***In the Merry Month of May is the final studio recording of the late, great Tony Conrad, and the first duo release with Jennifer Walshe, one of Conrad’s most important collaborators in the final decade of his life. Befitting these two absurdly gifted hell-raisers, this is a wild, improvisatory flaying of song, with Walshe’s clarion voice at the heart of the enterprise. The sheer sonic force of opener “In the Merry Month of May” recalls the ecstatic charge of Conrad’s Slapping Pythagoras. Ramshackle, go-for-broke performances provide gist for your next twelve months of earworms. (Walshe’s vocalisms and mantras born of mundani- ties will dog you; “Day of the Fair” gives “99 Bottles of Beer” a run for its money.) You want comparisons? Why? Conrad’s and Walshe’s prior work are about the only relevant reference points, and even then In the Merry Month of May is a one-of-a-kind concoction whipped up by two fearless and often peerless souls. It’s a joy to hear the two of them, with such manifest mutual regard and commitment to busting a gut.
LP $27.50
05/24/2024
***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-generating poem suggesting AI, one of the themes in St. Werner’s recent work. This became the side-length title track, a winding corridor of electronic fanfares and spontaneous musical miniatures urging Grubbs’s slow and steady recitation to grow wings and graduate into song. Who knows where this idiosyncratic mise-en-scène—day-glo, extrovert electronics and task-oriented human—came from? Reference points, distant ones, might include Robert Ashley and Paul De Marinis’s “In Sara, Mencken, Christ and Beethoven...” and the sound poetry of Anton Bruhin. Flip the record and you have “Soixante Ooze,” a live-in-the-studio duo for guitar and computer more recognizably St. Wernerian and Grubbs-like that reconfigures elements of the title track before finally morphing into needle-pinning monoliths of sound.
LP $21.75
05/20/2022
***Concordance is Susan Howe’s and David Grubbs’s fifth album in the unexpected and richly satisfying collaboration that began with Thiefth and includes Souls of the Labadie Tract, Frolic Architecture, and WOODSLIPPERCOUNTERCLATTER. Where these works feature the fragmentation and multiplication of Howe’s recorded voice—in a style akin to her celebrated text collages—with Concordance they’ve pared down their materials to voice and piano, aspiring to the hushed intensity of their live performances. After fifteen years of working together, the subtleties of inflection and interaction that previously resulted from Howe’s nuanced delivery and Grubbs’s composition using recorded materials now arrives as unadorned duo performance.
LP $24.25
09/24/2021
***Instant Opaque Evening is an epic offering from The Underflow, the new trio of Mats Gustafsson, David Grubbs, and Rob Mazurek. It makes vast strides on the heels of their self-titled 2019 debut (Corbett vs. Dempsey / Underflow Records) with nearly 90 minutes of intensely focused live performances from January 2020 shows in France, Belgium, Italy, and Poland. That tour was a revelation for all three members, experienced as they are, with this still-new group’s freedom to walk onstage each night determined to surprise one another, moving from long instrumental improvisations into and out of songs, and covering a terrific amount of ground at each of these concerts. Instant Opaque Evening conveys this broad sweep, from the full-tilt electronics of “Self-Portrait as Interference Pattern” and the climax of the 17-minute “Instant Opaque Evening” to the inspired, alternate universe chamber music of “Planks” and “A Thin Eternity” and the group’s spontaneous arrangements of three previously recorded songs by Grubbs, “Gethsemani Night,” “An Optimist Declines,” and “Cooler Side of the Pillow.” The short version of the long tale of intersecting paths bringing together these three musicians begins in Chicago in the 1990s, with all three active participants in numerous convergences among jazz, free improvisation, experimental rock, and more. Both Gustafsson and Mazurek appear as guests on Gastr del Sol albums (Upgrade & Afterlife and Camoufleur respectively; that’s Rob’s cornet taking “The Seasons Reverse” to new heights), and shortly thereafter Grubbs and Gustafsson recorded two duo albums, including the deep minimalism of Apertura,...
2XLP $30.50
01/29/2021
***Longtime friends and now the most simpatico of collaborators, Comet Meta finds David Grubbs and Taku Unami fully in third-mind territory as they start the conversation anew after their touted 2018 debut, Failed Celestial Creatures (Empty Editions). Comet Meta grew out of concerts in Seoul, Hong Kong, and Tokyo, with ground broken for this recording on a plane 35,000 feet above the East China Sea and in a tiny Risograph studio in Tokyo where they had to be extremely quiet. Those familiar with Grubbs’s and Unami’s extensive discographies know them as folks who like to think and to make on their feet and on the run, with situation and surroundings profoundly generative. The sound world of Comet Meta ranges from pindrop twin-guitar focus (“Comet Meta” and “Nothing Left to Hear but the Night”) and Grubbs’s piano maneuvering in Unami’s electroacoustic forcefields (“Mirror Auction at Echo Decor” and the horror homage “Walking Corpse in an Old House”) to unclassifiable throbs, ceiling fans, and the distant exultation of the crowd at the New York City marathon. You would be forgiven for thinking on occasion of gossamer Gastr-isms. Comet Meta casts a hell of a previously unpronounced spell.
