David Grubbs

Friday, September 23, 2022
7pm

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Guitarist, writer and teacher David Grubbs reads from his new book, Good night the pleasure was ours. The reading is free. A solo and ensemble performance follows at 9pm as a separate ticketed event.

With Good night the pleasure was ours, David Grubbs melts down and recasts three decades of playing music on tour into a book-length poem, bringing to a close the trilogy that includes Now that the audience is assembled and The Voice in the Headphones.

In Good night the pleasure was ours, the world outside the tour filters in with eccentric sparseness. From teenage punk bands to ensembles without fixed membership, and from solo performance to a group augmented by digital avatars, Grubbs presents touring as a series of daily dislocations that provides an education distinctly its own. These musicians’ job is to play that evening’s gig—whether to enthusiastic, hostile, or apathetic audiences—and then to do it again the next day. And yet, over the course of the book’s multidecade arc, Grubbs depicts music making as an irreversible process—one reason for loving it so.

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“David Grubbs, dazzlingly protean, turns musical-time into poetry-time by streaming condensed, sonorous phrases through his own magical verse-machine, Dantean in its three-pronged approach to paradise. Grubbs takes the entire experience of music making—listening, practicing, improvising, recording, performing, touring, reconsidering, remembering—and gives these complexities a porous and filigreed poetic form, transforming an evanescent panoply of acoustic events into a bravura verbal monument, as if Cage and Mallarmé had found a way to build a singing cathedral together.”

— Wayne Koestenbaum, author of The Cheerful Scapegoat

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David Grubbs is Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. At Brooklyn College he also teaches in the MFA programs in Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA) and Creative Writing. He is the author of Good night the pleasure was ours, The Voice in the Headphones, Now that the audience is assembled, and Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording (all published by Duke University Press) as well as the collaborative artists’ books Simultaneous Soloists (with Anthony McCall, Pioneer Works Press) and Projectile (with Reto Geiser and John Sparagana, Drag City).

Grubbs has released fourteen solo albums and appeared on more than 200 releases. In 2000, his The Spectrum Between (Drag City) was named “Album of the Year” in the London Sunday Times. He is known for his ongoing cross-disciplinary collaborations with poet Susan Howe and visual artists Anthony McCall and Angela Bulloch, and his work has been presented at, among other venues, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, the Tate Modern, and the Centre Pompidou. Grubbs was a member of the groups Gastr del Sol, Bastro, and Squirrel Bait, and has performed with Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, Luc Ferrari, Will Oldham, Loren Connors, the Red Krayola, Royal Trux, and many others.

This is an all ages event

Presented by VDSQ and the Poetic Research Bureau