Thursday 5 June 2014, 8pm
David Grubbs returns to OTO with his trio alongside two of Italy's finest: Andrea Belfi and Stefano Pilia - both, like Grubbs, well-versed in tearing the wall down between avant-garde praxis and rock energy. David Grubbs is one of the most influential musicians of his generation: a legacy that includes such bands as Squirrel Bait, Bastro and Gastr del Sol, numerous collaborative works and a string of LPs that present his idiosyncratic, immediately recognisable songs and arrangements. "It’s best to see tonight’s performance as the latest in a long line of high points from a songwriter-composer confirming his role as, amongst many other things, a standard-bearer for intelligent, uncompromising guitar music." - Thomas Blake, Folk Radio UK.
David Grubbs returns to OTO with his trio alongside two of Italy's finest: Andrea Belfi and Stefano Pilia - both, like Grubbs, well-versed in tearing the wall down between avant-garde praxis and rock energy. David Grubbs is one of the most influential musicians of his generation: a legacy that includes such bands as Squirrel Bait, Bastro and Gastr del Sol, numerous collaborative works and a string of LPs that present his idiosyncratic, immediately recognisable songs and arrangements.
"It’s best to see tonight’s performance as the latest in a long line of high points from a songwriter-composer confirming his role as, amongst many other things, a standard-bearer for intelligent, uncompromising guitar music." - Thomas Blake, Folk Radio UK(review of the trio's performance at OTO in June 2013)
DAVID GRUBBS
David Grubbs is one of the most influential musicians of his generation: a legacy that includes such bands as Squirrel Bait, Bastro and Gastr del Sol. Moving eccentrically forward from the straight-ahead hardcore punk of Squirrel Bait (after all, he was a wizened eighteen years old when SB called it a day) David increasingly infused his songcraft with an experimental strain, culminating in the discography of Gastr del Sol, who drew widespread interest with the ways in which they combined so-called "songs" with experimental music. Participating in the reinvigorated Red Krayola during this time exposed David to the formative tutelage of Mayo Thompson as well. But after the gradually more streamlined Gastr period concluded with Camoufleur, David's output became more segregated; the albums of pop songs were more focusedly, more cussedly pop, and the more experimental projects (including duo recordings with Mats Gustafsson, Nikos Veliotis, and Loren Connors, not to mention the entire catalog of his Blue Chopsticks label) became more unrelenting.
"Dust & Mirrors combines tonal minimalist repetition with hanging cadences of back-porch guitar and Grubb's sung-spoken poetry. The Headlock reshapes a riff that could fill stadiums. The album is unashamedly beautiful, but never banal; fiercely intelligent, never obscure" - Stewart Lee, The Sunday Times, review of Dust & Mirrors
Flash forward to April 16th, 2013: Drag City releases the sixth and latest David Grubbs album of songs, The Plain Where the Palace Stood, which finds David once again twining together the diverse strands of his vast interests. As in the days of Gastr del Sol, songs float in idiosyncratic yet exceptionally unhurried arrangements. The Plain Where the Palace Stood features vocals on just four of the eleven tracks, yet the album as whole flows—breathes—effortlessly alongside the most critically acclaimed releases of his great catalog, not to mention his contemporaries and kindred artists - Oren Ambarchi, Scott Walker, Talk Talk, and Sunn O))).
This is a process begun on David's previous pop album, An Optimist Notes the Dusk, nearly four years previous. Despite the fluid activity of collaborations, many of which have been released in the time since (and several others coming to fruition this year), patience, meditation and time were required to afford the depth and detail to The Plain Where The Palace Stood. The effect is both striking and tangible; the glass partition which all too often separates genre-spanning rock and academic experimentation shatters under Grubbs’s langourously insistent, idiosyncratic, immediately recognizable songs and arrangements.
blackfaurest.tumblr.com
ANDREA BELFI / drums
Andrea Belfi (drums, electronics), has studied composition, improvisation and technical applications of electroacoustics. He performs with his electroacoustic solo performance with drums and electronics together, as well as in different collaborative projects. His collaborations extend to diverse musical fields, from electroacoustic experimentation with the trio with David Grubbs and Stefano Pilia and the duo Tangle with Attila Faravelli, to the rock trio "il sogno del marinaio" with the punk-rock legend Mike Watt and Pilia, to the avant-folk of Larkin Grimm, from the radical improvisation of the duo with Ignaz Schick to the audio/visual performance in Stillivingrooms. His work has been released on Chocolateguns, Hapna, Die Schachtel and ROOM40. He toured extensively along all Europe and U.S.(Chicago, New York, Paris, Berlin, Oslo, London, Brussels among others).