LP $20.50
09/11/2020
***Konata Kanata is the Tokyo-based trio HONTATEDORI's second release, following their self-titled debut LP from 2013 on the Japanese Compare Notes label. TAKU UNAMI, MOE KAMURA and TETUZI AKIYAMA are better known as solo performers and in their numerous collaborations than they are in this unique, lovely trio—at least until now. Hontatedori places Kamura’s wonderfully delicate voice amidst the mercurial two-guitar landscape of Unami and Akiyama in crystalline settings of aphoristic song. The group describes their pieces as originating in monophonic compositions by Unami that gesture eccentrically toward medieval plainchant: “Originally their music sounded like covert and whispering folk music, however, they’ve come to the sound of quiet funkiness and cold psychedelia.” Some listeners might liken them to a dialed-back, considerably more reserved version of various Dagmar Krause-led groups such as Slapp Happy and the Art Bears given their erasure of separation between art and pop song. The eighteen exquisite minutes of “Konata Kanata” (“Here There,” in a slightly antiquated Japanese word choice) hearken back to the golden age of unclassifiable post-punk 12” EPs, in which at a certain point all that you might know of a particular group consists of rigorously vetted representative pieces (see “A Taste of DNA,” etc.), but also to miniatures—tantalizing scraps of song—that are one of the legacies of musical modernism.
12" $17.75
07/20/2018
***Lacrau is the first U.S. release of music featuring the legendary Portuguese guitarist’s guitarist MANUEL MOTA. Mota’s mysterious, uncompromising, resolutely personal approach to the instrument has most often been captured on solo recordings—and typically of an immersive length, such as Rck, a 5-CD release from 2013. Lacrau captures the ambience of a warm Sunday afternoon in late fall in Lisbon when longtime friends Mota and DAVID GRUBBS sat down for this waking dream of a first duo performance. The session unfolds with a real-time, documentary feel in which athematic, non-repeating musical gestures are rendered with an extreme sensitivity to microscopic soundworlds brought about by fingertips, strings, and tube amplifiers. These explorations are as apt to find emotional weight in the solitary note in all its fret-buzzing glory as they are in unexpected turns of phrase briefly referencing blues and jazz.
LP $20.50
06/22/2018
***If “mission creep” refers to a long-haul fatigue cited with increasingly regularity in the present political moment, DAVID GRUBBS imagines “creep mission” to be a talismanic utterance in the effort to turn this ship around. Creep Mission is an album of instrumental compositions with Grubbs’s effortlessly recombinant electric guitar at its core, and its m.o. is to go both deep and wide. The album goes deep in the sense that the guitar becomes the relentless, meditative focus of these songs without words, and it goes wide in that these pieces utilize a discontinuous set of arrangements that make the most out of an extraordinary group of musicians convened for the mission at hand. Drummer and most simpatico sparring partner ELi KESZLER picks up where his brilliant contributions to Grubbs’s 2016 Prismrose left off; trumpeter NATE WOOLEY defies you to identify his range of sounds as coming from a single player; and JAN ST. WERNER (MOUSE ON MARS, LITHOPS) can hardly contain his joy in transforming the proceedings into electro-prismatic splinters. For his part, Grubbs’s guitar playing has never before so confidently mangled commonsensical distinctions between composed and improvised music. (STREET DATE - 9/22/2017)
LP $19.75
09/22/2017
CD $13.75
09/22/2017
***Prismrose is a nearly wordless collection of six pieces for electric guitar, all given real time to breathe, grow unpredictably, mutate. It’s an album—an of-a-piece, start-to-finish listen—that documents what an electric guitar sounds like in DAVID GRUBBS hands now that we’ve stumbled into the year 2016. Prismrose comes to us—comes at us—from a stellar run of expansive, hands-thinking hands-puzzling guitar music that began with the stylistic pivot of Grubbs’s solo records An Optimist Notes the Dusk and The Plain Where the Palace Stood and the two recent albums from the trio BELFI / GRUBBS / PILLA. Prismrose begins with “How to Hear What’s Less than Meets the Ear,” an eleven-minute duo