All One Song :: Ilyas Ahmed on "Arc"

Welcome back to All One Song: A Neil Young Podcast. We’re spending the summer talking to some great musicians and writers about their one favorite Neil Young song. Or at least one of their favorite songs. Last week, our guest was Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth — and of course, the conversation went deep into Steve’s memories of Sonic Youth’s tour with Neil and Crazy Horse in 1991, when both bands were bringing incredible waves of feedback to the masses across North America. An exciting time!

For Neil, the tour resulted in a fairly traditional live album, the classic double-disc Weld. But that wasn’t all. Inspired partly by what he heard Sonic Youth doing, Young also put together Arc, one of — if not the — most avant-garde pieces of music Young has ever created. Basically, it’s a 35-minute noise collage consisting of the elongated and improvised endings of various songs that he and the Horse played in early 91. It’s the sound of amplifiers pushed to their limits, of things falling apart in ragged, glorious fashion. It’s an expressway to yr skull, as Sonic Youth put it.

Here this week to examine the mysteries and magic of Arc is Ilyas Ahmed. The Portland, OR-based musician has been making consistently fascinating music for well over two decades now, whether all on his own or in close collaboration with fellow travelers like Grouper, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Golden Retriever, Dania Shihab and many more. He also serves as guitarist in Grails, an awesomely uncategorizable collective that just put out one of the 2025’s best records — the appropriately named Miracle Music. No matter what Ilyas does, it’s always infused with a sense of curiosity, adventure and imagination.

Our conversation about Arc goes in a bunch of different directions — it’s a rich text, as the academics like to say. So let’s get into it …

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