In their time together as the avant-rock duo Gastr del Sol, David Grubbs and Jim O’Rourke functioned as Chicago ambassadors as much as musicians–touring Europe, attracting visiting artists from both sides of the pond, and exposing fans to new sounds on their own label, Dexter’s Cigar. Like Tortoise, they became a lightning rod for the media attention focused on Chicago music in the mid-90s. But the duo split acrimoniously in 1997, and both members have since moved to New York.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Grubbs returns to Chicago for the first time in almost a year on Thursday, September 12, for a one-off performance at the Abbey Pub in support of his latest solo album, Rickets & Scurvy (Drag City). A native of Louisville, Kentucky, where he cofounded the seminal indie punk band Squirrelbait, he admits it’s taken him a few years to feel comfortable in New York. “I guess you could say that musically I’m feeling a little more settled in New York because whatever expectations I had, like ‘This is bound to change who I am and what I do’…things like that have been tempered,” he says. He works regularly with the same stable of musicians he did when he lived here, including early Gastr drummer John McEntire, avant-garde violinist Tony Conrad, Swedish reedist Mats Gustafsson, New York drummer Dan Brown, and French guitarist Noel Akchote.
His newfound focus seems to have paid off. This year Grubbs has released two of his best recordings (for a dissenting opinion, see Spot Check). Act Five, Scene One (released in February on his own Blue Chopsticks label) is an hour-long instrumental experimental work with Conrad and Brown; the newer Rickets & Scurvy is his most concise and focused song-oriented collection, bristling with catchy melodies and taut execution. Gastr del Sol attempted to meld pop and hard-core experimentation, but Grubbs says he’s realized that “certain kinds of impulses are satisfied by certain kinds of records….As I was working on a wider diversity of projects all of the time, the song-based records somehow got tighter and more finished. It increasingly makes more sense to me than trying to pack it all into one record.”