written for Tony Conrad’s 75th birthday bash with Grubbs on chiming, tolling Telecaster and wunderkind percussionist and composer ELI KEZLER on backwards-somersaulting drums. Keszler makes his presence known on three of the album’s tracks. The years reel with an errand into the 14th century for “Cheery Eh,” an arrangement of Guillaume de Machaut, and a brief stop in the 19th century with a setting of Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”—there are your words, unimpeachable ones—by RICK MOODY, originally recorded by the Wingdale Community Singers. Side two is unambiguously set in the present moment, and this suite of three instrumentals sails off the edge of the world with the breezy, eminently whistleable anthem “The Bonsai Waterfall.” (STREET DATE - 5/13/2016)
LP $19.75
05/13/2016
CD $13.75
05/13/2016
***WOODSLIPPERCOUNTERCLATTER is the fourth collaboration in a decade from poet SUSAN HOWE and musician DAVID GRUBBS. Veering away from the stuttering, profoundly fragmented seance of Frolic Architecture (2011), Howe and Grubbs present a sound-work that germinates from new Susan Howe text collages and prose poems (referencing Tom Tit Tot, Childe Roland, Paul Thek, W.B.Yeats, and so on), a number of which were included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial and have more recently been collected in Tom Tit Tot, a MoMA publication featuring artwork by R.H. Quaytman. In WOODSLIPPERCOUNTERCLATTER, Howe’s texts are blended with the resonant sounds of Grubbs’s composition for piano and field recordings made in the near silence of off-hours in Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
LP $21.50
08/28/2015
CD $13.75
08/28/2015
***NOW AVAILABLE ON CD!!! Originally released on vinyl in 2010, Onrushing Cloud is the first recording by the trio of ANDREA BELFI (drums, percussion, electronics), DAVID GRUBBS (electric guitar, piano, voice), and STEFANO PILIA (electric guitar). Prior to meeting, all three had released recordings on the excellent Swedish label Häpna, and were already fans of one another’s work. In the spring of 2009, Belfi and Pilia were invited by the Harlem Studio Fellowship for a residence in New York, and the three took this opportunity to get down to the brass tacks of forming a power trio. Onrushing Cloud is characterized by the eccentric, fleeting symmetries of Grubbs’s and Pilia’s guitar playing simultaneously mediated, punctuated, and over and underscored by Belfi’s hybrid assemblage and deeply personal vocabulary of electronics and percussion. Although ultimately divided into five songs, this is clearly a single start-to-finish skein. “Hermitage” records the preliminary gestures of these musicians’ first encounter, and the album steadily builds towards the appearance of Grubbs’s vocals on “Onrushing Cloud,” a tale of being stranded atop a mountain and facing a rapidly approaching storm. (STREET DATE - 5/20/2014)
LP $15.00
10/19/2010
CD $9.85
05/20/2014
***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, which quickly sold out. If Onrushing Cloud represents a single stylistic arc in which these three first found commonality and shared musical means, Dust & Mirrors sees the trio confidently taking stabs in a number of opposed directions. It dramatically widens the terrain in the group operates. What changed? The difference comes with four years of semi-regular live shows, which have turned Belfi / Grubbs / Pilia from a studio-bound hibernation unit to an extroverted rock (or what’s left of it, or what’s beyond it) trio. Between albums, the three musicians worked together on David Grubbs’s 2013 album The Plain Where the Palace Stood, and took part in Grubbs’s and visual artist Angela Bulloch’s performance piece The Wired Salutation, which spins out variations on “Charm Offensive”—the fourteen-minute opening gambit on Dust & Mirrors. (The Wired Salutation features unnerving 3-D avatars of Belfi / Grubbs / Pilia and Bulloch, has been presented at the theater at the Pompidou Center and Berlin’s Tanz im August festival, and will hopefully be coming to a well-equipped theater near you before you know it.). From the epic, multi-part sprawl of “Charm Offensive” to Stefano Pilia’s distantly Robbie Basho-esque “The Distance, Cut,” and from the mechanized riffing of “The Headlock” to the wild improvisation “Ambassador Extraordinaire,” Dust & Mirrors sees this group...
