David Grubbs
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
David Grubbs, guitarist, pianist, and vocalist, was a founding member of Squirrel Bait, a 1980s Louisville, Kentucky punk rock group. His next group was the artier (and initially more Big Black-influenced) Bastro, which in the early 1990s moved to Chicago and transformed into the more avant-garde Gastr Del Sol. This project soon became essentially a partnership between Grubbs and Jim O'Rourke. The handful of albums released by the duo (including Crookt, Crackt, or Fly, Upgrade & Afterlife, and The Harp Factory on Lake Street) have been described as a visionary and theoretical deconstruction of the songwriting process. Since the partnership's breakup, Grubbs has released several solo and collaborative records, mostly on the Drag City label. He operates his own label, Blue Chopsticks, which has released both new and archival recordings from Luc Ferrari, Derek Bailey and Noël Akchoté, Workshop, Van Oehlen, and Mats Gustafsson.
Grubbs's soundtrack work includes music with Matmos for Thierry Jousse’s feature film Les Invisibles. He has composed the soundtracks for Angela Bulloch’s installations Z Point and Horizontal Technicolour, 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 has also contributed music to the Red Krayola’s soundtrack to Norman and Bruce Yonemoto’s film Japan in Paris in LA as well as to the soundtrack of Braden King and Laura Moya’s film Dutch Harbor: Where the Sea Breaks its Back, and John Boskovich’s film North. Music by Gastr del Sol appears in the P.B.S. television series The United States of Poetry, Hal Hartley’s film The Book of Life, and Doug Aitken’s film The Diamond Sea.
His criticism has appeared in Conjunctions, Bookforum, Texte zur Kunst, and Purple, and he regularly contributes music criticism to the Munich newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.
From 1997-99, David 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 an assistant professor of Radio and Sound Art at Brooklyn College, CUNY. He received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Chicago.
Grubbs lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Cathy Bowman, and their son Emmett Bowman-Grubbs.
[edit] Solo Discography
- Two Soundtracks For Angela Bulloch (Semishigure 2005)
- A Guess at the Riddle (Drag City 2004)
- I Am Deep In Thought/Comic Structure (En/Of 2003)
- Rickets & Scurvy (Drag City 2002)
- Act Five, Scene One (Blue Chopsticks 2002)
- Thirty-Minute Raven (Rectangle 2000)
- The Spectrum Between (Drag City 2000)
- The Coxcomb (Rectangle 1999)
- The Thicket (Drag City 1998)
- Banana Cabbage, Potato Lettuce, Onion Orange (Table Of The Elements 1996)
[edit] Collaborations
- Thiefth with Susan Howe (Blue Chopsticks 2005)
- Crumbling Land with Avey Tare (Fat Cat 2003)
- Arbovitae with Loren Mazzacane Connors (Hapna 2003)
- Apertura with Mats Gustafsson (Blue Chopsticks 1999)
[edit] Compilations
- A Pair of Ravens (Leiterwagen 1999)
- The Alley of the Shadow of Rats (Halana Magazine 1997)
- The Wire Tapper 6
