The Mirror and the Scene

My introduction to David Grubbs came via the Gastr Del Sol album Camofleur. The songs 'Seasons Reverse' and ' Blues Subtitled No Sense Of Wonder', blew apart my conception of what a song could be - that is if you decide to call them songs. Both pieces of music seemed wide open, not contained as much as held together enough to be musically brilliant while feeling equally loose. Loose affiliations of chord sequences and melodic and harmonic lines, near plodding, to seem almost accidental, just brought back from the brink of dischord or choas, free and profound and then.. a moment of melodic wonder and release. The crescendo of 'No Sense of Wonder' is nothing short of glorious once you've familiarised yourself with the terrain.




It seemed in my mind at least that, Grubbs and also Jim O'Rourke had taken that John Fahey thing, and slowed down the styles and structures to a near stasis, which then acted as the anchor for something else entirely. As if they'd stretched out the guitar blues of Rev. Gary Davis, through Dave Van Ronk, Leo Kottke, Ry Cooder and some Van Dyke Parks into a thin sheet of american musical history and wrapped it around the mohabi desert against the palette of Georgia O'keefe. The music is dusty, profound and yet pristine. Baudrillard set to music. I'd imagine that Grubbs would probably say that was a load of rubbish, but thats how it sounds to me. 

Grubbs describes his own influences in the following way:

The first groups that I loved were Kiss, the Who, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones. But who wants to live in the past? I started reading Rolling Stone and picking up local fanzines at record stores when I was twelve or so. Rolling Stone -- actually Tom Carson and Greil Marcus, the ones I could sort-of trust -- were then trumpeting the Clash as the embodiment of rock and roll spirit and Public Image and the Gang of Four as dangerous dismantlers of the rock tradition. Who would want to dismantle rock music? Rock music as the enemy? That nearly untenable ambivalence -- wanting to find the contemporary spirit of rock music, the real stuff in the here-and-now, but also wanting to give up on it out of sheer disappointment a la John Lydon -- spun me around, obsessed me, made me start a band. Then I discovered what had been happening in Louisville for the past several years -- the Endtables, the Babylon Dance Band, Malignant Growth -- and that became the primary context, real peers to be had, much more so than anything you might read about in Rolling Stone.

He describes Gastr Del Sol at least, as a musical 'scaling back, a unilateral disarmament'.

Here is another beauty of a track, Eight Corners, from the album Mirror Repair.




This music is about decontstruction and reconstruction in music and if the quote above is anything to go by, antagonism toward a standardised form like 'Rock Music'.


Speaking of John Fahey, here is Gastr Del Sol's own interpretation:







Here also below is a collaboration between Grubbs and poet Susan Howe. The two were brought together when the Fondation Cartier proposed a collaborative performance. Grubbs had been an ardent reader of Howe's for more than a decade, and the opportunity to work with Howe's poetry and her voice immediately intrigued him.