Having already dropped beautiful new editions of 'Camoufleur' and 'Upgrade & Afterlife', 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 vinyl reissue of Gastr del Sol’s 1994 full-length ‘Crookt, Crackt, or Fly’. Gastr’s second outing and the first to encounter the band slimmed down to the primary vehicle for Grubbs and O'Rourke’s visionary creative combo, more than 30 years ago it set the pace for the entire emerging movement of post-rock with its bristling tonal combinations and singular approach to structure. Even today, this landmark gesture by one of the greatest bands that ever was, feels radically ahead of its time.

Despite existing in the relative margins of American music at the time, the movement of post-rock that fermented in Chicago during the 1990s stands among the most singular, groundbreaking, 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 radical 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 came the monumental ‘We Have Dozens of Titles’ X3 LP Box, then came beautiful vinyl reissues of 1998’s ‘Camoufleur’ and their astounding 1996 outing ‘Upgrade & Afterlife’. Needless to say, such an initiative wouldn’t be complete without offering equal attention to their groundbreaking 1994 full-length ‘Crookt, Crackt, or Fly’, which has remained out of print on vinyl for years.

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 radically unique and forward-thinking expressions of pop-adjacent experimentalism, beginning with 1994’s “Mirror Repair” and “Crookt, Crackt, Or Fly”.

Amongst the many projects that collectively made up Chicago’s wildly diverse movement of post-rock, Gastr arguably most well represented the movement’s spirit, drawing on a near countless number of musical touchstones - weaving post-modern hybrids - working collaboratively beyond the band’s official membership, and 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. While Gastr’s debut, 1993’s ‘The Serpentine Similar’ laid the groundwork for the band’s aesthetic, that album was effectively an extension of Brown, Grubbs, and McEntire’s work together in Bastro. McEntire would continue to contribute and play with the band until its dissolution toward the end of the decade, but his and Brown’s departure as official members, alongside the roughly corresponding arrival of O’Rourke, places ‘Crookt, Crackt, Or Fly’ as the clearest and most concise emergence of the band’s singular sound; intertwining explicit avant-gardism with open, angular, intricate, and spacious song-craft.

Comprising eight tracks that push the boundaries of rock, folk, and modern composition, ‘Crookt, Crackt, Or Fly’ largely centres around the virtuosic syncopations and the brilliant harmonic / dissonant interplay of Grubbs and O’Rourke’s acoustic guitars - as though the innovations of guitarists like Derek Bailey and John Fahey had given birth to mutant, duelling twins - with light and occasional augmentation by McEntire and Steve Butters on percussion and Gene Coleman on bass clarinet. As the album unfolds the pair unfurl an entirely head-fucked reimagining of American folk music, bred in the ashes of punk and infused with the sophistication of free jazz and avant-garde chamber music. Were it not for the intermittent appearance of vocals and lyrics - loosely binding many of the album’s tracks to the rough resemblance of song - the aesthetic singularity of ‘Crookt, Crackt, Or Fly’ makes it nearly impossible to otherwise categorise.

Ranging from stunning miniatures like ‘Wedding In The Park’ and ‘Parenthetically’, which distill Gastr’s conceptual approach to its most elemental form; instrumental burners like ‘Every Five Miles’ and ‘The C in Cake’ which present a fascinating, (mostly) slowed down (mostly) acoustic cousin to Mark Shippy and Todd Rittmann’s roughly contemporaneous parries within US Maple; the explosive post-hardcore energies of ‘Is that a Rifle when it Rains?’; to the more ambitious, long-form stand-outs ‘Work From Smoke’ and ‘The Wrong Soundings’: sprawling, spacious works, marked by deep moments of abstraction, that shift and evolve over their respective durations, incorporating what is arguably the most ambitious conceptualisation of post-rock ever laid to tape.

Structurally, tonally, and creatively brilliant on nearly every imaginable set of terms - covering a vast amount of ground over its two sides while remaining remarkably cohesive - ‘Crookt, Crackt, Or Fly’, the first full-length to feature the band’s definitive line-up of David Grubbs and Jim O’Rourke, remains rich, challenging, and remarkably ahead of its time more than thirty years after its original release. A landmark in Chicago post-rock and easily among the most important, innovative, and influential records of the 1990s.