★Blue Chopsticks
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…
Dust & Mirrors
Dust & Mirrors’ is the second full-length album by the trio of Andrea Belfi (drums, percussion, electronics), David Grubbs (electric guitar, piano, voice), and Stefano Pilia (electric guitar). It follows 2010’s ‘Onrushing Cloud’ LP and finds the trio confidently taking stabs in a number of opposed directions. It dramatically widens the terrain in which the group operates. Between albums, the three musicians worked together on David Grubbs’s 2013 album ‘The Plain Where The Palace Stood’, and took…
Prehistory
Some of you may remember Circle X's corrosive, caterwauling, and unutterably fabulous self-titled EP, which was originally released in 1979 and reissued a little over a decade ago by Jim O'Rourke's and David Grubbs' Dexter's Cigar label. Now the story picks up again with the long-overdue first CD release of Prehistory, Circle X's first full-length album. Prehistory was recorded in 1981 and released in 1983 by Index Records, making them, strangely enough, labelmates with Wall of Voodoo. Circle X …