(Both tracks appeared on Three Lobed’s 2010 compilation Not The Spaces You Know, But Between Them, for which I wrote liner notes.) In turn, “Machine,” an outtake from 2009’s The Eternal, plays like a condensed version of “Out & In,” with Ranaldo and Moore’s chopping chords punching through drummer Steve Shelley’s beats like they’re dodging traffic. Hence the floating, Kim Gordon-hummed “In & Out,” recorded in 2010 at a soundcheck in California and the band’s New Jersey studio, sounds like a dream version of the more nightmarish “Out & In,” recorded a decade earlier at Echo Canyon. Having room to explore-or simply just to do what they wanted-helped Sonic Youth deepen their distinctive sound. That all explains not only why the tracks on In/Out/In exist at all, but also why they sound so coherent together despite being recorded in different years, locations, and situations. They settled into their Geffen contract, without much pressure to score hits they owned a studio, Echo Canyon, built with Lollapalooza headliner money, so they could record anything they played and they ran their own label, SYR, through which they could release music that might not fit on major-label albums. Still, these songs revel in their freedom, and the first decade of the millennium was an especially free time for Sonic Youth. Taken from various recordings made between 20, the five tracks here could be called “jams,” though Ranaldo (an avowed longtime Dead fan) recently demurred, preferring to label them “extrapolations.” That’s fair, since these sometimes repetitive, often solo-less pieces owe more to Glenn Branca’s forward-driving guitar symphonies than to the Dead’s spacier excursions. Sonic Youth never really entered into that circuit, but the posthumous, nearly-all-instrumental In/Out/In shows the New York band to be spiritual kin with the post-Dead tradition that has held remarkably steady since the 1990s.
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