New York's a noisy place. And Sonic Youth are doing their best to add to the racket.

Disorder... dissonance... brutality... apocalypse... I might well be describing the Eurovision Song Contest, but then again, New York's Sonic Youth might be a trifle close to the edge even for Terry Wogan.

They've been called a "murderous, thundering brutal assassination of those hackneyed stereotypes you find in rock'n'roll" but that's only halfway towards the intensity, the pride, and the pain; the trickle of blood seeping from blistered eardrums, the maximum heaviosity of it all...

Sonic Youth could be a massively successful Rock band if they were cute and respectable and loved the fanatical drool afforded stadium bands.

But the (generally) shared attitude between the four members — Thurston Moore and Lee Renaldo on guitars, Kim Gordon on bass and fairly new boy Steve Shelley on drums — is that their homeland America is Death Culture personified rather than the land of MTV and Red Rocks, and besides, punk and the avant garde are both too much fun to give up.

Sonic Youth believe that the truest way to play rock music is to maintain the traditions and then explore the sonic possibilities of the instruments.

Guitars are physically attacked, squeezed for every potential result; riffs are sustained, reverbed, stretched, choked and laid to rest in peace. "A holocaust", someone once remarked.

"We're interested in the possibilities for sound-making output from the guitar, bass and drums," says Lee, "in ways that haven't been as fully explored as we'd like to feel they've been.

"We're interested in textural sounds and the blending of instruments in ways that don't fit into the standard format of lead and rhythm guitars with a rhythm section backing it up.

"The music's got the emotion, the sentiment and the lyrical thinking of rock music. We're a rock band and we're proud of it. We're not an art, noise or extreme band. We just do what we have to do."

Sonic Youth have emerged from the same New York tradition that stretches back to the sultry days of 1975 and a dingy basement club called CBGB's where such scruffy luminaries as Patti Smith, Television and The Ramones consummated a real life art-takes-on-rock'n'roll relationship with the audience that became Punk.

1979/80 saw the growth of the nihilistic No Wave experimentations of James Chance and The Contortions, Lydia Lunch, DNA and more. It wasn't only guitars that were utilised as weapons against the marshmallow brains of the commercial world, but the aggression and volume dynamics of those six-string razors far exceeded the capabilities of any synthesiser.

1982 saw the emergence of Glenn Branca's guitar symphonies, often 30 guitars or more on record and stage — a massive new 'classical' progression.

Both Lee and Thurston played with Branca before forming Sonic Youth, a continuation of the idea of guitars delving into dynamics, pitch, playing tones and tunings, going completely against the accepted notion of American rock — Iggy and The Stooges, Hendrix, Heavy Metal; the raging sound of crackling amplifiers — and the idea of melody supported by the instruments.

Without going too far, Sonic Youth's creative impulse originates from the relationship between player, instrument and equipment. True musos, then.

Some say all this is simply avant-garde, others that it's the indulgent dabbling of art school delinquents. I say go and see, or just hear Sonic Youth if you're interested in the potential of the guitar. Thurston: "We're interested in the workings of it all, technologically, technically, architecturally."

Kim: "We're fascinated by electricity!"

Lee: "For the most part, the only effects we use are the guitars, the cord and the amp. Lately Kim and I have been playing around a bit with a distortion pedal, but for the most part we're really into the link-up between the guitars and the amplifier and the electrical thing that happens. We're pretty specific about the kind of amps that we use and the way we set them.

"We're really into Hiwatts for the bass amps, big powerful tube amps. Either Fender or Gallien Kreuger or something like that for the guitars. We tend to find that something like a Fender is the most reliable for travelling around the world, though it may not be exactly what we play at home."

How do you set the amps?

"Loud. Each guitar has a slightly different setting based on its personality. You're using them as an equaliser of a sort depending on how you set the tone control. They're part of the instrument, a crucial part of the sound. The sound doesn't stop at the guitar. It has to do with the sound from the strings through the cord to the amplifier and even back again, like with feedback."

Why do you choose such a pure, no-FX attitude?

"You've just answered it. We're into having as few barriers as possible in the way of what's going on. If you've got pedals to think about, then it's one more wall between the guitar and the amp and the audience. It's just that the more stripped down it can be, the more we can hot-rod it into the audience."

