Lee Ranaldo Details Upcoming Collaboration with André 3000

Earlier this year, news came out that Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo and André 3000 had recorded music together that was bound to come out soon. We don't have any music, but we have more information regarding the project.

In a new episode of the East Village Radio show Elia vs ? , Elia Einhorn chatted with Ranaldo about his new original soundtrack for The System , a film by Dutch filmmaker Joris Postema. Later on, they got into detail about the upcoming André 3000 album.

Around the 54-minute mark, Einhorn inquired about the in-the-works album. Ranaldo shared that he met with André 3000, a few members of his band, and Israeli multi-instrumentalist Yonatan Gat, with whom Ranaldo is working on a few other projects, in studios a year and a half ago.

"It's not completely clear when or if it will see the light of day," Ranaldo said. "But, yeah, André, in some public thing he did here a couple of months ago at the Drawing Center, he saw me in the audience and he mentioned, 'Oh yeah, we made a record together that's going to come out at some point.' So I hope it will come out at some point because he's been doing all this flute music the last couple years."

Later he added:

> We made this record in Yonatan's studio and it's balls to the wall. It's not the delicate stuff on New Blue Sun . It's really just amazing with a fantastic drummer, Carlos Niño, that's in Andre's band, among other things, and another guy, Deantoni Parks, who's in Andre's band. And so it's a quintet record, and we're titling it with the five of our names from oldest to youngest. So I'm first, and André's second, and Yonatan's last on the list of five members. He's the baby. But we just had a listening party for it, just a private listening party like a couple weeks ago, and I hadn't heard it in a while. And I really love it. It's really cool, and I think it's going to surprise people that only know André from either OutKast or other stuff that he's done. And I think we’re just waiting for the right time for it to come out. I think it will come out on Yonatan's Stone Tapes label.

Einhorn then asked what Andre is doing on the album. Andre's been up to a lot of different stuff lately — piano, flute, and some vocals that Einhorn points out are non-words, which were featured on his TRANSA contribution . Ranaldo said:

> Yeah, that's right. There's a bit of that, which he was doing on the New Blue Sun tour, which is when we filmed this during the first shows that they were doing for that tour. When he was in New York. And so he's playing mostly flutes. He spreads out like 15 different flutes. Some are old African things. Some are new electronic high-fangled things. And he's playing flute. We were each playing some kind of like a xylophone-like instrument. Mine is one of these homemade things with guitar pickups and his is a little more traditional. And he's doing some vocals on it as well. And it's pretty far out music, and it's a beautiful record.

Ranaldo also said that he's been compiling demos over the years for another new project of his own. Based on the full conversation surrounding these tidbits, this seems like a more collaborative album. It's unclear if it's an André 3000 or Ranaldo album, or if they'll have a group name. But Carlos Niño and Deantoni Parks both played on New Blue Sun and toured w/ André for it. Yonatan Gat has worked with Niño before.

In other André news, on Thursday, OutKast ( not to be confused with Ovrkst ) launched a collaboration with Waffle House. And a day earlier, Big Boi got dunked on for sharing an OutKast slop video for Aquemini 's 28th anniversary.

_Originally reported by [Stereogum](https://stereogum.com/2513364/lee-ranaldo-sheds-light-on-new-balls-to-the-wall-andre-3000-album/news/)._