in conversation with Martin Conrads.
The Interview took place at the Knaack Club in Berlin on September 27th, 1997.
Martin Conrads: You seem to have split with Jim O'Rourke [x] regarding Gastr. When I met him in March he had two gigs in Berlin, one with the sound of a hurdy-gurdy coming from a cd player. In your concert tonight you used similar sounds, material also coming from cd. Is this the part Jim left for Gastr?
David Grubbs: It definitely is the part that would not otherwise be there if I were playing solo. The first thing that I used was a multitrack-recording of synthesizers and then the last two were harmonium. I just found in situations like this one has to raise the floor of the noise a little bit, that events can't really dip into silence because there's no space for it. On the one hand I like playing with a fixed pitch, I like playing with a drone, and some of the stuff definitely harmonically works with that. But otherwise it's really just a way of raising the threshold of silence in the room, lowering the dynamic range, because, strangely enough, when I'm playing by myself with the acoustic guitar, it seems like there's almost too much dynamic range.
mc: Dynamic in which way?
dg: In terms of volume. In a room where most of the people are coming in and would not be necessarily disposed to 'listen' you have to be selective in what element of noise you are going to add into it. Because i don't want at all to have this didactic character, something like 'shhh'.
mc: But something seems to be important at places where there is no basis for the dynamic range: the experince of listening to voices coming from the audience and listening to the cd-material you use at the same time suddenly appears as an acoustic gap when the cd stops and you're still playing acoustic guitar. So I think there must be some notion of 'listening' you must be conscious of adding when the cd stops and you're still fading out with your guitar play.
dg: Oh yes, absolutely. It's not only mediation between me and the audience. But sometimes it serves that function of being halfway between the noise of the crowd and the noise that I produce from the guitar.
mc: Jim performed his 'Happy Days' when he was in Berlin. We then talked about if there is a necessity of seeing him when he is playing on stage while you as a listener are not able to figure out what he's actually playing at the moment because of the noises coming fron the cd. This also would be something that differs from a cd experience of the track
dg: Right, there is this pleasure of sharing the stage with something that is pre-recorded. It feels like a giving gesture to stand back and let the pre-recorded material take a solo. It is also a liberating effect as a musician to be the the only one on stage with an instrument and to be able to stop playing and not to have any kind of anxiety about that. Nothing I did tonight really had this effect that 'Happy Days' has where it's a very long crossfade, it begins with the guitar, and then it's a very compellingly gradual fade with the pre-recorded material. The dynamics of the pre-recorded material that I used where relatively static; foundational. Basically, the motion of 'Happy Days' is, that there is a foreground/background-shift. That's like one very slow movement that occurs over the whole piece, but there is no kind of interplay in what I was doing tonight.
mc: The idea of using long time background noise, for instance parallel to the guitar play, seems something you have developed especially in Gastr del Sol. Also you are working with John Fahey or Tony Conrad sometimes. Are these the references you wish the audience to combine with Gastr when performing sounds like these?
dg: The reference to Tony Conrad is the most telling or the most accurate one, because I'd never played with a drone in long stretches of time before playing with Tony. When I've played with him, I have generally played on a piece called 'Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plane'. It has a variable line-up but it's usually one violin, a cello, that plays one note for the entire piece, which is usually one hour and a half, and a bass, that plays a single note. I play a monochord, which is basically like a five foot plank of wood with two strings tuned at the same pitch and a guitar pick-up on the body of the instrument; and I play with a heavy slide, like a pedal steel slide. I do these very slow glissandos. The idea is that I never make it to the note that I'm always moving towards, there is a tonal center that is obvious from the gesture, but you never land on that. It's always a matter of slowing the arm down just as you're moving towards that tonal center. People have a similar experience in listening to it, but playing music like this takes you a long time to want to play any other type of music. You're completely satisfied playing music like that. Everything else seems like too frantic, or too dramatic, too much rise and fall, too much character playing.
mc: You said before it's a good experience being the only one stage to be able to stop the music at any moment - what happened with Jim and you?
dg: It's personal reasons. And it comes at the end of four years of working very intensely and very closely together, working very constantly for that period. For personal reasons it's time to do otherwise. And we both feel that way.
mc: How do you want to go on with Gastr then?
dg: I want to delay any decisions about Gastr del Sol. The one decision that I've made is I would like to leave the options open to doing it. And I don't want to do it by myself. It should be a group project. I don't have any interest in using a collective name for something that I do individually. There are people that come to mind that I would like to play with, but perhaps it would be better to wait 6 months or a year or 2 years before thinking about it too seriously. And perhaps in a span of a year ot two it would seem like 'why bother, why bother with that name'? I'm enjoying playing by myself, but I also know that I would like to work in some kind of sustained group project at some point in the future - not immediately.
