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LP
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DC 941LP
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$26.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 2/28/2025
"Don't look up! Whistle from Above is David Grubbs' first Drag City release in over a decade and his first-ever instrumental album for the label. The suspiciously youthful Grubbs is four decades into his career, with former bands including Gastr del Sol, Squirrel Bait, and Bastro, along with a wild ride of collaborators including Bitch Magnet, Richard Buckner, Codeine, Tony Conrad, The Red Krayola, Royal Trux, Dirty Three, Edith Frost, Mats Gustafsson, Susan Howe, Will Oldham, Stefano Pilia, Taku Unami, The Underflow, Ryley Walker, Jan St. Werner, and The Wingdale Community Singers. If all that doesn't imply 'Trying something different,' what ever will? 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. Meanwhile, David was reconnecting with the Gastr del Sol archive, as a new collection of old performances was being prepared from extensive archival material. The duo magic of that storied collaboration (released in 2024 as We Have Dozens of Titles) left David hungry to play in this format again -- as he had recently with Loren Connors, Alan Courtis, Manuel Mota, and Liam Keenan. These duo experiences showed David the path forward to complete this new solo material. Thus he sought out collaborations with folks he's called 'some of the musicians whom I adore most on the planet' -- Rhodri Davies, Andrea Belfi, Nikos Veliotis, Nate Wooley, and Cleek Schrey -- and their stunning contributions flesh out Grubbs' innate, deeply person brand of minimalism. 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. Throughout the album, the listener may recall some places visited over the years, but will find them -- as David and his traveling companions have as well -- changed again, reactivated in a new light."
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CD
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REC AC2-CD
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2001 release. Music for a 2001 installation for the Elysian Fields exhibit at Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. David Grubbs (guitar, electronics) with Noël Akchoté (electric guitar), John McEntire (drums), Charlie O. (organ), and Quentin Rollet (alto saxophone). Recorded and assembled between January 2000 and February 2001 by Nicolas Vernhes at Rare Book Room, Brooklyn, and David Grubbs at Studio 364, Brooklyn. Mastered by Nicolas Vernhes at Rare Book Room. The cover image is Cosima Von Bonin's "The Shakespeare Ravens" (1997), courtesy of Galerie Christian Nagel, Cologne.
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CD
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BLUE 020CD
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"David Grubbs's 26-minute soundtrack to Angela Bulloch's Hybrid Song Box.4 picks up sonically where An Optimist Notes the Dusk left off. Grubbs brings his thick, solid-body electric guitar tone to the most relaxed of tempos, the most spacious of handlings. This instrumental soundtrack is based on a short piece for electric guitar, followed by an interstitial section created with feedback from the last note of the guitar piece. This A/B structure is repeated three times. With each iteration, the guitar composition becomes progressively more scuffed, more degraded. The interstitial section begins at its gentlest and most transparent, and the material gradually becomes stronger and more harmonically distinct over the course of its three iterations. The first composition wanes, the second waxes. Hybrid Song Box.4 is Angela Bulloch's most recent work in a series of 'Pixel Box' sculptural installations. Hybrid Song Box.4 was first shown at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum as part of the exhibition Theanyspacewhatever."
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CD
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DC 373CD
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"'A step into the void' is how David Grubbs describes An Optimist Notes The Dusk, his first solo album since 2004's A Guess At The Riddle. Much the same way that each of Gastr del Sol's albums sought to avoid precedent and to model a world in which nothing should be taken for granted, An Optimist Notes The Dusk steps into the void. Nothing necessitates -- it's all built from the ground up, and at each step of the way it could have been built differently. David Grubbs' previous solo albums have tended to divide cleanly between pop records (The Thicket, The Spectrum Between, Rickets & Scurvy, and A Guess At The Riddle) and more experimental, instrumental records that investigate solo performance, drones, and hypnotic repetition. Grubbs' pop records stand in a series of increasing refinement. Here, the cards have been shuffled (is he dealing with a full deck?). An Optimist Notes The Dusk presents five longish songs and one eleven-minute instrumental floor rumbler, and the album can't be said to fall into either of the previously staked camps. Much like Gastr del Sol's recordings, arrangements take their own sweet, otherworldly time to unfold, and you're likely to discover that the undertow is stronger than you reckoned, and that you wind up a disorienting distance from where you began. That describes the associative flow of individual songs and of the album as a whole. How do you get from the exquisitely unraveling song-skein of 'Gethsemani Night' to the analog-synth sleeping bag of 'The Not-So-Distant?' The band left the building a long time ago. Much continues to be written about the end of the album and its splintering into the MP3dom of individual songs. An Optimist Notes The Dusk is at one and the same time an album and a collection of splinters. There is no contradiction. Do we dare suggest that it feels very 'playlist?' The electric guitar is central to An Optimist Notes The Dusk. In Grubbs' hands, the guitar can be as languid and liquid as Loren Mazzacane Connors' ('Gethsemani Night'), as spikily anthemic as the Pretty Things ('Holy Fool Music'), or as obsessively patterned as your favorite banjo eccentric ('Eyeglasses of Kentucky'). Speaking (singing) of Kentucky, bluegrass-native but Brooklyn-residing Grubbs seems to have lyrically reconstructed the Kentucky of his dreams, with songs about Thomas Merton's hermitage at the Abbey of Gethsemani and Lexington photographer Ralph Meatyard's trick of turning the waiting room of his Eyeglasses of Kentucky store into an exhibition space. Optometrist, optimist note the changing sky. Two sonic secret weapons have been brought in: drummer and percussionist Michael Evans and trumpeter Nate Wooley, both of whom ride musical divides like they've never heard of such divisions. It's all in making the right sound at the right time, what could be easier?"
