David Grubbs
David Grubbs
Professor, Musicology, Sonic Arts, and Music Technology
David Grubbs is a professor of music at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. At Brooklyn College, he also teaches in the M.F.A. programs in Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA) and Creative Writing. He is the author of The Voice in the Headphones; Now that the audience is assembled; and Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, The Sixties, and Sound Recording (all published by Duke University Press), and, with Anthony McCall, Simultaneous Soloists (Pioneer Works Press).
Grubbs has released 14 solo albums and appeared on more than 190 commercially released recordings. His most recent releases include Creep Mission (Blue Chopsticks, 2017) and WOODSLIPPERCOUNTERCLATTER (Blue Chopsticks, 2015), a collaboration with Susan Howe. In 2000, his The Spectrum Between (Drag City) was named Album of the Year in the London Sunday Times.
Grubbs is known for his cross-disciplinary collaborations with poet Susan Howe and visual artists Angela Bulloch and Anthony McCall, among others. His collaborations with Susan Howe appear on four CD releases and have been presented in performance at MoMA, the Southbank Centre (London), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Cambridge University, Harvard University, and Yale University's Beinecke Library.
Grubbs's collaborations with Anthony McCall have been exhibited at the Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin) and the Sean Kelly Gallery (New York), and he created the sound design for ECLIPSE, the performance work by McCall and Jonah Bokaer that inaugurated the Brooklyn Academy of Music's BAM Fisher Building in September 2012. Works by Angela Bulloch featuring soundtracks by Grubbs have been exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (in the exhibition theanyspacewhatever), the Centre Pompidou (in elles@centrepompidou), and the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich. Grubbs and Bulloch premiered a new performance work, The Wired Salutation, at the Centre Pompidou in 2013. Grubb's music appears in two installations by Doug Aitken, and his sound installation "Between a Raven and a Writing Desk" was included in the 1999 group exhibition Elysian Fields at the Centre Pompidou. Most recently his collaborative installation One and One Less (with Eli Keszler) was exhibited at the MIT List Visual Arts Center.
Grubbs is one of five musicians profiled in Augusto Contento's 2012 documentary film Parallax Sounds. He collaborated with Matmos on music for Thierry Jousse's feature film Les Invisibles, and has contributed music to Augusto Contento's Parallax Sounds, Strade Trasparenti, and Onibus; Gustav Deutsch's FILM IST. a girl & a gun; Braden King and Laura Moya's Dutch Harbor: Where the Sea Breaks its Back; and John Boskovich's North, as well as to the Red Krayola's soundtrack to Norman and Bruce Yonemoto's Japan in Paris in LA. Music by Gastr del Sol appears in the PBS television series The United States of Poetry, Hal Hartley's film The Book of Life, and Doug Aitken's film The Diamond Sea. Grubbs composed the musical score for Karl Bruckmaier's radio adaptation of Peter Weiss's Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (Hessischer Rundfunk's "Hörbuch des Jahres 2007") and contributed music to Bruckmaier's adaptation of Alexander Kluge's Chronik der Gefühle (Deutscher Hörbuchpreis 2010, "Best Fiction"). He appears in the Arte television documentary Lost in Music: Chicago Connections and the NHK (Japan) television documentary The Red Krayola, as well as in documentary films including Breadcrumb Trail (dir. Lance Bangs, 2014), Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present (dir. Tyler Hubby, 2016), and Just for the Record: Conversations with and about “Blue” Gene Tyranny (dir. David Bernabo, 2020).
David Grubbs was a founding member of the groups Gastr del Sol, Bastro, and Squirrel Bait, and has performed with the Red Krayola, Will Oldham, Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, Royal Trux, Loren Connors, and many others. Live performances include the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Fondation Cartier (Paris), MACBA (Barcelona), Museu do Chiado (Lisbon), CAAC (Seville), P3 Art and Environment (Tokyo), Vienna Jazz Festival, Toronto Jazz Festival, Steirischer Herbst (Graz), Festival Musique Actuelle (Victoriaville, Quebec), Musique Action Festival (Vandoeuvre-les-Nancy), STRP Festival (Eindhoven), SONAR (Barcelona), Playback Play Festival (Warsaw), Music Merge Festival (Tokyo), and What Is Music (Melbourne/Sydney). Grubbs directs the Blue Chopsticks label, which has released new and archival recordings by Luc Ferrari, Derek Bailey and Noël Akchoté, Workshop, Circle X, and many others. Between 1996 and 1998, he co-directed, with Jim O'Rourke, Dexter's Cigar, an acclaimed label that reissued out-of-print recordings by, among others, Arnold Dreyblatt, Henry Kaiser, and Merzbow.
