David Grubbs

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David Grubbs, guitarist, pianist, and vocalist, was a founding member of Squirrel Bait, Bastro, and Gastr del Sol.

Squirrel Bait was a 1980s Louisville, Kentucky punk rock group.

Grubbs' next group was Bastro. Compared to the earlier band, Bastro were artier and, especially early on, more Big Black-influenced.

In the early 1990s Bastro 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 albums released by the duo (including Crookt, Crackt, or Fly, Upgrade & Afterlife, and Camoufleur) have been described as a visionary and theoretical deconstruction of the songwriting process.^{[citation needed]}

Since the partnership's breakup in 1997, 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 and in the 2005 "Group Loop" exhibition at G Fine Arts Gallery in Washington D.C. 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.

David participated as drummer 23 in the Boredoms 77 Boadrum performance which occurred on July 7th, 2007 at the Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park in Brooklyn, New York.

Grubbs lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Cathy Bowman, and their son Emmett Bowman-Grubbs.