A series of electric guitar duet meditations.
Remember hearing music while dreaming, fully confident that you'll be able to reconstruct it once awake? Music that, as it turns out, you were the sole witness. In retrospect, why ruin the experience by something so vulgar as hearing it a second time, much less having to share it? We don't mean to alarm you, but David Grubbs and Liam Keenan have returned from the dark side of the pillow bearing "Your Music Encountered in a Dream."
How did they do it?
They did it by meeting to record a series of electric guitar duets in Sydney just as summer was turning to fall. They did it because Grubbs was limber and uncharacteristically chill after a couple of weeks in Australia playing shows and not playing shows. Sydney resident Liam Keenan's comfort zone gravitates toward singing and songwriting under the moniker Meteor Infant, and on this session one genuinely senses an unabashed spirit of discovery. It's happening, it's really happening in these three generously scaled improvisations. Maybe The Necks—as well as solo recordings by
Tony Buck and Chris Abrahams—count as unconscious reference points. From the juggling and interplay of pitches in isolation, to the ecstatic speaking-together of strings, to guitar music as electronic music, there's little in the way of searching for endings in this revelatory meeting. No hastening the dream's end. Hail the first encounter.
David Grubbs (born 1967) is an associate professor in the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College, CUNY, where he also teaches in the MFA programs in Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA) and Creative Writing. Grubbs has released numerous solo albums and is known for his cross-disciplinary collaborations with writers such as Susan Howe and Rick Moody, and with visual artists such as Anthony McCall,
Angela Bulloch, and Stephen Prina. He was a member of the groups Gastr del Sol (with
Jim O'Rourke), Bastro, and Squirrel Bait, and has performed with the Red Krayola, Will Oldham,
Tony Conrad,
Pauline Oliveros, and
Loren Connors, among many others. His work has been presented at, among other venues, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, the Tate Modern, and the Centre Pompidou. He is a grant recipient from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a contributing editor in music for
BOMB Magazine, a member of the
Blank Forms board of directors, and director of the Blue Chopsticks record label.
Liam Keenan is a Sydney-based guitarist and singer-songwriter.