Despite the Sonic Youth — the name coming from "a sense of freedom; you have fresh sounds, a sonic youth... we're totally into sound exploration in that sense" — guitar sound described variably as "searing... painful... DANGER-OUS"(!) on numerous occasions, this doesn't mean that you'd only hear a Very Metal onslaught that would do an ageing Tony Iommi justice.

Inside the Sonic Youth maelstrom is hardcore and softcore; moments where the sound is constructed by Lee and Thurston tapping the necks and the backs of their guitars, building up harmonics of a very different kind of tension. Kind of like the calm before and after a storm.

Then again, filed under sound exploration is the art of jamming screwdrivers under the strings and banging the strings with drum mallets.

Lee: "I gash the screwdriver between the Strings and the neck, normally on the ninth fret. You can do it on the twelfth fret as well but because of how a guitar is made, the ninth is easier. Both are great harmonic notes. You get more of the real good sound of the string without the attack pluck of the pick. A great chiming sound."

Kim: "We're interested in the direct physical relationship between the physical action and the sound, like how you can move your guitar around and how that affects the sound. Things that you can't get with synthesisers."

Thurston: "We like to play colours actually. I'm right into green at the moment."

Lee: "Lavenders and fuschias."

Thurston: "When we're in New York, we play black."

Kim: "Midnight blue maybe."

Lee: "Close to black but not quite."

Can you alter the colour by altering key, for example?

Lee: "We never talk in terms of a key. We have our own way of dealing with keys. We use a million guitars, like twelve on stage, and most of them are tuned in pairs. We play them in pairs and so the basis for each group of songs will be a different key structure. Switching guitars throughout the set keeps things from sounding repetitive because the tonalities are changing. None of the instruments are tuned normally."

Kim: "The tunings are arrived at pretty accidentally."

Thurston: "Each guitar has a totally different outlook to each other — the pickups, the strings, the bridges and all that.

"All of the guitars are sort of your cheaper model. They offer this kind of funkiness that you don't get when you arrive at a certain level of professional guitars like Stratocasters.

"It's just unfortunate that the cheaper guitars are built badly because they break."

Lee: "These guitars aren't taken seriously because they're considered to be too cheap, but they're great. The pickups create sounds that you don't get in regular guitars — you can play strings well behind the bridge and get tones unheard of. It's there to be utilised."

Thurston: "Right now we've been using a Kent, a Drifter, a Kay, and an Ovation electric bass."

Lee: "Fender Tele, Fender Jazz Master, Ibanez, Ovation guitar, Kappa, Vox Teardrop 12 string."

Thurston: "An electric sitar made in England and a couple of electric autoharps. And a zither."

Lee: "And a guitar called Robbie."

At their London gig, I also spotted a Kimberley, a Savoy and a Gibson Marauder — guitars with more stickers than controls, pieces of warped wood, pieces of junk. They all sound great.

Thurston: "We used them because that's all we had at the beginning. That was all that we could afford."

Kim: "When most people start to play, they want something with very strong pickups, something that's solid and durable and a sound that goes with the way that they want to play."

Talking of products, what have the Sonic ones done so far? First came the "Kill Your Idols" mini-album (1983, Neutron Records, produced by Glenn Branca), the debut album "Confusion Is Sex" (1983, Homestead Records), but both are on import only and therefore for fat wallets only.

If hard up but still hungry for invention, head for "Bad Moon Rising" the first official British release on Blast First Records (also home of the extraordinary Big Stick, T. Rex on LSD and ether) and the "Death Valley '69" 12-inch (also on Blast First) which co-stars Lydia Lunch. Not only but also... a new album, "Evol" (spelt forwards is... ) again on Blast First. More of the same, admittedly, but what Sonic Youth do, they do brilliantly well.

And the reason for it all..?

"Sound has total effects. It can have a totally magical effect on people and on yourself. It can be a real learning experience in terms of getting in touch with your feelings."

But, like it or not, is this rock'n'roll?

"We consider that we carry forth the torch of American rock rather than burying the corpse" says Lee.

"That's the whole thing about it, compared to, say, The Long Ryders' stuff. They're burying the corpse, dancing on a dead thing. We feel that if rock'n'roll is to have any meaning, it has to go on as a vital entity rather than ia backwards-looking thing.

"It's raw, and it has to do with projecting emotions, projecting intensity."