Sonic Youth

Massage the History is a short film by Cameron Jamie and the Sonic Youth song that gives it both its title and its soundtrack. Made between 2007 and 2009, it was shot in colour on 35mm and lasts about ten minutes. The film watches young men in Alabama, amateur dancers, perform a sexually charged dance with the furniture of their own middle-class living rooms. He cuts these scenes against found footage of violent or surreal incidents filmed in anonymous American suburbs, until it becomes hard to say where one world ends and the other begins. Jamie has described his films as a way of visiting hidden worlds inside our own, and his earlier work circled the same territory of suburban ritual and homemade spectacle. In autumn 2016 the piece was one of ten audiovisual works in The Infinite Mix, the Hayward Gallery's off-site exhibition with The Vinyl Factory at The Store, 180 The Strand. This one-sided record was released in celebration of the show.

The song closes The Eternal, the album Sonic Youth released on Matador in 2009, and it is sung by Kim Gordon. It unfolds over almost ten minutes as the last thing heard on that album. Reviewing the album, Rolling Stone (2009) heard the band curl up "in a fuzzy psych-folk blanket", with Gordon hoarsely whispering the title phrase. In Jamie's film the power and repetition of the music carry the images towards something close to hallucination, as The Vinyl Factory noted when the record came out. The song bridges the domestic dance and the anonymous footage without a break. It was not the first time the group's music had met moving images on a record: their 1987 score for the film Made in USA had been released on vinyl in April of that same year. On this edition Sonic Youth are credited as writers and performers, and the cut was mastered by Noel Summerville. Here the song arrives on its own, without the rest of the album around it.

Single-sided 12" at 45 RPM on 180g white vinyl, with an etching on the B side, in a clear PVC sleeve with info sticker, limited to 500 copies.