Delight of Process: A Conversation with Thurston Moore and Bonner Kramer on ‘They Came Like Swallows’

A duo is more than simply a musical meeting of two minds; it is a convergence of two paths. A dialogue between any two individuals in their twenties will inevitably differ from one between the same people four decades later. Life experiences and shifting attitudes, tastes, and perspectives inevitably change. This is especially true of artistic communications because, in the words of Miles Davis, “It’s not about standing still and becoming safe. If anybody wants to keep creating, they have to be about change.” And so, while Thurston Moore and Bonner Kramer met almost forty years ago, the musical expression one witnesses on their first duo recording, They Came Like Swallows – Seven Requiems for the Children of Gaza (Silver Current, 2026), is inherently reflective of the time in which it was created.

That moment comes from the meeting of two friends in Miami, Florida, after many years apart. Both artists once served as central figures in New York City’s underground music scene. Moore is perhaps best known to many as the lead guitarist and vocalist for the band Sonic Youth. His work in that context, and with other bands, has essentially resurrected the Fender Jazzmaster. His skills are so strong that Rolling Stone magazine even named him the thirty-fourth guitarist of all time. Kramer has performed with Shockability and John Zorn and has produced bands like Low and Galaxie 500. He also formed and ran the label Shimmy-Disc, which has proved a central outlet for outsiders like Daniel Johnston. The sonic openness, edginess, fearlessness, and willingness to abandon the status quo can be heard throughout the unpredictability of They Came Like Swallows, even though both men long ago left the city whose music scenes they helped define.

Once they left, both artists’ scopes only further expanded. Moore increasingly mined deeper into “free jazz” and the more “jazz” tinged elements of music with people like Daniel Carter and William Hooker. He’s even co-written a book about essential free jazz recordings. The freedom inherent in these forms of expression permeates through They Came Like Swallows, with each piece loosely structured and mostly improvised. Even the more composed pieces, whether Kramer compositions or a remarkable version of Joy Division’s “Insight,” are really more like diving boards into a pool of sonic freedom. Kramer’s  expanded scope in the years since leaving New York has included producing Laraaji. And the slowly blossoming atmospherics of “The Living Theater” and the solemn reflection on “Urn Burial” reflect the shadows of such work with the ambient giant, too.

And so, They Came Like Swallows is neither a romanticization of the artists’ pasts nor an outright rejection of them. Instead, it tries to forge a new way forward while the artists remain true to themselves. This also speaks to the desire to make music that is bigger than themselves. In this case, a prayer to the families in Gaza, a call for human dignity, and an advocacy for global change. They Came Like Swallows is a powerful, texturally rich recording that soars by being distinctly and uniquely itself. 

We sat down with both Moore and Kramer to discuss the making of They Came Like Swallows, its influences, and where we can go from here.

PostGenre: You first met over forty years ago, but They Came Like Swallows is your first duo record together. What took so long, and why did now feel like the right moment?

Bonner Kramer: I think ‘the right moment’ began over forty years ago. We simply never forced it. We let it happen on its own, as one would nurture any living thing, and a collaboration IS a living thing.

Thurston Moore: Maybe it was necessary for both of us to get through our own personal life experiences after first meeting each other and journey forth into our ‘twilight’ years to where we would ultimately reconnect as somewhat wizened adults, so the collaboration could therefore have that “old wine” energy. God only knows what noise we would have made together in 1988.  

PG: The album that came from that collaboration is dedicated to Gaza.  Did that focus develop before you began recording, or did it come together later as you spent more time with the music?

BK: It came together later. Some of the greatest horrors that were happening there were while we were recording.  So, although we didn’t discuss it during the recording process itself, I’m sure I speak for both of us when I say it was on our minds.                        

PG: Thurston described the album by saying you “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.” Where do you both see the role of music in driving global social change, and how do you hope They Came Like Swallows will most change a listener?

BK: I see the potential for CHANGE as being far more limited now than ever. Phil Ochs lived in a time when lyrics were not just heard but also LISTENED to and talked about, as did Dylan, Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie before him. But now we live in a world wherein we know that many ‘digital’ listeners don’t listen to more than the first fifteen seconds of a song before clicking onto a new one. That’s just not ‘Listening.’ I don’t personally hold much hope for the direction we’re headed. Not in this new ‘streaming’ world, anyway. I hope I’m wrong, though. As regards They Came Like Swallows, I know that the humanism we’ve hoped to offer in this Cry-for-Peace will reach the hearts and souls of anyone who listens deeply. Regardless of the fact that we have not articulated those concerns in words or lyrics in the music itself, as we have in the LP’s subtitle. Our ‘sonic activism,’ as Thurston so aptly described it, is embedded in a purely audio experience. It is to be imbibed by the listener as one would draw inspiration from a painting. So there is a dichotomy there, as it’s not about thinking – it’s about feeling.

