Gastr Del Sol

The first release from Gastr del Sol in over 25 years is nigh! Like a bolt echoing back from the blue, We Have Dozens of Titles restrikes the iron of Gastr del Sol, plunging us back into the maelstrom of David Grubbs and Jim O’Rourke’s all too brief (but ultimately, long enough to change everything incisively) run together between 1993–1998. For We Have Dozens of Titles, Jim and David reconnected to assemble nearly an hour of previously unreleased live recordings — including their final performance together — with another near-hour of studio recordings culled from long lost singles, EPs, and compilations. The result is a career-defining 3xLP box set of the band that changed the game immeasurably in the mid-90s, one whose influence continues to ripple through the space-time of modern music.

Gastr del Sol’s sound was of the transformative variety. David Grubbs formed Gastr from the final lineup of Bastro; on the debut Gastr album, The Serpentine Similar, Grubbs, Bundy K. Brown and John McEntire downshifted from a thrashing electric outfit into a droning, acoustic-based one. Following this, the lineup shifted again, decisively. When Brown and McEntire departed to focus on the project to be known as Tortoise, Jim O’Rourke arrived, pairing with Grubbs to make a sequence of unpredictable leaps across genre and practical approach alike, over the course of three LPs (1994’s Crookt, Crackt, or Fly, 1996’s Upgrade & Afterlife, and 1998’s Camoufleur) and a pair of EPs that threatened the passage of musical time as we knew it.

Today, in celebration of the announcement of We Have Dozens of Titles, we share “The Seasons Reverse”, a stunning, broadcast-quality live capture from Gastr del Sol's final show at the 1997 Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville, miraculously found in the CBC archive. With a laptop in tow, the two performed "The Seasons Reverse" on-stage using digital multitracks from the epochal pop music of their not-yet finished fifth and final studio album, Camoufleur. Within the song’s final mix, layers of vivid textural detail unravel in true Beach Boys Stack-o-Tracks fashion to form a take on an old favorite that crystalizes the ebullience and improbability found in Gastr’s live performances. We Have Dozens of Titles, rekindling the slow-burning incendiaries of Gastr del Sol, arrives on May 24, 2024 (available on 3xLP/2xCD/digital). Now is the time to discover a further set of reinventions from a group who continues to change the way we hear music!