A psychedelic vision of Factory-era Manhattan permeates through the extended music video for “Blackt Out” by Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, made by his old film-school friend Fred Riedel. “We were powerless here for more than a week,” says the Lower East Side-residing guitarist of writing the track during Hurricane Sandy. “In the evenings you’d have candles lit and there wasn’t really much else to do, so I strummed around on my guitars and this song came out.” Filmed at Sonic Youth’s studio in Hoboken, New Jersey, and at gigs in Brooklyn and LA, New York’s experimental past segues through the short, with references to Jonas Mekas and Andy Warhol’s short films of the Velvet Underground and their laconic hangers-on. “The Velvets were the classics of their day, getting ideas from what was going on in the art world as well as from the history of music,” says Ranaldo, who stars alongside his and Riedel’s friend, the avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs, as the wizened projectionist. “Lou Reed was my neighbor and we got to be friendly over the last decade. When he died I found it much more moving than I imagined I would. He influenced so many things and was such a New York guy—he was a victory right here.” Though the legend’s passing followed the closure of CBGB in defining the passing of the Lower East Side’s avant-punk credentials, Ranaldo still recognises the same spirit pulsing through the city: “When Warhol was here young people could live very cheaply, but it’s still a place where different creative disciplines bump up against each other. That’s been part of its character since the 1920s and that’s not going to change.”

Lee Ranaldo and the Dust’s Last Night On Earth is out now on Matador with a European tour starting May 25.