David Grubbs Interview: Overcoming Distance
David Grubbs; Photo by Julien Sitruk
BY JORDAN MAINZER
"People seem willing to jump in with both feet when working with sound." Speaking to me over the phone, composer and multi-instrumentalist David Grubbs was specifically referring to an upcoming book he was working on about cross-disciplinary collaborations he's done with visual artists and writers, and "sound as a welcoming space for co-authorship." I couldn't help but think, though, that his description of his book encapsulated the ethos of many of Grubbs' projects, from his legendary post-rock band Gastr del Sol to Whistle From Above, his first solo album in 7 years.
When combing through live and studio archives for Gastr del Sol's 2024 box set, We Have Dozens of Titles, Grubbs rethought material he was currently recording. That is, listening to his camaraderie with not just Jim O'Rourke but featured artists like one-time Gastr del Sol members Bundy K. Brown and John McEntire, Bob Weston, and multi-instrumentalist Thymme Jones, inspired Grubbs to reach out to other musicians to join forces with. Taking advantage of the Internet--something he didn't have during Gastr del Sol's days--Grubbs chose to invite mostly folks who lived across the pond, such as harpist Rhodri Davies, cellist Nikos Veliotis, and drummer Andrea Belfi. The result is Whistle From Above, released late last month on Drag City, a collection of experimental composed guitar works.
On Whistle From Above, the songs journey. The gentle title track ascends and descends subtly, Grubbs holding notes to create an echo as if to toy with space and time. Distortion and noise also enter in ultra-fine ways, as on the softly wincing "Hung in the Sky of the Mind" and "Scrapegrace", the latter of which juxtaposes a catchy guitar riff and a pulsating bass note. Best, the guests complement Grubbs rather than seem layered atop his guitar playing. Nate Wooley's blaring trumpet serves to mirror Grubbs' chirpy plucks on "The Snake on Its Tail", while on "Queen's Side Eye", it, along with Cleek Schrey's ten-string fiddle, encourages Grubbs' bluesy licks to continually speed up and propel the song to its finish. Such a phenomenon is notable considering Grubbs' process for Whistle From Above, wherein he sent material to his collaborators, they sent back their contributions, and he stitched it all together to make something that sounds like it was recorded live.
Last week at Sisters in Brooklyn, Grubbs played a record release show with Schrey, Wooley, and free jazz guitarist Wendy Eisenberg. Starting tomorrow, he's on tour in the UK for nine days, playing solo, save for two nights with Luke Fowler in Glasgow and London, where the two will be performing alongside sound material provided by, and Fowler's films about, composer Brunhild Ferrari. And at the end of the month, Grubbs will arrive in Knoxville for Big Ears Festival, where he's playing with Squanderers (his trio with Eisenberg and Kramer) at Regas Square on March 28th, as a guest of Water Damage on March 29th at The Standard, and solo on March 29th at The Point. Below, read our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Whistle From Above cover art
Since I Left You: How exactly did working on We Have Dozens of Titles make you want to revisit material you had you had written?
David Grubbs: I'd slowly been recording a record of what I though was going to be solo electric guitar. Working on the Gastr del Sol material made me think how nice it would be to reach out to other folks, and to build upon these solo pieces...Cleek Schrey lives in New York, but everybody else who plays on the record lives in the UK, Germany, or Greece--that's one of the things records do so well, overcome distance. There seemed to be no reason for the record to be limited to one person.
SILY: Had you been workshopping the pieces live?
DG: Gastr del Sol forward, I would either write in the studio, or the studio was a culmination of an intense period of creation. It probably had more to do with a period during the pandemic of not being able to tour as much. Most of these pieces I've been playing for a couple years now. Normally, I have this sense of, "One makes a record, and now I really know how to nail these pieces." It was good to have the extra time with these pieces before recording them.
SILY: When you reached out to these collaborators, did you have in mind what tracks would have what elements and who would play on what? How did that process come about?
DG: In each case, I had recorded the basic track myself in New York, and I had a sense, for example, with Nikos Veliotis, that he is really good at doing these walls of overdubbed cello. I had a little bit of a sense of how people might approach the track. If people ask for suggestions or guidance, I'm really happy to supply that, but most of these folks are people I've known for years. I love to be surprised by other people...I approached these people because they're fabulous musicians and brilliant artists.
SILY: Did you send collaborators the stems of what you had, and they'd send back their contribution, or did you record any of the album in person?
DG: No, except for Cleek Schrey. All of the others were done long-distance. I would do editing and the final mix.
SILY: Why did you decide to release "The Snake on Its Tail" as the intro to this world?
DG: It's the first track that I wrote, which isn't necessarily a good argument for why it's the first track for people to hear from the record. There doesn't have to be a 1:1 correlation. I really like the dynamic range of it. Andrea Belfi's drumming is fantastic on it. It just seemed like a good introduction to the record in all its breadth.
SILY: How do you come up with the track titles? In hindsight, they are evocative of what the songs sound like.
DG: I always think of titles as real opportunities to make the most of. Since I was a teenager in Squirrel Bait, I always have had an active list of titles that I can draw from at any point, keeping notes nearby.
SILY: "Later in the Tapestry Room" is particularly evocative to me, because it has the most layers of seemingly disparate elements you weave together.
