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David Grubbs (born September 21, 1967) is an American composer, guitarist, pianist, and vocalist. He was a founding member of Squirrel Bait, Bastro, and Gastr del Sol. He has also played in Codeine, The Red Krayola, Bitch Magnet and The Wingdale Community Singers.
Grubbs' first band was a brief-lived punk/new wave group called The Happy Cadavers that released the four-song 7" record With Illustrations in 1982. Grubbs then formed a hardcore punk band called Squirrelbait Youth that later evolved into the influential Louisville, Kentucky group Squirrel Bait, releasing a 12" EP and an album on Homestead Records. Grubbs's next group was the post-punk power trio Bastro, which released an EP and two albums on Homestead. [1] In 1991 Bastro morphed into the more avant-garde Gastr del Sol. [1] This project soon became essentially a partnership between Grubbs and Jim O'Rourke after the band's first album. [1] The albums released by the duo include Crookt, Crackt, or Fly , Upgrade & Afterlife , and Camoufleur . In this period, Grubbs also contributed to other projects, including guitar for two tracks on Codeine's 1994 album The White Birch [2] and guitar, piano, and harmonium on recordings by Palace Music, Will Oldham, Royal Trux, Dirty Three, Matmos, Richard Buckner, Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, Arnold Dreyblatt, and many others.
Since the breakup of Gastr del Sol in 1997, Grubbs has released numerous solo and collaborative records, mostly on the Drag City label, for which he co-directed the Dexter's Cigar sub-label. [3] In 2000, his album The Spectrum Between was named "Album of the Year" in the Sunday Times .
His 2017 album Creep Mission was described by The Quietus as "a typically playful and intellectually ambitious set – and is as good an entry into the world of Grubbs as any." [4]
In 2018, Grubbs released Failed Celestial Creatures, a collaboration with Japanese guitarist and electronic musician Taku Unami. According to Pitchfork, the album "feels of a piece with Grubbs’ last two records under his own name, Creep Mission and Prismrose, both nominal solo releases that each features a handful of guests. On all three albums, Grubbs uses the presence of collaborators to play with drones, repetition, and improvisatory interplay, taking his style to a more intuitive place." [5]
He operates his own label, Blue Chopsticks, which has released new and archival recordings from Luc Ferrari, Derek Bailey and Noël Akchoté, Workshop, Van Oehlen, and Mats Gustafsson. Grubbs is also known for his collaborations with writers Susan Howe, Rick Moody, and Kenneth Goldsmith, and with visual artists including Anthony McCall, Angela Bulloch, Stephen Prina, and Cosima von Bonin. He has composed the soundtracks for Angela Bulloch's installations Z Point , Horizontal Technicolour , and Hybrid Song Box.4 , and his music appears in two installations by Doug Aitken. Grubbs's sound installation "Between a Raven and a Writing Desk" was included in the 1999 group exhibition Elysian Fields at the Centre Pompidou.
Grubbs's soundtrack work includes music with Matmos for Thierry Jousse's feature film Invisible (Les Invisibles). Grubbs has also contributed music to the Red Krayola's soundtrack to Norman and Bruce Yonemoto's film Japan in Paris in LA and to three films by Augusto Contento ( Parallax Sounds , Strade Trasparenti , and Onibus ), to Braden King and Laura Moya's film Dutch Harbor: Where the Sea Breaks its Back , and to John Boskovich's film North . Music by Gastr del Sol appears in the PBS television series The United States of Poetry, Hal Hartley's film The Book of Life , and Doug Aitken's film The Diamond Sea. Grubbs composed the score for Karl Bruckmaier's radio adaptation of Peter Weiss's Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (Hessischer Rundfunk Hörbuch des Jahres 2007) and contributed music to Bruckmaier's adaptation of Alexander Kluge's Chronik der Gefühle (Deutscher Hörbuchpreis 2010, "Best Fiction").
From 1997 to 1999, Grubbs was a part-time instructor in the Liberal Arts and Sound departments at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is currently Professor of Music in the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College, CUNY. [6] He teaches in Brooklyn College's MFA program in Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA) and Brooklyn College's MFA program in Creative Writing, and is a member of the faculty of the Brooklyn College Center for Computer Music (BC-CCM).
He is one of five musicians (with Steve Albini, Ken Vandermark, Damon Locks, and Ian Williams) profiled in Augusto Contento's 2012 documentary film Parallax Sounds .
Grubbs received a B.A. degree from Georgetown University, an A.M. degree from the University of Chicago in 1991, and a Ph.D. degree in English, also from Chicago, in 2005. [7] [8]
Grubbs is Distinguished Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, specialised in sound art and experimental music, and teaching in performance arts, interactive art and creative writing. [8] His criticism has appeared in Texte zur Kunst , Chicago Review , TDR, Conjunctions, Bookforum, and Purple, and from 1999-2007 he regularly contributed music criticism to the Munich newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung . Grubbs received a 2005–2006 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award.
Grubbs is the author of four books for Duke University Press: Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording (2014), Now that the audience is assembled (2018), The Voice in the Headphones (2020), and Good night the pleasure was ours (2022). Now that the audience is assembled was described by The Washington Post as "a new book-length poem [that] reminds us that listening can feel stranger than dreaming." [9] Records Ruin the Landscape has appeared in French, Italian, and Japanese translations. Grubbs is also the co-author of the collaborative artists’ books Simultaneous Soloists (with Anthony McCall, Pioneer Works Press, 2019) and Projectile (with Reto Geiser and John Sparagana, Drag City, 2021).