TM: Again, I’m not sure we would have had the same emotional energy thirty years ago. It’s possible we would have been denouncing the Yee-haw-ism of Ronald Reagan, but the world has come into a far more sinister era where there is seemingly attempted normalization agendas happening with any “democratized” country committing blatant genocide against more impoverished neighbor countries. As artists working since the late 1970s, I would say we have the optional power to offer beauty and rapacious thought in resistance to fascism and state-sanctioned terror.

PG: The album’s song titles draw from literature, including the record’s name. Do you see your music as a form of storytelling?

BK: I see it as something that can be received as any number of things by listeners. Again, like a painting – by Rothko, for example – what two people are going to get the same ‘story’ from one of his paintings? I think the greatest art happens in the soul of the viewer/listener and cannot easily be translated or set forth in summary into a series of sentences and paragraphs. Academics are always trying, but in my opinion, they are nearly always failing. You could say that Thurston and I together have begun the story, but the story ends within each individual listener’s psyche. It’s a psycho-acoustic experience unique to each listener, if we’ve done our jobs right. So yes, music can act as a kind of parable, but the listener takes part in its creation, as they listen, almost like a fellow collaborator. The listener completes the process.

TM: We are both keenly interested in literature, whether it be the poetry of Allen Ginsberg or Frank Stanford or the prose dynamics of Patti Smith or Lou Reed. Pieces of music, compositional or improvisational, act as short stories, or chapters, or simply as paragraphs or sentences. Not unlike the way any sentient art form refracts another. As Kramer suggests, a Rothko painting being viewed is not dissimilar to a Mary Lou Williams composition being heard.

PG: Thurston fairly recently co-authored the excellent book Now Jazz Now: 100 Essential Free Jazz & Improvisation Recordings 1960–80 (Ecstatic Peace Library, 2025). Are there any particular recordings in it, or that could have been, that you feel most directly shaped the music on They Came Like Swallows? And, following on from those influences, do you ever find that you have to work especially hard to ensure your own voice emerges rather than the shadows of influences that have shaped you?

TM: I wouldn’t say so. At this point in time, as a person in their mid-60s, the allowance of every musical epiphany gleaned from any genre of recorded music informs me. Yes, it could be the Free Jazz LP by Sunny Murray. But it may as well be the detonation hardcore of Black Flag’s Damaged (SST, 1981) LP or the British folk stylings of any recording by Anne Briggs.

PG: But They Came Like Swallows certainly uses a repetitive motif in several pieces that gradually transform. Did minimalist composers shape this project at all?

BK: HELL Yes! The living ghosts of Terry Riley, Gavin Bryars, Morton Feldman, and Pauline Oliveros – among ALL the others – are always haunting me and infecting my work, and if there’s a cure for that, I don’t want it.

TM: Dee Dee Ramone was also a minimalist composer. Sometimes I have Dee on one shoulder, stabbing me with his bass guitar, and on the other shoulder is Pauline Oliveros snapping at my earlobe with her accordion.

PG: The album also references Joy Division by including a fascinating cover of the band’s song, “Insight.” Why this particular song? What does it add to an otherwise fully original record?

BK: Well, that second question is for the listener to decide. As for the first question, “Insight” has always been my favorite Joy Division song. I think it serves as a proper coda for our LP. Tuli Kupferberg said, “There’s always Hope.” I think that in these times, more than ever, we need to keep that firmly in mind. If we lose hope, we lose heart. And when we lose heart, all is lost. I think that’s what Ian Curtis was trying his best to convey in those lyrics. He tried his very best. The fact that he failed makes that song all the more poignant and all the more vital for people to hear. Especially nowadays. We must – at the very least – try.

PG: At a high level, They Came Like Swallows has been described as drawing from primitive outsider rock, avant-garde composition, progressive ambient, and “unnamable territories.” Do you see meaningful distinctions between those categories, and do those distinctions shape your creative process?

BK: I see meaningful distinctions, but I do not utilize them as I work. I’d imagine Thurston may feel quite otherwise. I could simply say “music is music”, but it’s far more complex than that. I just choose to NOT actively THINK about it during the creative process, or allow it to become a part of what I do. I’m not allowing my intellect to get involved at all. I’m seeking something else from the results. Something more SUB-conscious, and hidden.

TM: I don’t find myself thinking categorically when playing music in any which way, like “this is ambient” or “this is punk” or “this is…” – I glean distinct vocabularies from music genres, but I don’t ever slot myself into any one of them – I’m not a jazz musician or a blues musician or a punk musician or a whatever. I do tend to define whatever I do as “experimental” but that’s only because it’s a good sounding descriptive, and it sounds like something David Tudor would be OK with.

PG: Looking back, what do you see as the most enduring legacy of the 1980s to 1990s underground scenes you both helped define, and how can elements of that legacy be heard in They Came Like Swallows?

TM: We intersected during the ‘80s/‘90s, certainly during Kramer’s years with B.A.L.L. and his tenure with Butthole Surfers, where those bands and Sonic Youth could be found on the same stages, but we also struck out on differing paths. The experiences of dealing with the wild life of the experimental music scene, even when playing dodgems with major labels and their amorphous expectations, opened our eyes to the truth of how the act of creative music is always born pure and does not necessitate commerce to define its organic value. Any attempted capitalization of music, whether it be underground or otherwise, is ultimately a vapid exercise. If money can be made, yippee, but the music itself is its own currency. I think there’s an enlightened sound of “fuck the system” in this record for sure.

