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.
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 year’s compilation box, David opened his deeply personal solo pieces for engaging conversational gambits with modern masters Rhodri Davies, Andrea Belfi, Nikos Veliotis, Nate Wooley, and Cleek Schrey.
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 Sparagana has long produced sliced and mixed collage works in which a source image is enlarged, copies of the image sliced vertically into 1/8” strips and then sequenced horizontally, followed by a second stage in which the stretched image is sliced …
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…
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.
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.
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…
United States of America Triptych (II)
Voice by Pete Simonelli, guitar by David Grubbs, organ by David Maranha, percussion by Andrea Belfi. Selection of texts follows that of Harry Partch's „Eleven Intrusions” Texts by Ella Young, Ella Young and Lao Tzu, Tsurayuki, Willard Motley, George Leite, Giuseppe Ungaretti
The Seven Storey Mountain
a groundbreaking musical project by Nate Wooley, unites legends like Paul Lytton (Evan Parker’s longtime collaborator) and David Grubbs (Gastr Del Sol, Bastro) in an ecstatic sonic journey. Inspired by Thomas Merton’s spiritual exploration, the piece transcends religion, channeling the raw energy of free jazz and modern noise. Premiered at NYC’s Festival of New Trumpet Music, it blends improvisation, ambient textures, and bold experimentation—a testament to Wooley’s visionary artistry.