Rombo LTD cassette 50 copies out now on Tulip records

David maranha – Organ
Andrea Belfi – Drums

Track list

#1 (14’17’’)
#2 (14’55’’)
Recorded at Powiększenie, Warsaw, on the 4th of October 2012 during Playback Play festival by The Norman Conquest

Mixed in Lisbon on the 6th of March 2013 by David Maranha
Thanks to Michal Libera, Norman Teale

David Grubbs is one of the most influential musicians of his generation: a legacy that includes such bands as Squirrel Bait, Bastro and Gastr del Sol.  Moving eccentrically forward from the straight-ahead hardcore punk of Squirrel Bait (after all, he was a wizened eighteen years old when SB called it a day) David increasingly infused his songcraft with an experimental strain, culminating in the discography of Gastr del Sol, who drew widespread interest with the ways in which they combined so-called “songs” with experimental music. Participating in the reinvigorated Red Krayola during this time exposed David to the formative tutelage of Mayo Thompson as well. But after the gradually more streamlined Gastr period concluded with Camoufleur, David’s output became more segregated; the albums of pop songs were more focusedly, more cussedly pop, and the more experimental projects (including duo recordings with Mats Gustafsson, Nikos Veliotis, and Loren Connors, not to mention the entire catalog of his Blue Chopsticks label) became more unrelenting.

Flash forward to April 16th, 2013: Drag City releases the sixth and latest David Grubbs album of songs, The Plain Where the Palace Stood, which finds David once again twining together the diverse strands of his vast interests. As in the days of Gastr del Sol, songs float in idiosyncratic yet exceptionally unhurried arrangements.  The Plain Where the Palace Stood features vocals on just four of the eleven tracks, yet the album as whole flows—breathes—effortlessly alongside the most critically acclaimed releases of his great catalog, not to mention his contemporaries and kindred artists – Oren Ambarchi, Scott Walker, Talk Talk, and Sunn O))).
This is a process begun on David’s previous pop album, An Optimist Notes the Dusk, nearly four years previous. Despite the fluid activity of collaborations, many of which have been released in the time since (and several others coming to fruition this year), patience, meditation and time were required to afford the depth and detail to The Plain Where The Palace Stood. The effect is both striking and tangible; the glass partition which all too often separates genre-spanning rock and academic experimentation shatters under Grubbs’s langourously insistent, idiosyncratic, immediately recognizable songs and arrangements. It’s 2013 and this is David Grubbs: Punkademic Godfather.

Featuring:
Andrea Belfi on drums, percussion and electronics
Stefano Pilia on electric and acoustic guitar
C Spencer Yeh on Violin
Attila Faravelli on electronics

Year 1949, Harry Partch – leaving for Gualala. Old smithy on a cliff, an isolated recording studio, breeding of a troop of small creatures called „Eleven Intrusions” – perhaps one of the first cosmopolitan reinventions of American native music.

Populista BR POP 08: Ten Intrusions

Voice by Pete Simonelli
Guitar by David Grubbs
Organ by David Maranha
Percussion by Andrea Belfi

1. The Rose
2. The Crane
3. First Intrusion
4. The Waterfall
5. The Wind
6. The Street
7. Lover
8. Second Intrusion
9. Soldiers-War-Another War
10. Vanity

Selection of texts follows that of Harry Partch’s „Eleven Intrusions”
Texts by Ella Young, Ella Young and Lao Tzu, Tsurayuki, Willard Motley, George Leite, Giuseppe Ungaretti
Music by Andrea Belfi, David Grubbs, David Maranha and Pete Simonelli

All music premiered and recorded at Playback Play 2012 in Powiększenie
POP 08, 09: mixed and mastered by The Norman Conquest,
POP 07: edited and mixed by DJ Lenar and Michał Libera, mastered by The Norman Conquest
Produced by Michał Libera
Artwork by Aleksandra Waliszewska
Layout by Piotrek Bukowski
Published by Bôłt Records
Distributed worldwide by Monotype Records
Distributed in Poland by Bęc Zmiana

*

Three takes on America – three journeys and three documents. Written and recorded.
Year 1939, John A. Lomax and Ruby T. Lomax in their Plymouth – going South. 6502 miles, tons of audio recordings and a diary where the voices of South and the report on the voices of South become barely distinguishable.

Finally, just recently, an anonymous quest for vanishing – say north of Highway 15 and West of Baker. Online manual.

All three documents were approached by musicians who met in Warsaw for Playback Play 2012 – a week long series of rehearsals and performances. And then put together to form – what exactly? A historiosophical narrative in music arrangements? A distant mirage of something we have already heard somewhere? Three images of America facing each other?

This Saturday , March 23rd 2013, at Centre Pompidou, Paris:

Angela Bulloch & David Grubbs “The Wired Salutation”

As part of its continuing interest in creating convergence between the visual arts and live events, the Centre Pompidou invited artist Angela Bulloch and musician David Grubbs to mount an original production. Both chose to instigate the process by which images and ideas break down, deteriorate and simplify. This loosening and slackening occurs visually through performance, video and theatrical light and takes the audience on a voyage to the interior of the image. Simultaneously, the live musical composition creation by David Grubbs (guitar and voice), Andrea Belfi (drums, electronic) and Stefano Pilia (guitar) work and compress the sound material by separating out its constituent parts, one by one, thus separating from the work’s initial coherence. Angela Bulloch’s conceptual works combine a practice inherited from minimalist art and references to daily life. They subvert existing systems, rules and structures and, thus, the public’s expectations. She often uses light, sound and text to create her sculptures, questioning the notion of “artist” and the perception of time.