[Baltimore, MD]

David Grubbs – Reading and Performance
April 19, 2018, 8:30 pm
at The Red Room

On what will surely be a lovely Thursday evening in April, legendary guitarist David Grubbs will be reading from his new book, Now that the Audience is Assembled and playing solo electric guitar. He will play some new things and pieces from Creep Mission issued by the “Drag City” record label.••• “David Grubbs’s tone poem on the vibratory consciousness betwixt performer and listener rings with an intellect both spiritual and Earth-activist. A sublime sense of provocation is at dance with the O-mind bliss of Kenneth Koch’s The Pleasures of Peace, Pauline Oliveros’s “The Collective Intelligence of Improvisation,” and Albert Ayler’s Music is the Healing Force of the Universe. David’s meditation joins hands with these critical, artful signals of love, mercy, hope, and beauty in an enlightened and welcome vision.” — Thurston Moore ••• Following his investigation into experimental music and sound recording in Records Ruin the Landscape, David Grubbs turns his attention to the live performance of improvised music with an altogether different form of writing. Now that the audience is assembled is a book-length prose poem that describes a fictional musical performance during which an unnamed musician improvises the construction of a series of invented instruments before an audience that is alternately contemplative, participatory, disputatious, and asleep. Over the course of this phantasmagorical all-night concert, repeated interruptions take the form of in-depth discussions and musical demonstrations. Both a work of literature and a study of music, Now that the audience is assembled explores the categories of improvised music, solo performance, text scores, instrument building, aesthetic deskilling and reskilling, and the odd fate of the composer in experimental music. More information here.