Books by David Grubbs
Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording
by David Grubbs
John Cage's disdain for records was legendary. He repeatedly spoke of the ways in which recorded music was antithetical to his work. In Records Ruin the Landscape, David Grubbs argues that, following Cage, new genres in experimental and avant-garde music in the 1960s were particularly ill suited to be represented in the form of a recording. These activities include indeterminate music, long-duration minimalism, text scores, happenings, live electronic music, free jazz, and free improvisation. How could these proudly evanescent performance practices have been adequately represented on an LP?
In their day, few of these works circulated in recorded form. By contrast, contemporary listeners can encounter this music not only through a flood of LP and CD releases of archival recordings but also in even greater volume through Internet file sharing and online resources. Present-day listeners are coming to know that era's experimental music through the recorded artifacts of composers and musicians who largely disavowed recordings. In Records Ruin the Landscape, Grubbs surveys a musical landscape marked by altered listening practices.
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Introducing Tony Conrad: A Retrospective
by Rachel Adams, Christopher Williams, David Grubbs, Annie Ochmanek, Andrew Lampert, Tina Rivers Ryan, Branden Joseph, Tony Conrad, Cathleen Chaffee, Vera Alemani, Constance DeJong, Diedrich Diederichsen, Anthony Elms, Henriette Huldisch, Christopher Müller, Tony Oursler, Jay Sanders, Paige Sarlin
An in-depth introduction to an artist who forged a unique path through numerous artistic movements and a vast range of cultural forms
Throughout his six-decade career, Tony Conrad (1940–2016) forged a unique path through numerous artistic movements and a vast range of cultural forms―from Fluxus to rock music, from structural film to public access television. Published on the occasion of the first large-scale museum survey devoted to works Conrad presented in museum and gallery settings, this richly illustrated catalogue offers an in-depth introduction to Conrad's life and career.
Including new texts and Conrad's own writings about selected works dating from 1966 to 2016, Introducing Tony Conrad surveys the artist's work in painting, sculpture, film, video, performance and installation. It includes the artist's early structural films; projects in which he treated film as a sculptural and performative material; his series of Invented Acoustical Tools, presented as sculptures themselves; his ambitious films about power relations, set in the military and in prison; and his final sculptures and installations, which evoke and critique what he perceived as an emerging culture of surveillance, control and containment. The list of contributors testifies to Conrad's wide and lasting influence; this volume includes texts by Constance DeJong, Diedrich Diederichsen, Anthony Elms, Branden W. Joseph, Tony Oursler and Christopher Williams, among many others.
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Now that the audience is assembled
by David Grubbs
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.
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