LP $19.75
02/18/2014
CD $13.75
02/18/2014
***Strange to say, but Borough of Broken Umbrellas is DAVID GRUBBS’ first record of solo guitar improvisations. From his time in GASTR DEL SOL forward, Grubbs has frequently cast himself in the role of the composer/songwriter working with improvisers—witness his collaborations with Jim O’Rourke, Mats Gustafsson, Noël Akchoté, Loren Connors, Ken Vandermark, and many others. Borough of Broken Umbrellas emerges from a period in which Grubbs has been particularly focused on writing music. 2013 saw the release of The Plain Where the Palace Stood (Drag City), his first solo album in five years, as well as the completion of a forthcoming second album by the trio Belfi / Grubbs / Pilia and a new full-length collaboration with Susan Howe. Borough of Broken Umbrellas is a profoundly unhurried probing (sometimes worrying, like a tongue and a tooth) of a handful of gorgeously spare themes. The last time that David sat down and slowly unspooled a scroll of ideas and gestures in this fashion was his first solo record—a record of solos—the 1997 Banana Cabbage, Potato Lettuce, Onion Orange (Table of the Elements). Where Banana Cabbage was comprised of three solos on three instruments (piano, acoustic guitar, electric guitar), Borough of Broken Umbrellas divides its sides between two long (c. 12’) tracks for electric guitar and nylon-string guitar. Comparisons are unnecessary and perhaps misleading. On the surface, the Guitar Roberts (Loren Connors’ former nom-de-guitar) albums on St. Joan? Tetuzi Akiyama in his more lyrical mode? Jozef van Wissem’s mirror-image melodies for lute?...
10" $19.75
12/17/2013
***Night, Sleep, Death is the third full-length album by songwriting juggernaut THE WINGDALE COMMUNITY SINGERS. It finds the core trio of HANNAH MARCUS, RICK MOODY, and DAVID GRUBBS augmented by a cast of effortlessly sympatico guests including JOLIE HOLLAND, TANYA DONELLY, and ONEIDA’s KID MILLIONS. The Wingdale Community Singers first convened in 2003 to take a whack at crafting a repertoire of unkillable songs. The group brings together the criminally underrated songwriter and vocalist Hannah Marcus (last heard solo on the 2003 album Desert Farmers, made in collaboration with members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor), writer Rick Moody (best known for his novels The Four Fingers of Death, Purple America, and The Ice Storm, as well as the recent non-fiction collection On Celestial Music), and the guitarist and Gastr del Sol and Red Krayola alum David Grubbs. Night, Sleep, Death adds another Brooklyn-based lyricist to the group, Walt Whitman, whose poetry forms the basis of a three-song Whitman sampler at the center of the album, including the title song (approximately), “Night, Sleep, Death, and the Stars.” Indeed, bringing Whitman’s smoldering phrases into play (“I ate with you and slept with you, your body has become not yours only nor left my body mine only”) seems to have altered the basic tenor of the Wingdales’ lyrics, making their overtures and gambits all the more direct. No Export to Europe. (STREET DATE - 2/19/2013)
LP $19.50
02/19/2013
***Frolic Architecture is the third collaboration from poet SUSAN HOWE and musician DAVID GRUBBS. It follows Souls of the Labadie Tract (2007) and Thiefth (2005), both of which appeared in the Records of the Year lists in The Wire. Writing in Artforum, Bennett Simpson described Souls of the Labadie Tract as “a confrontation with history, community, language, and sound that is truly harrowing.” Where the previous works began with prose introductions that contextualized the poems’ embeddedness in history, Frolic Architecture drops the listener into a soundworld that germinates wildly from this most multiple and heterogeneous of Howe’s celebrated collage poems. Looking at one of Frolic Architecture’s poems on the album’s cover, it’s apparent why Howe initially thought the poem to be unperformable. For long stretches, it is impossible to separate Howe’s real-time performance of her fragment-strewn text from Grubbs’s further deformations, scatterings, and layerings. These aberrant vocalizations are placed in a landscape in which individual pitches pulse autonomously within thick chords; gravel and cicadas duet. There is no foreground, no background. Frolic Architecture is the most radical and abstract of Grubbs’s and Howe’s work together. Limited edition of 500 copies. (STREET DATE - 8/23/2011)
CD $13.75
08/23/2011
***A companion piece to The Thicket album, and a musical adaptation of STEPHEN CRANE's short story The Blue Hotel from the adventurous and multi-talented mind of guitar plucker DAVID GRUBBS. A seventeen-minute morität (the label's word, not ours) scored for three voices: The Narrator (STPEHEN PRINA), The Swede (GRUBBS), and The Cowboy (SASHA ANDRES). Features music performed by Grubbs, cellist DIDIER PETIT, trombonists YVES ROBERT & THIERRY MADIOT, and saxman QUENTIN ROLLET. Included on this disc is a reworking of Grubbs' solo piece "Onion Orange" featuring Rollet, NOEL AKCHOTE, JOHN McENTIRE, and DAN BROWN.
CD $11.25
12/19/2000