Thurston Moore & Bonner Kramer

Kramer and I reconnected in Miami Florida a few years back, many many years after each of us had departed NYC on separate life adventures. While living and working in London, England, Kramer’s name would at times come up in recording studio conversations and the engineers would share their awe at this mythic producer, musician, provocateur. They would be extremely impressed that I actually knew and recorded with the man off and on during the 1980s, mostly at Kramer’s downtown studio enclave Noise New York. As it were, Sonic Youth recorded their first demo in the initial studio incarnation of Noise New York in mid-1981 as overseen by a gent named Frank Eaton (who would eventually sell the studio gear – and sobriquet – to Kramer). Fast forward to 2020 and I find myself reconnecting with Frank in Miami where he had been living in sunshine splendor and he tells me Kramer also resides not too far away and we all subsequently get together and talk music, dine on Kramer’s organic pancake creations, and delight in the fact that all three of us are still alive and well and each enjoying their own experience of domestic love, and still enamored by excellent weird music, art, cinema and literature. It was only a matter of time before Kramer and I started making plans to record together and with his irrepressible due diligence he quickly set up a mobile recording contraption in the pad I was decamped in, the Florida sunshine flowing through the palm leaves, lithe lizards skittering across the windowsills, and we just went for it. Kramer had the idea to cover a Joy Division tune, a left turn from the improvisations we had been tracking, though wholly in keeping with both our sensibilities of light and dark unifying in transcendent songwriting, both of us devotees of ‘the song’ as well as ‘the freedom’. What transpired is They Came Like Swallows, a session we immediately felt should exist as a prayer to the war-torn souls of the families of Palestine continually decimated by the brutality of genocide. We agreed beyond words to offer our music as a sonic activism and as a beneficent energy. This album is our duo exchange for human dignity; it is our soul music for any semblance of a peaceful planet.

Thurston Moore, London 2026