David Grubbs
David Grubbs, born in Louisville in 1967, is a guitarist, pianist, singer and composer whose career runs from teenage hardcore to the quietest of chamber music. He was a founding member of Squirrel Bait, Bastro and, with Jim O'Rourke, of Gastr del Sol, the group that in the 1990s joined post-rock, American folk guitar and electroacoustic composition; he also passed through Bitch Magnet, the Red Krayola, Palace and the Boxhead Ensemble.
From Red Black to Black, from Blue Black to Black
David Grubbs' commissioned music for Josiah McElheny's singing paintings, wall works with hand-blown glass discs that resonate sound: one 30-minute piece for lap steel, electric guitar and Serge synthesizer, built on microtonal slide.
Somewhere in the Wind
Somewhere in the Wind is the third record that Loren Connors and I have made together. Of the three, it’s the first that consists exclusively of electric guitar duos and it’s the first that was recorded live. To me it feels very much like a live reco…
Bitterviper
Tip! In the realm of experimental music, certain collaborations feel inevitable - the convergence of like-minded artists whose individual voices seem destined to merge into something greater than the sum of their considerable parts. Bitterviper repre…
Whistle from Above
Reinvigorated by months of shutdown woodshedding, David Grubbs developed new works for guitar, as well as a piano piece and an exceptionally eerie bit of musique concrète. Inspired by the deep dive into Gastr del Sol’s duo magic that facilitated last…
Projectile
Projectile is an artist’s book by Reto Geiser, David Grubbs, and John Sparagana that spirals outward from a single source image: a news photograph of chair-throwing at the conclusion of a cancelled rock concert in the early 1980s. Visual artist John …
Evening Air
Evening Air is the result of Loren Connors and David Grubbs’s first trip to the recording studio in the two decades since their first duo album, Arborvitae (Häpna). Arborvitae stood out for its spellbinding, utterly unhurried meshing of electric guit…
The Voice in the Headphones
The voice in the headphones says, “you’re rolling” . . .
Good Night the Pleasure Was Ours
With Good night the pleasure was ours, David Grubbs melts down and recasts three decades of playing music on tour into a book-length poem, bringing to a close the trilogy that includes Now that the audience is assembled and The Voice in the Headphone…
The Coxcomb
*2024 stock* The Coxcomb is an adaptation of Stephen Crane's "The Blue Hotel." Aux Noctambules was recorded in June 1998 at Xtralab, Paris. Mastered at DM Studio, Limoges, France. Aux Noctambules is dedicated to Pierre Carré. © Gastr Virgo Music (BMI…
Rickets & Scurvy
One of his best works, it brings together technical bluegrass banjo and fingerstyle acoustic guitar playing with abrupt stylistic shifts, philosophical questioning lyrics, improvisation, and drones.
Sound – Space – Sense (Book)
People perceive audio events in very different ways. There is still a great deal of uncertainty about the physics, biology, signifiers, and unconscious processes on the basis of which auditory experiences are constructed. The book applies the methods…
Simultaneous Soloists (Book)
2024 stock. Simultaneous Soloists is an artist’s book emerging from the exhibition Anthony McCall: Solid Light Works and its accompanying performance series Four Simultaneous Soloists, organized by David Grubbs. It documents these ephemeral events th…
Your Music Encountered in a Dream
Remember hearing music while dreaming, fully confident that you’ll be able to reconstruct it once awake? Music that, as it turns out, you were the sole witness. In retrospect, why ruin the experience by something so vulgar as hearing it a second time…
Now that the audience is assembled
*2023 stock* Following his investigation into experimental music and sound recording in Records Ruin the Landscape, David Grubbs turns his attention to the live performance of improvised music with an altogether different form of writing. Now that th…
Records Ruin the Landscape (John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording) (Book)
*2023 stock* John Cage's disdain for records was legendary. He repeatedly spoke of the ways in which recorded music was antithetical to his work. In Records Ruin the Landscape, David Grubbs argues that, following Cage, new genres in experimental and …
Off-Road
Tip! *2022 stock. In process of stocking* Their second duo recording, the follow-up to 1999's Apertura. Off-Road finds the two of them forsaking their earlier, glacially meditative m.o. for a shower of digitally recomposed slivers, the metal-on-metal…
Na Margem Sul
Haunted ice-cold electric guitar minimalism, shimmered and expertly restrained, 'Na margem sul' is a recording of David Grubbs and Manuel Mota's first public performance as a duo. They've been working together for over a decade - 2018's "Lacrau" is a…
Translation from Unspecified
David Grubbs and Jan St. Werner met in the mid-1990s when Grubbs was playing with Gastr del Sol and the Red Krayola and St. Werner in Mouse on Mars and Microstoria. After years of exchanging ideas, Translation from Unspecified marks their first time …
Concordance (LP)
Concordance is Susan Howe’s and David Grubbs’s fifth album in the fifteen years of their unexpected and richly satisfying collaboration. Here they’ve pared down their materials to voice and piano, aspiring to the hushed intensity of their live perfor…
Instant Opaque Evening (2LP)
An epic second installment from the trio of Mats Gustafsson, David Grubbs, Rob Mazurek, nearly 90 minutes of intense live performances from January 2020. They converge here on a wide swath of sounds: expansive free improvs, full-tilt electronics, alt…