All whirlwind heat and flash

Short review of The Empty Page: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth, now out on Serpent's Tail.

This dark, uplifting, violent, poetic and macabre collection may make as little sense as one of Sonic Youth's albums but sense be damned for it's just as stirring and memorable as their finest work. With the ghost of the music ever-present and the lyrics bleeding into the stories as they have into the lives of the writers, the stories satisfy and tantalise in equal measure, each freshly-discovered severed human hand, ghost, sex shop, revolutionary heiress and molotov cocktail, each remarkable story and unique spin on a song, like every great record is a beginning and not an end in itself.