David Grubbs
David Grubbs, guitarist, pianist, and vocalist, was a founding member of Squirrel Bait, Bastro, and Gastr del Sol. David Grubbs has had an astonishingly wide-ranging career: Squirrel Bait, Bastro, Bitch Magnet (fleetingly), the Red Krayola, Gastr del Sol, Palace, Boxhead Ensemble, & a series of solo recordings & collaborations. The common aspect among these performances is contigent on itself, as it is primarily identified by Grubbs' own commitment & growth as both instrumentalist & composer, constantly pursuing forms & structures that challenge both musician & listener.
David Grubbs, guitarist, pianist, and vocalist, was a founding member of Squirrel Bait, Bastro, and Gastr del Sol. David Grubbs has had an astonishingly wide-ranging career: Squirrel Bait, Bastro, Bitch Magnet (fleetingly), the Red Krayola, Gastr del Sol, Palace, Boxhead Ensemble, & a series of solo recordings & collaborations. The common aspect among these performances is contigent on itself, as it is primarily identified by Grubbs' own commitment & growth as both instrumentalist & composer, constantly pursuing forms & structures that challenge both musician & listener.
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 guitar (Connors) and piano (Grubbs). With this long-awaited return, Connors and Grubbs take turns trading off on piano and guitar, with Grubbs at the keyboard for the two gently expansive pieces on the first side and Connors taking over the instrument fo…
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 Headphones. In Good night the pleasure was ours, the world outside the tour filters in with eccentric sparseness. From teenage punk bands to ensembles without fixed membership, and from solo performance to a group augmented by digital avatars, Grubbs presents…
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), administered in Europe by Rough Trade, Ltd.
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 of artistic research to convey a sense of how mental space, social practice, and the direct experience of sound relate to each other and how connections are generated between these levels—a topology of resonances, reflections, and vibrations in perp…
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 through multiple means: an extensive conversation between McCall and Grubbs detailing a decade of working together, interviews with sixteen participating musicians, writings by art historians Branden W. Joseph and Swagato Chakravorty, and visual materi…
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, much less having to share it? We don’t mean to alarm you, but David Grubbs and Liam Keenan have returned from the dark side of the pillow bearing Your Music Encountered in a Dream.
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 the audience is assembled is a book-length prose poem that describes a fictional musical performance during which an unnamed musician improvises the construction of a series of invented instruments before an audience that is alternately contemplative, …
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 avant-garde music in the 1960s were particularly ill suited to be represented in the form of a recording. These activities include indeterminate music, long-duration minimalism, text scores, happenings, live electronic music, free jazz, and free impr…
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 timbre of a saxophone equipped with contact mics, Grubbs's chiming electric guitar, and Gustafsson's pro rhythm analog synthesizer clipped to the bell of his horn.
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 particular highlight - but it's taken them this long to actually play together in front of an audience. Grubbs admits that although they've met countless times, they rarely talk about playing. From David Grubbs: "This recording documents Manuel Mota…
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 locking horns as a duo, and it’s clear this deck-clearing collaboration was long overdue. In January 2020 Grubbs arrived at Mouse on Mars’ Berlin studio Paraverse with a guitar and “Translation from Unspecified,” an open-ended, seemingly self-generat…
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 performances. What had previously resulted from Grubbs’s recomposition of recorded materials now arrives as unadorned duo performance.
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-universe chamber music and spontaneous arrangements of three previously released Grubbs’ songs.
The harmless dust
The Harmless Dust is a unique release in the discographies of both David Grubbs and the Athens-based cellist Nikos Veliotis (Mohammad). In 2005 the duo were on tour in the U.S. in support of Grubbs’s album A Guess at the Riddle when they took a most productive break at John McEntire’s Soma Studios, over the course of a day laying down something utterly different from the song-based set they were playing most evenings. The Harmless Dust presents the same composition in two arrangements: one for p…
Arborvitae
This is the first LP release on Loren Connors’ and David Grubbs’ Arborvitae, originally released on CD by the Swedish label Häpna in 2003. Loren Connors and David Grubbs first performed as a duo on May 30, 2003 at the Green-Wood Cemetery Chapel in Brooklyn, N.Y. Green-Wood Cemetery is one of Brooklyn’s landmarks—it’s the highest natural point in the borough, and an unexpected expanse of tranquility in the midst of the city. The stone interior of the chapel makes the quietest of sounds audible, a…
Comet Meta
Grubbs and Unami are fully in third-mind territory after their touted 2018 debut, Failed Celestial Creatures. From pindrop twin-guitar focus to Grubbs’s piano maneuvering in Unami’s electroacoustic forcefields, to unclassifiable throbs, ceiling fans, and the exultation of the crowd at the NYC marathon, Comet Meta casts a gorgeous avant spell. With resumes as long as their arms, restart their conversation. You'd be forgiven for thinking on occasion of gossamer Gastr-isms. Think instead of Comet M…
The Underflow
An übertrio drawn from distinct parts of the creative music spectrum, The Underflow was recorded during a sizzling two-night stand in May 2019. In a series of duets and trios, guitarist David Grubbs, saxophonist Mats Gustafsson, and trumpeter Rob Mazurek met headlong for the first time, converging not only their acoustic and electric instruments, but at times submerging themselves in a tangle of electronics, then emerging into shamanic bell-shaking chant or chest-rattling howl. Ranging from extr…
Prismrose
Prismrose is a nearly wordless collection of six pieces for electric guitar, all given real time to breathe and mutate. It’s an album that documents what an electric guitar sounds like in David Grubbs’s hands — with Eli Keszler dropping by to pummel some drums — now that we’ve stumbled into the year 2016.