“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. »
Have you any books from Siglio Press? I think if you saw one you’d remember it, because they happen to rock. Siglio Press has been putting out basically some of the best hybrid art books for half a decade now, with incredible success. Want to start an art press but you’re also into majorly legit writing? Would you like to learn about varying contemporary art movements and then wow a dinner party without sounding like a jerk? Siglio Press Publisher Lisa Pearson made some time for us—which, that was cool, and you might enjoy reading this. If you’re a square, don’t bother. Love, Nicolle
NICOLLE ELIZABETH: Hi, Lisa. We’re interviewing publishers, authors, and editors in an effort to share information with readers on what it is like to work in the many facets of publishing. Siglio is a publishing house that has brought many things, such as the works of Spero and Brainard and Calle, to better light. Can you walk us through the differences between publishing novels and publishing art books, with regard to the specifics of the process?
LISA PEARSON: Collaboration and conversation. The novelist generally writes in isolation and most often thinks of “the book” as a kind of delivery system for the language she has so carefully composed and honed into a work of literary art. If she works with an editor, it is on the writing itself; the physical qualities of “the book” are out of her hands and may be of little interest other than wanting a really great cover and decent paper stock. For an artist, and particularly for the kinds of books Siglio publishes—which are more like artists’ books than monographs or catalogues—the physical manifestation of the work as a book is not only critical but intrinsic to the work: it mediates the reader’s relationship with that work in a way that is much less transparent than with a novel, a nonfiction book, or a collection of stories. There are a thousand decisions, large and small, to get the work to really live on the page and as as an object the reader holds in her hands. That’s a dynamic process in which publisher and author/artist engage together: it’s creative and conceptual, but also practical and logistical. And I bring that same kind of attention to the fiction and prose I publish. For instance, in the novel SPRAWL by Danielle Dutton, there are no actual images, but the shape of the book itself, the wide margins, and the space between lines of text, make an essential contribution to nature of the reader’s experience with the book. It’s subtle, but it makes a difference.
NE: How much time does it typically take for an art book to be birthed to the world, from acquisition to shelf?
LP: “Acquisition” isn’t quite the right word for what I do, though I hope it will be sometime in the future (and make my life a little easier). Many of the books I publish are nurtured, developed, shaped into form out of conversations with the artists and writers (or those who represent their estates) I approach or who approach me. Sometimes it takes as little as six months from an initial breakfast meeting of coffee and latkes to a press-ready book (as with The Nancy Book by Joe Brainard, edited by Ron Padgett and myself). Other times, the gathering, editing, designing process can easily take more than a year (or three as it was with It Is Almost That: A Collection of Image+Text Work by Women Artists & Writers, so that I could consider hundreds of works and narrow the selection down to a couple dozen). And in some cases, a conversation gets started without necessarily a specific project in mind, and we just see where it goes. Of course, when an unsolicited query lands in my inbox and yields a book like SPRAWL (which required minimal editing), I’m thrilled.
Once a book’s on press though, the timing is pretty standard. I have to print overseas in order for the books to be affordable. Six months is generally the norm from going on press to the book appearing on a bookstore shelf—and the norm is generally full of mishaps so it shouldn’t take six months, but it always does. Anything can happen. From tsunamis and earthquakes to sunken boats and lost trucks, not to mention recalcitrant (or just plain slow) printers can add weeks to the schedule.
NE: Do you believe that art books are a niche market or can they transcend into the literary realm as well, and if so, how? Siglio seems to transcend genre.
LP: The books I publish straddle both the literary and art worlds. Though most look like “art books,” they are all very literary—language, narrative structures, poetics, lexica of various sorts, voice, character, etc. play essential roles in various ways in all Siglio books. Or as in the case of SPRAWL and the kind of fiction and prose I publish, “the visual” inflects or infiltrates the text in sometimes literal and sometimes oblique or even invisible ways. Siglio is all about that hybridity which actually means many niches, many audiences. And I think niche is just another way of saying small—so yes, the market is relatively small, but it’s diverse, and a little different for every title. What matter most to me—after developing as wide an audience as I can for each individual title—is building a core audience of readers who are curious, adventurous, and fascinated by the unexpected connections that a shelf of Siglio books might yield. The readers who can make the leap from radical geography to abstract tantric painting to a visual archive of a fictional alter-ego to nonsensical, Victoriana collage to pop appropriation to… Well, that’s a very small niche of readers, but I’ve found them—and they’re finding Siglio. I love those readers most. They transcend.
NE: If one, just one of our readers wanted to start an art book press, what would you tell them?
LP: Go to Printed Matter’s New York Art Book Fair (every year in September at MoMA P.S.1) or the new one they’re organizing in Los Angeles (at the MOCA Geffen) in January. You’ll see all kinds of amazing presses doing extremely interesting things and giving it absolutely everything they’ve got. If you don’t see there the kind of work you believe deserves a space in the world—and you’re willing to give it every ounce of your being to make it happen—then go for it. There are plenty of us somehow making it happen. Why not you?
(Image Courtesy Siglio Press)