Grubbs lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Cathy Bowman, and their son Emmett Bowman-Grubbs.
Jim O'Rourke is an American musician, composer and record producer. He has released albums across varied genres, including singer-songwriter music, post-rock, ambient, noise music, and tape experiments. He was associated with the Chicago experimental and improv scene when he relocated to New York City in 2000. O'Rourke is best known for his numerous solo and collaborative music projects, many of which are entirely instrumental, and for his tenure as a member of Sonic Youth from 1999 to 2005.
Tortoise is an American post-rock band formed in Chicago, Illinois in 1990. The band incorporates krautrock, dub, minimal music, electronica and jazz into their music, a combination sometimes termed "post-rock". Tortoise have been consistently credited for the rise of the post-rock movement in the 1990s.
Codeine is an American indie rock band formed in 1989 in New York City. They released two full-length albums—Frigid Stars LP in 1990 and The White Birch in 1994. The band broke up in 1994 shortly after the release of The White Birch, but reunited to play a handful of shows in 2012. The band has reunited again for a series of shows in New York and Los Angeles in 2023.
John McEntire is an American recording engineer, producer, drummer and multi-instrumentalist, based in Chicago, Illinois. He is a member of both Tortoise and the Sea and Cake.
Kevin Drumm is an experimental musician based in Chicago, United States.
Gastr del Sol was an American, Chicago-based band, consisting for most of their career, of David Grubbs and Jim O'Rourke. Between 1993 and 1998 they released seven albums ranging in genre from post-rock to musique concrète.
Upgrade & Afterlife is the fourth studio album by American indie rock band Gastr del Sol, released on June 17, 1996 by Drag City.
Camoufleur is the fifth and final studio album by American indie rock band Gastr del Sol, released on February 23, 1998 on Drag City.
Crookt, Crackt, or Fly is the second studio album by American indie rock band Gastr del Sol, released on April 18, 1994 by Drag City. The album was written and performed by David Grubbs and Jim O'Rourke, with John McEntire (percussion), Steve Butters (percussion) and Gene Coleman also contributing. It was recorded by Brian Paulson in October 1993 at Kingsize in Chicago.
The Serpentine Similar is the debut studio album by American indie rock band Gastr del Sol, released on June 1, 1993 by TeenBeat Records. The album was re-released by Drag City on June 16, 1997.
Squirrel Bait was an American punk rock band from Louisville, Kentucky active from 1983 to 1987. Squirrel Bait's dense, moody, melodic hardcore sound, featuring pronounced tempo shifts, foreshadowed the grunge sound of the late 1980s as well as math rock. Squirrel Bait, along with Hüsker Dü, are often noted as precursors to the emocore sound that arose from the D.C. hardcore punk scene with bands like Rites of Spring, Beefeater and Fugazi.
Squirrel Bait signaled the second coming of American punk – bands of little brothers and sisters who got to grow up on Black Flag and Hüsker Dü without a preparatory course in Supertramp. ... Like a hundred other little Düs across the country, Squirrel Bait managed to make a couple of records before spintering off to form five more bands. Unlike most of that punk rock loam, the members of Squirrel Bait chewed up their legacy and shat out something curious and consequential.
Andrea Belfi is an Italian electro-acoustic musician and composer. He began playing drums at the age of 14. From 1995 to 1998 he was involved in numerous punk bands. He studied art in Milan, before becoming involved in experimental music in 2000. He’s been member of electronic outfit Medves, the duo Christa Pfangen with Mattia Coletti, the trio Rosolina Mar.
Bastro was an American post-hardcore band which was active in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The band's main line-up consisted of David Grubbs on guitar, Clark Johnson on bass guitar, and John McEntire on drums. The band also experimented with use of piano, organ and musique concrète compositions, foreshadowing McEntire's and Grubbs' subsequent musical projects.
James Elliott is an American electronic musician, usually releasing solo material under the alias Ateleia. The name comes from Ateleia, a legume or from ancient Greek meaning tax-free. The music is electronic psychedelic minimalism.
Bundy Kenneth Brown, also known as Ken Brown or Bundy K. Brown, is an American musician and recording engineer. He is best known for being a founding member of Tortoise and for his production, engineering and remixes in the Chicago post rock scene.
Skag Heaven is the only full length Studio Album by the American punk rock band Squirrel Bait, released in 1987 through Homestead Records. Squirrel Bait disbanded after the album's release and the band's members went on to form Slint, Bastro and a number of other influential indie and post-rock bands.
Mirror Repair is a 1994 EP by Gastr del Sol released on Drag City. The album was written and performed by David Grubbs and Jim O'Rourke.
Apertura is an album by Mats Gustafsson and David Grubbs, released on July 6, 1999, through Blue Chopsticks.
Frank Schültge is a German author, musician, and producer working under the pseudonym F. S. Blumm.
Sing the Troubled Beast/Diablo Guapo is a 2005 compilation of the two sole full-length studio albums originally released by Louisville post-hardcore band Bastro - Diablo Guapo (1989) and Sing the Troubled Beast (1990). Released via Drag City, the compilation includes all of the tracks from both of these albums in their original order, except one.