PG: Kramer, you’ve shaped so many artists’ sounds as a prolific producer, composer, and label founder. What was it like stepping into a truly equal collaborative space where you’re both creating from scratch?

BK: That’s incredibly difficult to describe, as I’ve done it hundreds of times before and it’s never the same twice. In this particular case, however, the first three pieces on this LP weren’t created entirely from scratch. I worked on those in my home studio and then brought them to Thurston to ‘complete,’ which he did with a kind of combined discipline and abandon unlike anything I’d ever seen or heard before. It was as if he knew exactly what to do with the songs as-he-was-hearing-them-for-the-very-first-time. This was not the kind of experience I normally have with such collaborations when I arrive with some of the ‘arrangement’ work already nearing completion. Usually, there are hours upon hours of hit and miss, as the artist figures out what to do, with each attempt at creativity being less inspired than the last. Thurston didn’t waste time thinking. He was FEELING, and that part of his brain took over and achieved in an atmosphere of unbridled spontaneity what other artists couldn’t achieve in a lifetime. Nearly everything he did on those pieces was done quickly and succinctly, and nearly all of it is on the final LP. The title track and the first two pieces on Side B began with Thurston’s spontaneous compositions (aka improvisations), which I then took home and ‘shaped’ by adding some of my own contributions, and those became my favorite pieces on the LP. So that’s what it was like; three pieces that began with Thurston, three that began with me, and one that sprang from the tortured mind of Ian Curtis.

PG: Do you feel distinctions between precomposition and spontaneous composition even matter for fully appreciating the work?

BK: God, I hope not. That would mean that I have failed spectacularly. I’ve only discussed it here in a previous answer because I could sense that you were going there. If I’ve achieved my goal with this LP, it means that there MUST NOT be any distinction between the two disciplines. The only other thing I can add to what I’ve already stated is that even the three pieces that began with me working alone in my home studio BEGAN in improvisations, I never chart, score, or write anything down. I never plan ahead. It all exists solely in my head as I work. And I don’t ‘receive’ inspiration beforehand. I just show up and get to work.

TM: I totally concur with Kramer. I prefer to listen to what is presented as “free improvisation” with the sense that it is “composition,” albeit composition being composed in real time. When I first heard Brian Eno’s Another Green World (Island, 1975) LP when it came out, I realized as a teenager that Eno was using segments of improvisation as musical pieces. Later on, when performing the music of John Cage for Merce Cunningham, I found that Cage regarded the music he had scored as “events,” which I loved. Thinking of the music and sound being made as a series of “events”. But Cage notated his work, even when the notation was simply ‘instructional’. There’s a balance between documentation and keeping it in your head, which I like, and I believe I share with Kramer – where the musician, the human, is acting as the primary instrument in the making of the music.

PG: You recently performed as a duo at Big Ears. How has playing the music from They Came Like Swallows live most shaped its evolution compared to the record?

TM: It was reflecting aspects of the pieces we played while allowing new freedom to engage. It all went by too fast, and I would love to perform again as a duo where we can really get in and outside the pieces. I don’t think anyone at Big Ears was too familiar with the recording, as it had yet to be released! But we did set a bit of a parameter for our set by referencing the pieces to some extent. We could have also just gone out there and improvised, and I think the listeners would have been OK with that, as we would have as well – but it would have been more typical. The tension of adhering to the pieces and trans-morphing them allowed for a nervous energy to be dealt with for better or worse.

PG: What did you each learn the most from working together on They Came Like Swallows, and do you see future records together on the horizon?

BK: [Filmmaker John] Cassavetes said that he didn’t care nearly as much about the final film as he did about the experiences the actors in his films shared during the creative process. Although I cannot say that the final LP takes a back seat to the experience I shared with Thurston, I have to echo Cassavetes’ dictum. No listener can possibly share what Thurston and I shared in-the-moment. But if they truly LISTEN, they can sense the freedom, the celebration, and the HOPE we worked to convey. I’m not sure that I “learned” anything, in the conventional sense of the word, other than what I’d already suspected – that Thurston Moore is a perfect collaborator for me on multiple levels, including personal, artistic, creative, and humanistic. There’s nothing we disagreed upon or even debated. It all just happened, as if nothing could get in our way. I’d been waiting a long, long time for such an experience, and I would welcome any future in which another such experience with Thurston might repeat itself. I’ll be there with bells on.

TM: Agreed! Process is the delight that the artists alone can delight in. I think it’s what sets great free improvisation apart from composition in that it presents process as performance. That said, yeah, you know where to find us. Roll tape!

‘They Came Like Swallows – Seven Requiems for the Children of Gaza’ will be released on May 1, 2026 on Silver Current Records. It can be purchased on Bandcamp. More information on Bonner Kramer and Thurston Moore can be found on their respective websites.