Grubbs holds a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Chicago, and, from 1997 to 1999, taught in the Sound and Liberal Arts departments of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In the summer of 2008, he taught in a four-week session of the Interdisciplinary and Technological Performance Arts (ITPA) program, a 10-week intensive course in performance, interdisciplinary collaboration, and interactive media technology offered through the Fundacão Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon. Between 1999 and 2007, he regularly published music criticism in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. His criticism has appeared in Chicago Review, Texte zur Kunst, Frieze, Afterall, Modern Painters, The Wire, Bookforum, Tin House, Black Clock, and Conjunctions. Grubbs is a grant recipient in Music/Sound the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a contributing editor in music for BOMB Magazine, and a member of the board of directors of Blank Forms.
Selected Discography
Solo Recordings
- Creep Mission CD/LP (Blue Chopsticks, 2017)
- Prismrose CD/LP (Blue Chopsticks, 2016)
- The Plain Where the Palace Stood CD/LP (Drag City, 2013)
- Hybrid Song Box.4 CD (Blue Chopsticks, 2009)
- An Optimist Notes the Dusk CD/LP (Drag City/P-Vine, 2008)
- Two Soundtracks for Angela Bulloch CD (Semishigure, 2005)
- A Guess at the Riddle CD/LP (Drag City/FatCat/P-Vine, 2004)
- Rickets & Scurvy CD/LP (Drag City/FatCat/P-Vine, 2002)
- Act Five, Scene One CD (Blue Chopsticks/P-Vine, 2002)
- The Spectrum Between CD/LP (Drag City/P-Vine, 2000)
- The Thicket CD/LP (Drag City, 1998)
- Banana Cabbage, Potato Lettuce, Onion Orange CD (Table of the Elements, 1997)
Collaborations
- Comet Meta (with Taku Unami) LP (Blue Chopsticks, 2020)
- The Underflow, The Underflow CD/LP (Corbett vs. Dempsey/Underflow, 2019)
- Lacrau (with Manuel Mota) LP (Blue Chopsticks, 2018)
- Failed Celestial Creatures (with Taku Unami) LP (Empty Editions, 2018)
- One and One Less (with Eli Keszler) LP (UDPR, 2017) WOODSLIPPERCOUNTERCLATTER (with Susan Howe) CD/LP (Blue Chopsticks, 2015)
- Belfi / Grubbs / Pilia, Dust & Mirrors CD/LP (Blue Chopsticks, 2014)
- Belfi / Grubbs / Pilia, The Wired Salutation 3 of 3 one-sided LP (AB CD LP)
- Noël Akchoté, Gesualdo: Madrigals for Five Guitars CD (Blue Chopsticks, 2014)
- The Wingdale Community Singers, Night, Sleep, Death LP (Blue Chopsticks, 2013)
- Frolic Architecture (with Susan Howe) CD (Blue Chopsticks, 2011)
- Belfi / Grubbs / Pilia, Onrushing Cloud LP (Blue Chopsticks, 2010)
- Souls of the Labadie Tract (with Susan Howe) CD (Blue Chopsticks, 2007)
- Thiefth (with Susan Howe) CD (Blue Chopsticks, 2005)
- The Harmless Dust (with Nikos Veliotis) (Headz, 2005)
- Arborvitae (with Loren Connors) CD (Häpna, 2003)
- Pauline Oliveros, Primordial/Lift CD (Table of the Elements, 2000)
- Stephen Prina, Push Comes to Love CD/LP (Drag City, 1998)
- The Red Krayola, Hazel CD/LP (Drag City, 1996)
- Palace Music, Arise, Therefore CD/LP (Drag City, 1996)
- Tony Conrad, Slapping Pythagoras CD (Table of the Elements, 1995)
