David Grubbs, Onrushing Cloud (Blue Chopsticks)

I am really lucky to play music with David Grubbs, who is the “lead guitar” player in The Wingdale Community Singers, and who is many more important things besides: a member of the Red Krayola, of Gastr del Sol, and of Squirrel Bait (the excellent Louisville hardcore band), and of the proto-Tortoise math-rockish outfit called Bastro, in which he played through and transcended total noise; he is also, recently, a maker of many solo albums of songs (on Drag City), as well as an architect of lots and lots of experimental music. As regards the songs, I was lucky enough to collaborate on some lyrics with David on two records, Rickets and Scurvy and A Guess at the Riddle, and in the process to grow to love the guitar stylings of the man, whom I consider at the forefront of the instrument these days. His playing reminds me of Glenn Mercer of the Feelies or maybe Richard Lloyd in that he has, just by dint of playing and loving playing, become a complete individual as a guitarist. You will never mistake a Grubbs part for anyone else’s, and we can speak of certain tendencies: absolute rhythmical perfect, for one, understatement, and a tendency to prefer timbre and texture to playing fast, a tendency to avoid pedals and effects unless they are really doing something important, which they only infrequently are, and a love of chord voicings that are often closer to jazz than to rock and roll. He always heads for chords where there are a lots of notes suspended. His voice, too, to me is a perfect instrument, laconic, Southern, and full of vulnerability. Even when the lyrics are abstract, nearly painterly, there is that emotional openness to the voice that really makes the lyrics stick. But having said all this about the songs (and a fine recent example is An Optimist Notes the Dusk, which features the trumpet playing of Nate Wooley, of whom I also wrote recently), what I really like is the furthest out experimental iteration of Grubbs, in which he often collaborates (with people like Mats Gustafsson, Loren Connors, Tony Conrad, the aforementioned Wooley, and many others), often plays harmonium, and in which he goes far afield indeed. He has, I happen to know, an analogue synthesizer in his storage unit in Brooklyn.  He has mixed entire albums on earbuds in his apartment, and made entire albums while his son was sleeping. Which is sort of like Nabokov writing novels in the bathroom so as to avoid waking Dmitri. Of the really experimental stuff, I have in the past noted my appreciation of Two Soundtracks for Angela Bulloch, but I also love Act Five, Scene One and Banana Cabbage, Potato Lettuce, Onion Orange. All of the more abstract pieces are incredibly rewarding, especially as you listen to them over time. I was therefore very excited to hear of a new collaborative album coming out in vinyl (though my own turntable is one of those not terribly good ones that is housed in a faux-antique chassis, in general I think the return to vinyl, which is sweeping the indie world recently, is a step in the right direction; even though recent digital audio mastering sounds lots better than it used to sound in the eighties and early nineties, there’s still something terribly artificial about making all those sound waves uniform and bumping everything up to the same excessive volume—vinyl is, as the commonplace suggests, warmer, and even on my low-class close-and-play turntable things sound warm, and I enjoy the requirement to turn the disc over, as I did through my teens), this time with Andrea Belfi and Stefano Pilia, both Italians with experimental and avant-garde rockist tendencies, the whole being entitled, as shown above, Onrushing Cloud. This is a great title, and it suggests the sound of the whole, which is made from electric guitars (Grubbs and Pilia) and percussion/electronics (Belfi), excepting a tiny bit of piano and singing by Grubbs on the title track. The whole starts slow, and builds toward some agreeable wall of interdependent syncopations, in which the lead instrument is more often Belfi’s electronics than it is the guitars, and that is consonant with Grubbs’s other efforts along similar lines. The lyric for the one “song”—though this is a misnomer in that the album proceeds through its five cuts without interruption and is therefore continuous—is great too. It has a Bashoesque allusiveness, including the presence of rats, where rats ought not to be. Most often, these days, David Grubbs is somewhat overworked by his job at Brooklyn College where he teaches electronic music and composition and other things, and it might be to the detriment of those who love his songs, but still, despite his heavy schedule, he manages to fit in these beautiful semi-improvised collaborative albums, likewise his pieces for art installation and film, and the fact is that that these pieces teach as well, as Grubbs often does generally; he is nothing if not a thinker, an intellectual, and a person of subtle but enthusiastic passions, and even the most recondite and obscure of his passions always includes lessons (easy pieces, to speak in the Feynman mode) on how to listen and to appreciate, and Onrushing Cloud is a perfect example.

Rick Moody, The Darkness Is Good (Dainty Rubbish)

It is especially embarrassing to speak of myself here, but since I have mentioned everyone else in my band, and some other friends besides, I will say that I have in fact recorded a solo album, and that it is probably coming out at some point soon, on a brand new record label owned and operated by the novelist and teacher Nelly Reifler. If it were not for Nelly and a few other very encouraging people, this album would never see the light of day. And it may yet be a while before it does. When it comes down to it, one of the qualities I most admire in music and art is vulnerability, as I have said about David Grubbs’s voice above, e.g., and in trying to make my solo album, my model was the very early Palace Brothers records; The Madcap Laughs, by Syd Barrett; Weed Forestin’ by Sebadoh; and the recent releases of Gene Clark’s demos. In fact, Gene Clark has been a very important recent influence. Some of you will know his sad tale (left the Byrds at the pinnacle of their popularity because of his inability to fly without crippling anxiety, prompting Roger McGuinn to quip: “Gene, you can’t be a Byrd if you can’t fly,” after having written some of their most memorable tunes—“Eight Miles High,” e.g.—to embark on a very spotty solo recording career, marked by great albums made at the wrong time, and alienating and unprofessional behavior at the right time, culminating in an early death from addiction and related medical problems), but fewer of you will know his work, which certainly merits more attention (I suggest The Adventures of Dillard and Clark, and White Light). What I like about Clark is the nakedness, and so I tried to produce some nakedness myself. Whether it is possible for a middle-aged guy in comfortable middle-age who is some decades from his last period of excess and more or less serene in domestic life to make music like an addict and phobic with a lot of skeletons in the closet, I do not know, and furthermore, I will never sing as well as Clark (though I may ascend to the heights of his somewhat untutored guitar stylings), nor write songs as indelibly. But one’s record has to sound like something. So mine sounds like it was made by a slightly desperate person who could not find anyone to collaborate with, though I am surrounded by reasonable collaborators, as shown here. I play guitar and some piano and sometimes sing unaccompanied. All songs by me, except for one lyric by Jonathan Lethem. There is also some harmony singing by Nina Katchadourian, who has always made me sound better than I am. It may be that this record is in fact never to be released, and that would be all right with me, but if some of you want to hear a song or two in anticipation of its release or non-release, just ask, and I will send one along.

Pages: 1 2 3 4

Read the whole article on one page

Tweet

Related Posts

• No related posts...