mc: Still, there seem to be some projects going on which started when Jim still was with Gastr?
dg: There will be a Gastr del Sol record to come out in january or february that's a collaboration with oval. It's coming out under the name of Gastr del Sol; there will also be an oval record coming out at the same time that will use Gastr del Sol as source-material, which will come out under the name of oval. The idea is, to have simultaneous relieves that will hopefully come out on the same label, at least in the United States. What happened was, that, right after we did the Table of the Elements-record, 'The Harp Factory on Lake Street', we send all of the individual tracks, stripped down from a 24-track master to Markus Popp. He started making pieces, and several months after we sent him stuff, we got some pieces in the mail, revisions of those pieces etc.. What we did basically was select elements that we wanted to do and began writing songs around those. It did seem important to Markus that they be in a song context - that they have vocal material and acoustic instruments, and would not be dominated by the sound of the oval software. Which was a great task, because it's a difficult task: there are certain elements that you heard on oval records or oval remixes, or microstoria records that immediately seem so strongly recognizable. There are those elements on the Gastr del Sol record, but they were rather than having Markus' versions as the finished versions as Gastr del Sol. Like on a lot of remix-projects, where strangely enough authorship resides in the band or artist who had the original material even though it's so little a product of what they do. The oval material that came back is the hidden center of a lot of these compositions and what I've heard is really terrific. Our record is called 'camoufleur', there are like strings and horns and klezmer type music - I'm not kidding (LAUGHS), I know that probably sounds terrible. Both will be on drag city in the US.
mc: You did a solo record this year - when exactly was it released?
dg: It came out in february on Table of the Elements. It's three instrumentals, each on a different instrument, solo live recordings: acoustic piano, acoustic guitar, electric guitar. The title of the record is the titles of the three piecesi. [1] I took a very literal approach to making a solo record - a record of solos. Just because when someone has always played in groups when they make a solo record usually that's the moment of most intimate expression, like 'finally I can say all the things that I've wanted to say', so I determined that it would be an instrumental record... The thing that I'm working on right now, the next full length, will be a record that will appear under my name and will be more song-orientated, whatever that means, that's a very ambiguous distinction - it will be more text-orientated, maybe I should say.
mc: When I think of the artwork on Gastr-covers by people like Roman Signer or Albert Oehlen: How much is your work connected to visual artists' work?
dg: I'm more connected to visual artists interpersonally right now. I'm sure it has some bearing on what the music does. I tend to trust the opinions of a lot of visual artists friends of mine about music (LAUGHS). And I can't say that I trust the opinions on art of very many musicians. The connections are mainly through The Red Krayola. When I was in college I always was trying to think of a profession that didn't exist before and for a long time I thought: 'I have to start some kind of think tank so I can spend a lot of time working with my friends', like 'These people are interesting enough. Certainly they would be interested in this think tank', that doesn't have a clear purpose.The Red Krayola is the closest to that idea, just as far as a very remarkably diverse group of interest, and that's responsible for me knowing a lot of visual artists and picking their brains a little bit. Like Albert Oehlen: I always want know what he thinks about music, and I actually rarely ever talk about art with him, because he seems kind of uninterested in talking about art. He probably does that enough and is thrilled to talk about music with somebody. I went into a record store with him yesterday, it's always interesting to go to a record store with him, because he was like 'Yeah, there's so much great stuff here, I have no idea what to buy, but I'm sure, most of it is great!' Albert softened my rough edges. He reduced my cynicism in that context...(LAUGHS)
mc: You're also teaching at the University of Chicago...?
dg: Yes, at the English department, although I'm still a graduate student. I've been an advisor for creative writing students there. I am teaching a class this winter. It's listed as a creative writing class, but it's a radioplay class. Students have to join in an inexpensive community studio and the final project would be like a radioplay. I don't have any experience doing this - some experience as a listener. One of the things that compells me to teaching is that I think I can propose something and very quickly have to go through the process of learning myself. I'm also teaching a music class, that's also learning on a job experience, because i've never taken a music class. I've studied classical piano when I was young, but I don't know how music survey courses are arranged.
mc: Also, you're working with 'Critical Inquiry'?
dg: I've worked there for several years, as an editorial assistant.
mc: I came across that information when writing about W.J.T. Mitchell and his notion of the Pictoral Turn recently...
dg: ... He's one of my dissertation advisors, I worked on 'Picture Theory'.
mc: If you're working on both fields, on literature and on sound, could there be some...
dg: ...analogies? Well, I've never seriously used the phrase 'the Sonic Turn'. (LAUGHS)
1 Banana Cabbage, Potatoe Lettuce, Onion Orange. Table of the Elements 1997.
