“Perhaps now, as in Orwell’s time, censorship is not a problem of compliance—people are not ordered, or not as a rule ordered, to comply. The ogre of Orwell’s age was complacency; alas, the ogre of our age is more formidable: complicity.”
On April 9, Nick Hallett sat down with New York City based composer, guitarist, pianist, and vocalist, David Grubbs to discuss David’s new album, The Plain Where the Palace Stood. The two were familiar with one another’s work from having collaborated on numerous performances in New York of “Essential Repertoire”—including works by Luc Ferrari, Terry Riley, and Pauline Oliveros—as part of Hallett’s and Zach Layton’s new-music series Darmstadt “Classics of the Avant-Garde.”
In anticipation of his new album, David, who is also a founding member of Squirrel Bait, Bastro, and Gastr del Sol, appeared in a handful of monumental performances in Europe in the past few weeks, including a performance in Rhys Chatham’s “Guitar Trio” alongside Nina Canal and Chatham himself, sharing a bill with legendary No Wavers UT and Lydia Lunch in a program entitled “From No Wave to Post-Rock: New York – Chicago” at the Ecole Nationale Supériore d’Architecture, which you can watch online.
This meeting took place in the relative corporate splendor of an unspecified midtown Manhattan cafeteria. David had sushi and Nick had a salad.
NICK HALLETT: Where have you played most recently?
DAVID GRUBBS: I just came back from three weeks in France. I did a collaborative performance called The Wired Salutation with the visual artist Angela Bulloch in the theater at the Pompidou Center, and it was a blast. In the past I’ve done soundtracks for several of her pixel-box pieces, which are generally extremely low-resolution pulsating grids of color that are derived from familiar cinematic texts, like Zabriskie Point or the Star Gate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey. We’d talked about making that process visible—the transition from perfectly recognizable cinematic image to its taking the form of 48 large pixels. Fairly far along in the process, she became interested in working with 3-D avatars, which she made of the four musical performers. In one section there’s a double quartet, as all eight figures are visible to the audience.
NH: Where do you see these collaborations with visual artists in relation to your new album?
DG: The danger of these collaborations across disciplines is in having too strict of a division of labor—in my case, of getting stuck doing the music. When I make an album, I write music, I write lyrics, I come up with the visual design, etc. I get to do all of that stuff.
NH: Where do you draw the line between writing a composition and recording a track for a record? Or are those divisions useless to you?
DG: The instrumental pieces are compositions, certainly, although that’s not the language that I instinctively use. They’re not scored, and arrangements are often arrived at collaboratively. I always choose to play with people whose input I desire.
NH: Do the songs exist in a similar framework? Are they art songs?
DG: The question of art songs always came up with Gastr del Sol. I think Jim O’Rourke had it right in being clear that there’s a tradition of art song—Ives being the touchstone for the two of us—and what we do doesn’t belong to it. It wasn’t important to advance those kinds of distinctions, but clearly he thought it was fanciful for anyone to speak of what we were doing as being in that tradition.
NH: There’s a song on The Plain Where the Palace Stood called “Ornamental Hermit.” And for me, it’s a different kind of song than what I’m used to on your records. It approaches a verse/chorus format where more of your songs are based in recitative or a more internalized kind of poetry.
DG: I don’t write poetry for the page because my inclination in that area is satisfied by songwriting. “Ornamental Hermit” was a comparatively effortless song to write, which is rare for me. Typically a song like “I Started to Live When My Barber Died,” which has very little repetition, and all of these different line lengths, is put together over the span of weeks or months.
NH: Conventional songs can be the result of a crazy amount of inspiration, and the best songs normally come together in the shortest amount of time, for me at least.
DG: I don’t feel that way about my own work. I think about Stephin Merritt at one point saying that it doesn’t take him more than fifteen minutes to write a song. What a different way of working …
NH: I’ve spent ten years working on some songs but my favorites are the ones that appear to me in a moment.
DG: For me, it’s good to have those dissimilar modes of songwriting sit side-by-side on a record, because they yield such different results. The ornamental hermit is a figure that I came across in Denton Welch’s novel Maiden Voyage. In eighteenth-century England, there was a practice of hiring a picturesque hermit who would inhabit the beautiful ruin on your estate. To me it rhymes with certain kinds of pop-music entertainers and eccentrics—both touted and tolerated. If the records that I make have one thing in common, it’s that there is little recapitulation, and the idea is that it should end in a place very different from where it began, and that you’ve heard musicians undergo a change or be irreversibly transformed.
NH: Is there a precedent for this in other records of yours?
DG: It’s more like the Gastr del Sol records, where there are longer expanses of instrumental texture.
NH: Should we expect more of this in the future?
DG: It feels consistent with live performances that I’ve been doing lately, where the balance—the imbalance—with a tilt towards instrumentals. The album feels like the kind of set that I’m happiest playing now.
NH: You want to fully inhabit the work. One reason why we’re drawn to collaborations is to play around in areas we’re not fully comfortable or skilled in.
DG: And it’s the best possible education.
David Grubbs’s new album The Plain Where the Palace Stood is out now on Drag City Records.
Nick Hallett is a NYC-based composer, vocalist and impresario who works across genre and media to create innovative, multidisciplinary music-based performances.