DG: There's a very clear explanation for that, though I didn't feel the need to have liner notes on the record. I'm not shy about sharing it. The Tapestry Room is the room at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, where they had concerts for 100 years. I did a sound installation there, having done research there, so I knew, for example, it was one of the first places Japanese Gagaku music was heard in the U.S., and it was the second place where Arnold Schoenberg's String Quartet No. 1 was performed. You hear a little bit of those elements of the sound installation I made for the Tapestry Room. But it also does have a sense of the room coming alive when no one is present.
SILY: You're simultaneously in conversation with the past and with your past.
DG: Yeah.
SILY: Did you name the album after the title track because something about the title track was particularly evocative of the album as a whole?
DG: I had settled on the album title a long way's back. Whistle From Above, for me, what I associate it with, is the stage in Samuel Beckett's Act Without Words, a play without any text. Whistle From Above is almost vaudeville or slapstick comedy. A character is on the stage, there's a whistle from above, they look up, something's dangled above them. As they reach for it, it's always pulled just outside of their reach. Whistle From Above is an uncomfortable, uncanny quality of being hailed. "What? Who, me?" It also made me think of the first line in Gravity's Rainbow, "A screaming comes across the sky."
SILY: There are definitely moments on the album where the instrumentation does the same thing, pulls you in one way, almost dangling a pattern in front of you before changing. On "Poem Arrives Distorted", the guitar notes start out droney and the strings expressive, and then they switch qualities. The piece lulls you to expect something and then flips on its head or takes an element away. Do you ever listen back to the album you made and make connections after the fact?
DG: I listen obsessively when I'm making demos for a record, but then, I'm on to the next thing. I have a dog that's a rat terrier--now he's blind, but for years, he was always obsessed with squirrels. I thought to myself, "Oh god, if he ever catches a squirrel, how will I get the squirrel away from him?" He finally killed a squirrel once in Prospect Park. He grabbed a squirrel, shook it, broke its neck, dropped it, and was on to the next one. That's a little bit how I make records. [laughs] It's a terrible comparison, but rather than being unwilling to relinquish it, it's kind of the opposite. I'm like the rat terrier scanning the horizon again, like, "Okay, what's next?"
SILY: In that same way, do you feel like you've squeezed every inch of life out of the material before moving on? How far does the metaphor go?
DG: [laughs] I do maybe feel like I've done it to death and it's best to move on.
SILY: Can you tell me about the cover art?
DG: That's a collage by Kevin and Jennifer McCoy, who are friends of mine. Kevin is a computer programmer, and Jenn has made video work for almost 30 years. They're more associated with interactive media and art and technology. They're people whose work rarely wasn't made with a computer or software they haven't devised. I think they needed a break from the screen. A year or so ago, they started this series of collages of environmental catastrophe imagery, like forest fires and flooding. This was one from the series. It's funny: I saw an image of it before I saw the original, and I knew it was 12'' x 12''. There's something to me about the exact scale. I often feel like I'm seeing artwork on albums that's blown up or shrunk. It's very satisfying when you hold an album cover and think, "This is the appropriate scale for this artwork." In addition to this rich imagery and color palette, it seemed like a ready-made album cover to me.
SILY: People are consuming media and looking at the image many different ways, but to choose something optimized for an LP seems rare these days.
DG: I really thought about what the artwork would look like at the 1:1 scale of a 12-inch square rather than on my phone or on Apple Music.
SILY: What's your approach to playing these songs live? Is there an improvisational element simply because you don't have all the musicians from the record playing with you?
DG: There's kind of a roadmap to doing solo, duo, trio, and quartet, and trying to give a flow to it with as little interruption as possible. Making records is weird, at least for me, because I'm focused on this composition that's three or four minutes long. There's very little improvisation on the album, even though I love playing improvised music and settings. It's all composed, except for some of the contributions from other folks. Even that tends to be composed through editing. Rhodri gave me three takes of his harp performance, and I shaped it into a part for the final record. I think of an album as a meta composition that might last 30 or 40 minutes. My approach to playing with others for the concert is, even if I'm playing with three other people, the four of us don't have to play from start to finish. In fact, I really love this ebbing and flowing quality of adding people to the stage, subtracting people, giving people a break. All of the people I'm playing with are playing on roughly half the set. There's a little bit of new solo material in the middle of the set. A band continually in flux would be the idea.
SILY: I always appreciate shows around a record's release that use the record as a launching point or broader musical realm to diverge from.
DG: I don't see any reason to replicate the album.
SILY: Is there anything else on the horizon for you in the short or long term?
DG: There's a second Squanderers record coming out in the fall. There's a first record by a new group called Bitterviper, which is me, Nikos Veliotis, Taku Unami, and Sarah Hennies. I'm putting that out on Blue Chopsticks in July.
SILY: Is there anything you've been listening to, watching, or reading lately that's caught your attention or inspired you?
DG: I'm loving this new book by Elizabeth Willis called Liontaming in America. It's about Mormonism and westward expansion and polygamy. It's prose poetry, but a brilliant book of American history.
Tour dates:
3/15: Glad Café, Glasgow, UK 3/16: Glad Café, Glasgow, UK 3/17: Star & Shadow, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK 3/18: NCI Sports & Social Club, Cambridge, UK 3/19: Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, UK 3/20: Cafe Kino, Bristol, UK 3/21: Pan-Pan, Birmingham, UK 3/22: World of Echo, London, UK 3/24: Cafe OTO, London, UK 3/28-3/29: Big Ears Festival, Knoxville, TN