning triad used by Thurston Moore on Sonic Youth’s Schizophrenia (1987) – a Joy Division-like song that explores the tuning’s strange slacknesses with long, wordless interludes, replete with dreamy harmonics and a slight microtonal spice. Requires a thinner 4str.

 

Contains nothing but three sequential diatonic scale tones, all paired in adjacent unison (like one half of some strange 12-string) – with the odd geometry presenting no inherently clear root. The bizarre layout forces you to think vertically, disorientating and shuffling up the familiar – in keeping, I guess, with the song’s title.

Pattern: 0>(1)>0>2>0

Harmony: (~Gmaj9) | 7-7-1-1-2-2

• TUNING TONES •

• SOUNDS •

As recounted in a 2013 New Yorker profile, Schizophrenia (originally called ‘Sister’ before that became the album’s name instead) was partly inspired by Kim Gordon’s experiences of how the condition affected her elder brother Keller: “He took LSD, briefly dropped out of college, and dated a woman who disappeared during the Tate-LaBianca murders. On the day he graduated from a master’s program at Berkeley, with a classics degree, he suffered a psychotic episode, and soon received a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. He shuttled between halfway houses, psychiatric wards, and jail. For a time, he lived in a trailer parked in his parents’ driveway; eventually, they had him declared a ward of the state, and today he lives in a psychiatric facility in Los Angeles”.

 

(Keller also seems to have been the subject of another Sonic Youth classic – Cinderella’s Big Score. As noted in Stevie Chick’s Psychic Confusion, the track’s video runs as follows: “Kim stood on a slowly rotating playground roundabout, the boy riding directly opposite her; she delivers her vocals while staring at the camera with a calm that’s almost unsettling, her words an anguished attempt to connect with the wayward boy: ‘You’d rather have a dollar than a hug from your sis…Don’t give me yr soul, it’s caught in an abyss’…”).

 

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• Schizophrenia – Sonic Youth (1987):

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“I went away to see an old friend of mine; His sister came over, she was out of her mind; She said Jesus had a twin, who knew nothing about sin; She was laughing like crazy, at the trouble I’m in…”

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In a 2012 Tiny Mix Tapes blog, a reviewer by the name of ‘Dr. Winston O’Boogie’ summarises the song as the group’s “single greatest accomplishment…the band enters transcendental-jam mode, and whisks listeners away. Lee and Thurston trade harmonic pings back and forth, as Kim’s haunting chants lead the band into a dramatic swell…Sonic Youth was forcing everyone to rethink the guitar’s role in pop songs, [and] Schizophrenia is their most perfect statement from that era”.

 

Part of this intrigue arises from how the band mixed different tunings across multiple guitars (Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, and Kim Gordon can all pick up an axe if called upon). In Schizophrenia, only Thurston winds to the notes listed here, with Lee using a more generalised two-tone drone of D-D-D-D-A-A (almost the same as Bruce Palmer).

 

However, Lee and Thurston both use the F#-F#-G-G-A-A layout on other tracks: including Tom Violence, White Kross, and Drunken Butterfly (it’s also on Skip Tracer, but only Thurston’s part). And, for more multi-track linkage: some of Schizophrenia‘s lyrics appear to have been re-purposed from an early, never-released Thurston song called Come Around (“Your future is static, it’s already had it”).

 

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• Schizophrenia (live) – Thurston Moore (2013):

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“My future is static,
It’s already had it,
I could tuck you in,
And we can talk about it…”

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• NUMBERS •

	6str	5str	4str	3str	2str	1str
Note	Gb	Gb	G	G	A	A
Alteration	+2	-3	+5	0	-2	-7
Tension (%)	+26	-29	(-)	0	-21	-55
Freq. (Hz)	92	92	196	196	220	220
Pattern (>)	0	13	0	2	0	–
Semitones	0	0	13	13	15	15
Intervals	7	7	1	1	2	2

• See my Tunings Megatable for further such nerdery: more numbers, intervallic relations, comparative methods, etc. And to any genuine vibratory scientists reading: please critique my DIY analysis!

• RELATED •

—Associated tunings: proximities of shape, concept, context, etc…

• Bağlama: also made up of three unison pairs
• All Tritones: another dissonant, unsettled zone
• Zen Drone: or try out a more consonant drone

• MORE INFO •

—Further learnings: sources, readings, lessons, other onward links…

• Sonic Youth tunings: the avant-garders twisted their way to a dizzying range of tunings over their three decades together, mixing drone-tone layers across restrung, range-narrowed guitars – learn more about how they did it on the excellent fan-compiled Sonic Youth Tunings site (inc. song lists, sourcing notes, & tutorials), and also see my Altered-Tuned Artists listing for the band (“for Burning Spear, Thurston wedges a drumstick under [12fr], and beats it with a second stick. Lee apparently uses an electric drill through a wah pedal on the original song…[but] live, he seems to just attack his guitar with drumsticks…”)
• Schizophrenia: while the song makes no attempt at ‘speaking for’ sufferers of the illness, I’m glad its lyrics derive from a genuine witnessing of its effects rather than just vague artistic speculation (i.e. Kim Gordon’s experiences with her elder brother) – but, given the stark realities of the subject matter, why not take some time to find out more about what life is like for sufferers? Read a basic medical summary on the NHS website, and check out various human perspectives on the Living Well with Schizophrenia channel – and hear how world-leading jazz trumpeter Tom Harrell adapts to its challenges in a JazzProfiles interview (“I like to think of my music as a play of colors over a rhythm…like inviting the listeners to visit an art gallery, to view an exhibition of various paintings. We express our feelings through timbres and colors within our world of sense, so as to then transcend them, and enter the spiritual dimension…”)

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Header image: from SY’s Sister album art (1987)