David Grubbs: To Start Again, Differently, Afresh
David Grubbs, by all accounts seems to be as restless an artist as there could be. Working across the span of avant garde sound art to contemporary composition and songwriting, Grubbs is into his 40th year of a creative practice that began in his teens. From his fertile post-punk beginnings to his role today as experimental musician and professor of the music arts, Grubbs has never been content to stand still.
The new year finds Grubbs releasing his first solo album in 8 years—Whistle from Above. The first single, The Snake on Its Tail—already a kind of year-defining nod to the experience of the eternal return—showcases Grubbs’ gorgeous and cacophonous guitar, sidewinding into sheets of warm brass tone, provided by trumpeter Nate Wooley. The single itself seems to embody many of his artistic concerns in a visceral way. It is on the backdrop of this fresh release that I had the opportunity to discuss Grubbs’ new album, writing books, and the good fortune of having friends as collaborators.
- Eric Hurtgen
You're getting ready to release, I think, something like your 20th solo album—Whistle from Above. The initial track that you released, The Snake on Its Tail, is a wonderfully meditative piece—spare in its instrumentation—that dissolves into this marriage of warm modal trumpet and sheets of distorted guitar that is as beautiful as it is cacophonous. I’d love to know the genesis of this work—what led you into working on this album, now?
Thanks for the kind words. I'm always working on new music; I don't think that I've ever really taken a break from doing so since I started releasing records as a teenager -- now, somewhat unbelievably, forty years ago. It's been a minute -- by which I mean eight years -- since the previous solo album, which similarly came out at the beginning of a Trump administration, ugh. The gap has to do with the fact that I committed more time to writing books, particularly the trilogy that includes Now that the audience is assembled, The Voice in the Headphones, and Good night the pleasure was ours, as well as collaborations with Jan St. Werner, Taku Unami, Ryley Walker, and others.
Most everything on Whistle from Above has had some period of being worked out in live performance, which is unusual for me -- I'm usually writing and recording more or less simultaneously. And I wanted to build up small arrangements that kept to the spirit of these pieces being played solo in a live setting while also allowing the album to go places that I couldn't or wouldn't go all by my lonesome.
I feel like that's such a rare thing—to have a pursuit that remains constant through a lifetime. Given my own experience in the arts, I'm assuming your relationship to working on music has changed in all sorts of ways over the years—even despite its consistency. How much has your book writing affected your music—was your desire to work out the arrangements prior to recording affected by your writing, or the content of your writing?
Writing books of poetry has let me off the hook for writing song lyrics—at least that’s how I’ve conceived of it. But is that a good thing? I keep thinking that I need to return to songwriting, but it just hasn’t felt like a pressing issue. Very happy at the moment with the focused concentration of just playing guitar or piano or whatever’s required, especially in a solo setting. The books have helped me to organize my ideas; it seems less like having variations on the same formulations bouncing around in my head. You got something out in writing, and you’re that much more free to move on.
I really like that idea—of the freeing aspects of writing. I'm interested though, you've always seemed like an artist that's felt very free to explore a very wide terrain—regardless. When you mention being free to move on, it sounds almost like an idea captures you and that you have to act on the idea before it can let you go. Is that fair to say? Or is that freedom more in the way that you approach your work?
I was thinking about the freedom that comes with feeling that one has finished a project—a recording, a tour, a piece of writing—to one’s satisfaction and that the road ahead is clear to embark upon something that feels different, and that you’re not tackling the same ideas over and over again. That’s one reason why I’ve always liked toggling between different working situations—solo, duo, group and largely composed versus largely improvised methods. To start again, differently, afresh—that’s always the dream.
Oh, I like that idea even more. There's something, I think, almost primordial about that drive to start again afresh...or to work in kind of ever-widening circles of leaving and then returning. Is there already some other project that's kind of on the horizon for you or are you still focused on this current release and the subsequent touring you'll do with it?
I’m excited about playing shows and doing more recording with Squanderers, the new trio with Wendy Eisenberg and Kramer, and there’s a record coming out in the summer by Bitterviper, which is a new group with Taku Unami, Sarah Hennies, Nikos Veliotis, and me. We’re on three continents, but I hope that we’ll all be in the same room at the same time sometime. I’m also in the middle of a next book, which is about my experience of collaborating with folks from other disciplines: the poet Susan Howe, the visual artist Anthony McCall, and others.
This kind of inveterate working across so many forms is one of the things I love about your work. This seems to be something that was with you, maybe, from really early on—do you see that as something innate or something that's reflective of a time spent in places like Louisville or Chicago? The scales of both cities are obviously so different but both seem to have a kind of mid-American curiosity and restlessness that seems to hum under the surface. Obviously it's present in Brooklyn as well, though in a much different way—maybe in the sense that it seems to be where relentlessly curious people often end up.
In reading about various post-war art or music or literary milieus, I used to be startled by what I thought was the improbability of a given poet having known a given visual artist or musician whose work would seem to have very little in common. But I gradually came to understand that they were likely neighbors, went to the same bars, had a friend in common, and so forth. And that’s kind of my situation as well, first in Chicago and then in New York, where these kinds of meetings and conversations and, ultimately, collaborations occur because people are just physically in such close proximity or because friendships span different disciplines and working methods. Branden Joseph did a great job of explaining this in his book about Tony Conrad. That’s how some of the range of collaborations for me more or less organically came about.
In light of this organic collaborative community that you're describing—how much have these friendships and collaborations influenced Whistle From Above?
It was great to know when I had the idea of expanding these solo pieces beyond the solo setting that there would be a range of folks—Cleek Schrey (violin), Nate Wooley (trumpet), Rhodri Davies (harp), Nikos Veliotis (cello), and Andrea Belfi (drums)—whose playing I admire but also whom I just greatly enjoy spending time with. Easy! I’ve played with Nikos, Nate, and Andrea each many times in recordings and live performances; I’ve known Rhodri for a while but never had the chance to play together, and Cleek is a recent acquaintance who also happens to be teaching me violin! The violin is my pandemic instrument; I had the incredible good fortune of finding a relatively nice one on the street—a neighbor was moving, and it was in the discard pile; that’s one of the great things about New York: the stuff people leave on the street—and so I’ve tried to spend some time playing the violin daily since then. I don’t know that you’ll ever hear me play it in public, but it has been a mind-bender!
David Grubbs’ Whistle From Above is available here.