A gig to remember: Kim Gordon and Ikue Mori live in Belgrade

The Sonic Youth star backed by the Japanese electronic virtuoso treated the Belgrade crowd to a show they will never forget. Too bad if you weren’t there

Everybody play: Kim Gordon lets the audience feel some of that Fender Jaguar / Photo: Nemanja Knezevic for resonate.io

When it was announced in October of last year that Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth were separating after 27 years of marriage, many fans began to publicly question the existence of lifelong love. For much of their audience, the couple, who played in an exalted noise rock band together for 31 years, was an aspirational love example. So what is Kim Gordon, fresh from a high profile split, up to nowadays? She’s tearing up Europe for one, playing a series of shows with Ikue Mori, the Tokyo-born drummer of late-70s no wave band DNA.

Among the handful of European cities the duo chose to visit was Belgrade, as part of Resonate’s program at this year’s BELEF festival.

Photo: Whitemonkey

The day of the show, Gordon told journalists about her aspirations for each performance: “You sorta want to get lost and you hope that the audience gets lost with you.” Her performance in Belgrade last night appeared to fulfill this wish, with Mori making noise that sounded like it was coming from a broken machine, and Gordon occasionally punctuating the blurry soundscape with guitar chords and feedback improvisations.

Gordon also said that each audience is different. “You can feel if they’re listening, you can feel if there’s some connection.”

Photo: Nemanja Knezevic for resonate.io

At the end of the duo’s Belgrade performance, Gordon smiled as she climbed down from the stage with her guitar, inviting members of the audience to participate in the performance by repeatedly striking the instrument. Several people in the crowd rushed the stage in order to get their hands on Gordon’s Fender Jaguar while Mori sat behind her laptops confidently holding it all down. The two women, now well into middle age, displayed no signs of diminished potency.

As Gordon described the live musical performance in Artforum back in 1983, “People pay to see other people believe in themselves.”