Continuing their dedicated initiative to bringing seminal, groundbreaking efforts of David Grubbs and Jim O'Rourke back into circulation, Drag City returns with a much needed and long-overdue double LP reissue of Gastr del Sol’s landmark, 1996 full-length ‘Upgrade & Afterlife’. An understated marvel of musical mastery, featuring brilliant contributions by Kevin Drumm, Sue Wolf, Günter Müller, Mats Gustafsson, Tony Conrad, John McEntire, and others, it’s quite possibly the greatest Chicago post-rock record ever laid to date, and for many Gastr Del Sol’s crowning achievement, plumbing the depths of experimentalism and left-field song craft that remain entirely singular 29 years after it first appeared.

Despite existing in the relative margins of American music at the time, the movement of post-rock that fermented in Chicago during the 1990s remains among the most singular, radical, and influential contexts to have appeared during the last quarter of the 20th Century. Impossible to concisely define due to its sonic diversity and vast breadth of touchstones - prog, punk / post-punk, jazz, free improvisation, minimalism, folk, kosmische, experimental music, etc. - nearly every band, despite often sharing members, that appeared within this scene - Tortoise, Sea and Cake, Brokeback, Town And Country, Pullman, The For Carnation, Storm & Stress, and numerous others - forged a distinct sound that had almost no historical precedent and bore little resemblance to any peer. Among the most important and groundbreaking of these groups was Gastr Del Sol, the famed duo of David Grubbs and Jim O'Rourke. Over the band’s brief run, they set the pace for the pack, producing a slim discography of masterstrokes that remains among the most celebrated of the era. Over the last year or so, Drag City has dedicated themselves to bringing Gastr’s seminal contribution back into circulation, first with the monumental ‘We Have Dozens of Titles’ X3 LP Box, then with beautiful vinyl reissues of 1998’s ‘Camoufleur’. Now the initiative continues with a much-needed reissue of their astounding 1996 outing, ‘Upgrade & Afterlife’, among the most forward thinking and experiential of their recorded efforts. It’s arguably the legendary duo’s most ambitious, accomplished, and representative full length, incorporating nearly every aspect of the band’s practice within a single, seamless whole.

Gastr Del Sol was founded in 1991 in Chicago by David Grubbs, evolving out of the last incarnation of his band Bastro, with Bundy K. Brown and John McEntire. Following the release of the project’s first full-length, “The Serpentine Similar”, Brown and McEntire left to commit the majority of their energies to Tortoise, alongside Doug McCombs and John Herndon, within which they had already been concurrently working, opening the door for the band’s seminal line-up as the duo of Grubbs and Jim O’Rourke, joined by a rotating cast of collaborators. Over the duo’s relatively short run between roughly 1994 and 1998, Grubbs and O’Rourke pursued some of the most unique and radically forward-thinking expressions of pop-adjacent experimentalism, beginning with 1994’s “Mirror Repair” and “Crookt, Crackt, Or Fly”.

Of all the projects to emerge from Chicago’s near indefinable movement of post-rock, Gastr arguably most well represented the movement’s spirit, drawing on a near countless number of musical touchstones far beyond the expected - weaving strings of post-modern hybrids - and often forging ties with important figures, across numerous musical contexts, particularly notable in the cases of Grubbs and O’Rourke’s close connections with artists like Tony Conrad and John Fahey during this period. Endlessly restless, pushing, and evolving, from the open, angular, intricate, and spacious song-craft of ‘Mirror Repair’ and ‘Crookt, Crackt, Or Fly’ - aspects of which they would incorporate again across 1998’s ‘Camoufleur’ - Grubbs and O’Rourke dove into explicitly avant-garde territory with 1995’s ‘The Harp Factory On Lake Street’, issued by Table of the Elements, a sprawling, spacious work marked by deep moments of abstraction. Viewed with the gift of hindsight, it was this gesture that laid the most discernible tracks into their astoundingly ambitious double LP, ‘Upgrade & Afterlife’, originally released in 1996.

Comprising seven compositions and covering a vast amount of territory over the album’s two sides, the droning tones and relentless guitar explosions - delivered by Kevin Drumm - of ‘Our Exquisite Replica Of "Eternity"’ set the stage for the wondrous journey that is ‘Upgrade & Afterlife’, before quickly devolving into angular guitar work, complex structures and timing, and left-field, vocal sound craft for which the duo is most famed, through the track ‘Rebecca Sylvester’. Incorporating staggering piano lines and layers of timbral textures rendered by Gene Coleman on Bass Clarinet and Mats Gustafsson on Flageolet, with a heavy dose of electronic processing, ‘The Sea Incertian’ dives into a tense realm of post-minimalism that further unveils Gastr’s rigorous compositional gifts in ways that outsteps a great deal of experiential music of the contemporaneous moment. ‘Hello Spiral’ then picks up the pace with a hypnotic, kosmische infused, driving post-rock, featuring inspired work by both Günter Müller and John McEntire on drums and percussion. Moving through the constrained piano lines and vocals of ‘Relay’ and the song miniaturism of ‘Crappie Tactics’ - both of which are brilliant, singular, and engrossing - ‘Upgrade & Afterlife’ enters its final, glorious high with an inspired rendering of John Fahey’s 1975 solo guitar work, ‘Dry Bones in the Valley (I Saw The Light Come Shining 'round And 'round)’, backed by none other than Tony Conrad, delivering dense violin drones across its second half.

From sparse instrumentalism, droning textures, electronic interventions, delicate song-craft, and raucous noise, at every turn Grubbs and O’Rourke weave a careful balance of sonority, simultaneously resting at the outer reaches of pop and experimental music. Entirely singular. There’s been nothing that quite sounds like this album before or since. It’s nothing short of a masterpiece and unquestionably one of the most important records of the 1990s.