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SEMI 007CD
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"David Grubbs (Bastro, Gastr Del Sol) has a long-standing history of collaboration and interest in contemporary visual arts. This new mini-album features two compositions commissioned by Angela Bulloch for two of her installation pieces. The two pieces on this CD accompany the works 'Z Point' and 'Horizontal Technicolour,' two major works that make use of -- or, rather, are connected to --Antonioni's Zabriskie Point. 'Z Point' is based on original film material of the famous desert explosion from the final scenes, whereas 'Horizontal Technicolour' uses material filmed by the artist herself at Death Valley, a setting similar to the one used in the final scenes from Antonioni's film. The two pieces by David Grubbs are beautiful and intricate works in which the original Antonioni soundtrack, the translations of the film in other languages, and his own sound palette come together. They show yet another different approach to his diverse musical capacities and are maybe closest in spirit to his Thirty-Minute Raven mini-album on Rectangle. The CD comes with a 12-page booklet with previously unpublished stills from the Death Valley desert taken by Angela Bulloch."
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CD
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DC 266CD
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"David Grubbs has worked simultaneously at records of songs and records of longer, immersive instrumental pieces. A Guess At The Riddle is a record of songs. It feels like an unburdening. Matching experimentation with articulateness, A Guess At The Riddle is to David's other solo records what Gastr del Sol's Camoufleur was to their preceding records. One finds acoustic instruments (David's piano and Nikos Veliotls's cello) brokering peace agreements with electronics (Matmos), one finds full bands going full-bore (Adam Pierce and Thomas Belhom kicking ass behind the drums, David returning to the electric guitar, David's freshest, most lively-sounding production), and one finds David's strongest collection of songs."
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CD
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BLUE 005CD
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"Responding to the invitation of Quentin Rollet and Noel Akchote to make an LP for their Rectangle label, Grubbs penned 'The Coxcomb,' an adaptation in song of Stephen Crane's short story 'The Blue Hotel.' This seventeen-minute moritat is scored for three voices: The Narrator (Stephen Prina, white-hot on the heels of Push Comes to Love); The Swede (Grubbs, wild-eyed and singing through gritted teeth); and The Cowboy (played to perfection by deep-voiced Sasha Andres, singer of the group Heliogabale). Grubbs's engrossing guitar-yarn is gorgeously fleshed out by the saloon band of Didler Petit (cello, voice), Yves Robert (trombone), Thierry Madiot (bass trombone), and Quentin Rollet (alto sax). The original LP and picture-disc LP version of The Coxcomb featured as its B-side 'Aux Noctambules.' In its place is 'Avocado Orange,' recorded during The Spectrum Between sessions."
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CD
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DC 186CD
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"Six months in the making, The Spectrum Between reflects the changes brought on by David's relocation from Chicago, a home of ten years, to Crooklyn. No longer able to easily draw upon the musical associations built up over years spent in the midwest, David progressed slowly with the new material. Eventually, a worldwide pool of collaborators were drawn into the project -- including Noel Akchote, and others from the Rectangle records collective, Swedish reed sensation Mats Gustafsson, and the omni(im)potent John McEntire on batterie."
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CD
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DC 160CD
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"David Grubbs' first pop proper solo LP. There's a proud equilibrium to The Thicket. The arrangements are consistent (and consistently colorful) throughout the record. When you first hear a banjo or a trumpet or a Tony Conrad, you can bet your bottom dollar that you'll hear it again. Thus, the record is purged of exoticisms. The Thicket is many things, and elusive is not among them. It's a straight-40-to-the-head album of pop sonic lucidity."
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LP
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DC 160LP
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