DAVID GRUBBS
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Territories: Worldwide
“Though [Gastr del Sol’s] music began with two carefully intertwined acoustic guitars, it stretched to encompass orchestral fantasias, electronic abstraction and collage sensibilities imported from the avant-garde. Grubbs’s image-rich writing felt poetic and detached. In an era of plangent indie rock, they were the studied, intricate eccentrics” – Grayson Currin, NEW YORK TIMES
“It’s decades now that David Grubbs has kept my head spinning with ideas about the creation, performance, and understanding of music. To hear or read his work is to be invited into collaboration” – Will Oldham
“David Grubbs’s books are at once bravado poetic performances and incisive works of performance theory. He combines a deep knowing with a willingness to smash everything. I will follow him into any medium” – Ben Lerner
“One of indie rock’s most influential founding fathers” – BEATS PER MINUTE
David Grubbs is Distinguished Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. He is the author of Good night the pleasure was ours, The Voice in the Headphones, Now that the audience is assembled, and Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording (all published by Duke University Press) as well as the collaborative artists’ books Simultaneous Soloists (with Anthony McCall, Pioneer Works Press) and Projectile (with Reto Geiser and John Sparagana, Drag City). Records Ruin the Landscape has appeared in French, Italian, and Japanese translations.
Grubbs has released sixteen solo albums and appeared on more than 200 releases. In 2000, his The Spectrum Between (Drag City) was named “Album of the Year” in the London Sunday Times. He is known for his cross-disciplinary collaborations with poet Susan Howe and visual artists Anthony McCall, Angela Bulloch, and Josiah McElheny, and his work has been presented at, among other venues, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, the Tate Modern, and the Centre Pompidou. Grubbs was a member of the groups Gastr del Sol, Bastro, and Squirrel Bait, and has performed with Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, Luc Ferrari, Will Oldham, Loren Connors, Jan St. Werner, the Red Krayola, and many others. He is a recipient of the Berlin Prize and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts award in Music/Sound, a member of the board of directors of Blank Forms, and director of the Blue Chopsticks record label.
‘Whistle from Above’ is the first solo collection David’s released since 2017’s ‘Creep Mission’. During the 2020 shutdown, David played what he precisely quantified as “a shit-ton of guitar,” more than he could recall playing ever previously. Reinvigorated by this period of enforced woodshedding, he produced a series of new pieces, mostly for guitar, but also a piano composition and an exceptionally eerie bit of musique concrète. These seemed to imply a solo set that would tour marvelously when the time was right again. ‘Whistle from Above’ is a colorful, compulsive set of instrumental pieces in which David and his chosen collaborators interact amid the steady roll of an expansive landscape based in the hypnosis of David’s immediately recognizable guitar style.
Photo: Julien Sitruk