Lee Ranaldo: The System, a score that outlives its film

Lee Ranaldo's The System (Original Soundtrack) is a film score let out of the room. Fifteen tracks, re-sequenced away from Joris Postema's eco-documentary and released on Silver Current Records. What is left is an instrumental record with its own weather, uneasy from the first minute and only rarely willing to resolve. It stands without the images, and it asks for your patience.

Ranaldo is the guitarist who formed Sonic Youth in 1981 with Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon, after playing in Rhys Chatham's Guitar Trio and Glenn Branca's electric guitar orchestra. He was born on Long Island in 1956 and studied art before any of that. A 2004 list put him at 33 among the greatest guitarists; a later staff poll placed him and Moore together at number one. Since Sonic Youth went on hiatus in 2011, his solo records have moved between written songs and guitar pieces: Between the Times and the Tides in 2012 was the one with verses and choruses, then Electric Trim in 2017, Names of North End Women in 2020, Churning of the Ocean in 2021, Early New York Silver in 2025. Film has been in the work longer than the solo records have. The Drift installations with Leah Singer, the walls of spontaneous noise he made with Text of Light against avant-garde film: he has never treated a screen as something to fill. A 2019 record made with Jim Jarmusch, Marc Urselli and Balazs Pandi was the rehearsal for this one, and all three are back.

The System was written for Postema's documentary and then rebuilt. Ranaldo took the score apart and re-sequenced it to fifteen tracks, letting the music breathe outside the film's narrative timing. He plays guitar, keyboards, bells, kalimba and percussion, and sings. Around him the credits read like a working band rather than a session: Leila Bordreuil on cello, Jarmusch on guitar, pedals and MIDI synthesizer, Brian Chase and Pandi on drums, Refree on guitar and electronics, Urselli on bass and laptop, Avishag Cohen Rodrigues on backing vocals. John McEntire mastered it, Carl Saff cut the lacquer, and Silver Current's handmade vinyl pressings are the format it was built for.

You can hear the shape of the whole thing in one pass. Long reverb tails, wide silences, prepared guitars tuned to disagree with themselves, a cello allowed to sit underneath and pull. The record stays instrumental almost to the end. The voice arrives late, and it lands as a chord instead of a line.

Tajikistan (Nice to Meet You) opens on a rhythm that grinds like a machine with something living inside it, which is the record's method in one track. Bergelmir is the best of them: a lattice of ringing overtones from the prepared guitars, notes landing slightly off each other, Bordreuil's cello dragging a dark line through the middle. Berlin Blockade is narrower and heavier, a dense overlapping hum of metal on metal, feedback held past the point of comfort. Instruments of Violence breaks the chill with wood and wire, an acoustic strum recorded far enough back in the room that it sounds like weather coming in.

The titles carry the argument: An Exploding Dandelion, A Just Collapse, The Cusp of the Change, Something Beautiful to Live For. This is a record about holding on to hope while the frameworks come down, and it makes that case without a spoken word. Then Cool Water closes it, a lonesome cowboy standard played slow and lifted into something else: unhurried guitar plucks caught in shifting vocal harmonies, the track moving from ground to air.

It is for people who have stayed with Ranaldo's guitar records, and for anyone who keeps Branca, early drone and the ambient end of the avant-garde in rotation. If Between the Times and the Tides is your record, there is nothing to sing here. Put it on headphones at night, or at the volume where the room starts to hum back.

What does not work is the structure. Fifteen pieces, and several of them were built to sit under a scene instead of standing in a room: the shorter titles between the two big guitar pieces do their job and pass. By the back half, that patience starts to read as stasis. Resequencing the record does not make every piece independent of its film. A tighter twelve would have hit harder.

Three and a half, then, with the best of it close to a four: Bergelmir and Berlin Blockade stand with anything Ranaldo has released outside Sonic Youth, and Cool Water is the one you will play twice. The rest is a score doing its job well, which is not the same as an album doing it. Cool Water ends this record looking up, and nothing else on it does.

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