TODD MAY: There’s an image from, I think, ancient Chinese philosophy that tries to get you to understand how long immortality is. It says, imagine you have a beach with grains of sand—let’s imagine the size of the Sahara—and imagine a bird comes and takes one of the grains of sand and flies off. Ten thousand years later, that bird comes back and takes another grain of sand and flies off—and this happens every ten thousand years. Now, by the time the bird emptied the beach, emptied the entire Sahara, not a millisecond of eternity will have gone by. In other words, you have to realize that immortality lasts a really long time.
Read the entire interview by Matt Bieber on the Believer website. »
Remember the days when writers used to write paper letters to each other, sent through the mail? Did their letters feel so different from all the emailing that goes on today? We set up writers Claudia Dey and Stacey Levine in a paper-correspondence, and are posting their letters on The Believer Logger slightly after the letters are received by their intendeds in the mail. This is the second letter from Claudia to Stacey. Here is the previous letter in the series. This was the first letter.
Dear Stacey,
It is spring here and everyone is injured. Just yesterday, I saw a young woman in jean shorts with a gold-colored prosthetic leg. This would never have happened if she had been wearing an overcoat. With human skin comes medical equipment, I guess.
Apparently, the new thing is “cool”, which I admit I have tried, but found, with its emphasis on opposing actions, exhausting. I prefer a more direct route so I just wanted to say outright: I am having a terrific time on our blind date.
There are a couple of flourishes in your first letter that readers would not have been able to see. One is a sticker of a pretty, galloping horse with the thought bubble: “I am not confused.” Another is your signature: Stacey L. The L is shaped like the L on Laverne’s shirts. I am curious: Have you ever worn a uniform? Or ridden a horse? (I have done both, and unfortunately, my horse was confused.)
Please, what was the honking sound you set your paragraphs to? Animal? Machine? My ambient panic? I felt especially concerned when you left off your letter to investigate Nancy Drew-style: “There’s nothing wrong with going outside late at night…”
You asked what I am up to this week, and all I can say is: Last Sunday, something very upsetting happened on our street. We pulled the curtains open and there were police cars, ambulances, two fire trucks and a SWAT team in front of our house. I stepped onto our porch and asked the nearest cop what was going on and he said: “There is a man in distress and we are trying to keep him calm.” I had a baby in my arms. “There are no weapons involved. There is nothing for you to be concerned about.” I decided we should leave the house.
Going out the back way, I turn into the alley with the stroller and, ahead of me there are four people in stocking feet standing with their backs to a garage door. They are making the sound of children in trouble; laughter, but not quite, and they are looking up. On separate rooftops, there are two SWAT team guys in full riot gear. They are standing very still. A gasp and suddenly the four people run between the houses; whomever they are tracking has moved from the back of the house to the front of the house, and they are on the roof.
Five hours later, I am coming home with the baby in the stroller and now, also, with my six-year old. We are meeting my parents at our house to celebrate Mother’s Day. (It is Mother’s Day.) We arrive at the back alley and it has been cordoned off with caution tape. At its far end, a neighbor I recognize sees me and shrugs. A police officer appears; he lifts his finger signaling to wait. He then comes back several minutes later, “Just out of your eyesight there is a woman on her roof. She is threatening to jump.” I explain where we live. “You need to take the other way home.” Doing so, my six-year old asks, “What kind of fever does she have?” I tell him that is a good way to think about it.
We get home and my fingerprints are pressed into my son’s hand. The baby has fallen asleep. My mother, who loves crime of any kind, tells us what she has found out: The woman had a fight with her boyfriend. She has threatened to jump if anyone walks by and looks up at her. She is running and jumping between the rooftops. Is your office door locked?
An hour or so later, my son scrapes his knee. As my father says, it “ looks angry.” He is inconsolable. Eventually, a good half-hour into murder-scene crying, I bring him out on to the street to distract him with the emergency. There are about a hundred people on their front lawns in barbecue outfits, talking in groups and looking up. The SWAT men are carrying metal things and trick driving, but despite this display, my son wants to get closer to see the woman. No, I say, while explaining to the trumpet player across the street that I am consoling my child with his bleeding knee by watching a suicide attempt.
Soon after, they rescue the woman with a cherry picker. Wheeling her on a stretcher into a waiting ambulance, I can see the back of her head and it tells me nothing about her. A neighbor grumbles: she kept the street closed for seven hours. As if to say: and she didn’t even jump!
In true date-fashion, I’ll answer your questions now (again, terrific.) I do not use outlines. This is not to say that I don’t have ways of ordering. I am very orderly, but not omniscient. Maybe I am like those architects whose blueprints are scribbled onto napkins and I have rooms filled with napkins and they are carefully catalogued. I actually feel I would make a lesser building if I did have an outline - that I would be superimposing something GPS-esque on to my work prematurely - and that the best parts often come unbidden. You?
Regarding Canadian-writer happiness measured against American-writer happiness, let’s meet at the border and discuss it. Which side would you want to be on? The happy or the unhappy side? Does one make for better writing?
I am reading “The Girl with Brown Fur” and find I am laughing like those four people with their backs to the garage door, looking up, not knowing what will happen next, but caring in a way that is unsettling.
The thing is, about the woman almost ten doors down, unless she had been really precise about her fall, it would not have killed her. She would have broken bones – maybe just a leg - and joined the legion of people walking around injured.
Tell me: How was your Terence Davies movie?
Your pen pal,
Claudia
