Lee Ranaldo - In Virus Times (LP) - Turquoise Vinyl

Lee Ranaldo has spent decades finding poetry in texture. With In Virus Times he pares that impulse down to a single voice and a single room. Released in 2021 on Mute, this is a four-part solo acoustic piece conceived during the long hush of lockdown in New York City. It sits apart from his collaborative detours and the noise-sculpting days of Sonic Youth, yet it carries the same curiosity for tone and resonance that has always anchored his work.

The structure is simple. Four movements, each one circling a handful of motifs and letting them breathe. No rhythm section, no electronics crowding the corners. Just a guitar recorded close enough that you can feel the intake of air around the notes. The restraint is striking. Ranaldo leans into the decay of strings and the soft clatter of fingers moving up the neck, almost like he is sketching in pencil rather than painting in oil. It recalls the meditative side of American primitivism, but he is not chasing Fahey’s ghost. He’s tracing the contours of a day when time felt stretched and rooms felt larger than they were.

If you know his 2020 album with Raül Refree, Names of North End Women, this feels like a quiet reply to its collage-like energy. That record was full of tape loops and voices. Here, the loops are inside the guitar itself. He circles a phrase, lands on a harmonic, drifts away, then returns to some fragment you remember from minutes earlier. You start to anticipate the exact speed of a slide up to the 7th fret. That’s the pleasure. The small changes start to feel monumental.

He has always loved alternate tunings, and you can hear that curiosity at work. Chords bloom in unexpected ways. Bass strings hang in the air and become a pulse, even when there is no beat to speak of. He resists the easy lift of reverb and keeps the sound honest. The instrument has body. You can picture it sitting in his lap, the floorboards below, a window cracked open. It is music built from attention, and in that way it mirrors the strange intimacy of 2020 more accurately than a louder statement might have.

As a listening experience, In Virus Times rewards real focus. Put it on while cooking and you’ll catch the surface calm. Sit with it and you’ll hear the logic underneath, the way the four parts map a mood that turns from tentative to settled to gently searching. The final section carries a soft glow, as if the piece has learned how to live in its own skin. It feels personal without turning diaristic. He never explains. He just shows you how a few fretted shapes can carry weight.

On vinyl the music feels especially tactile. The In Virus Times vinyl pressing lets the overtones bloom, and the side-length arc suits the piece. Drop the needle, let the room go quiet, and it plays like a single breath. If you collect Lee Ranaldo vinyl, this one sits nicely next to his electric experiments, a companion that tells you something about the broader map of his ideas. It is the sort of record you might stumble upon in a Melbourne record store, slip into a tote, then play on a rainy night when you need the present tense of wood and wire. If you buy Lee Ranaldo records online, keep an eye out for this along with his other Mute-era titles. There is a real pleasure in hearing how these later works open up on a turntable.

The pandemic has already inspired a flood of art, some grand, some heavy with metaphor. Ranaldo’s answer is humble and precise. He gives you four pieces that feel like hours spent learning the light in a room. No grand gestures, no forced catharsis. Just a guitar thinking out loud. For anyone searching for Lee Ranaldo albums on vinyl that reveal a quieter side, this is essential. And for those who keep lists for visiting shops that specialize in vinyl records Australia wide, it’s one to ask after. It may seem slight at first glance. Give it time. The details gather.