www.chocolateguns.com
STEFANO PILIA / guitar
Bologna-based guitarist Stefano Pilia's solo work draws on his research into the sculputural dimensions of sound and it’s relations with space, memory and time suspension both through instrumental executional-experimental practices (mainly on guitar and dbass) and investigations into the recording and production process… He is one of the founder members of 3/4HadBeenEliminated, a group that synthesises improvisation, electro-acoustic composition and avant-rock sensibilties. Since 2008 he's been part of the Italian band Massimo Volume and since 2010 of In Zaire and has collaborated with Mike Watt (il sogno del marinaio), David Grubbs (bgp trio), David Tibet and ZU (zu93), Rokia Traorè and John Parish, Phill Niblock, Marina Rosenfeld, Andrea Belfi, Valerio Tricoli and Claudio Rocchetti (3/4HBE), Giuseppe Ielasi, and many more...
blindsuncrows.com
“Italian guitarist Stefano Pilia is a lyrical minimalist… His playing is poised, higly articulate and emotionally generous” Jon Dale / THE WIRE
David Grubbs is Distinguished Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. He is the author of Good night the pleasure was ours, The Voice in the Headphones, Now that the audience is assembled, and Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording (all published by Duke University Press) as well as the collaborative artists’ books Simultaneous Soloists (with Anthony McCall, Pioneer Works Press) and Projectile (with Reto Geiser and John Sparagana, Drag City).
Grubbs has released fifteen solo albums and appeared on more than 200 releases. In 2000, his The Spectrum Between (Drag City) was named “Album of the Year” in the London Sunday Times. He is known for his ongoing cross-disciplinary collaborations with poet Susan Howe and visual artists Anthony McCall and Angela Bulloch, and his work has been presented at, among other venues, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, the Tate Modern, and the Centre Pompidou. Grubbs was a member of the groups Gastr del Sol, Bastro, and Squirrel Bait, and has performed with Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, Luc Ferrari, Will Oldham, Loren Connors, the Red Krayola, Royal Trux, and many others.
Italian-born Andrea Belfi is a drummer, composer, and experimental musician based in Berlin. Over the years Belfi has built a sound world blending the complex timbres of the acoustic with the endless possibilities of the electronic. Belfi has a strong live reputation internationally and his performances are known to be energetic and hypnotic, featuring long-arching immersive soundscapes. He was invited by Thom Yorke to open for his solo show on an international tour in 2019. His last releases Ore and Strata gained Belfi many new fans including tastemakers Mary Anne Hobbs, Gilles Peterson, and Sasha Frere-Jones among others. Over the last few years, he’s been collaborating and touring with artists such as Nils Frahm, Mouse on Mars, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Mike Watt, Circuit des Yeux, David Grubbs. He has been on stage at Philharmonie de Paris, Montreux Jazz Festival, The Greek Theater (Los Angeles), Unsound Festival (Krakow), Barbican Center (London), Issue Project Room (New York), and CTM Festival (Berlin). Belfi will be returning to Cafe Oto since his last performance there in 2016 to celebrate 10 years of Marionette.
Stefano Pilia is a guitar player and composer born in Genoa and based in Bologna. His work has become progressively concerned with researching the sculptural properties of sound as well as sound’s relationship with space, memory and the suspension of time. Pilia explores these points of focus through instrumental practice and investigations into the recording and production process. He is one of the founding members (alongside Valerio Tricoli and Claudio Rocchetti) of the seminal group 3/4HadBeenEliminated, a project that synthesises improvisational, electroacoustical and avant-rock sensibilities. He is also a member of the psychedelic quartet In Zaire, the BGP trio with David Grubbs and Andrea Belfi, and il Sogno del Marinaio alongside legendary Minutemen bassist Mike Watt. Pilia is also the lead guitarist for celebrated Malian singer Rokia Traorè and the cult Italian band Afterhours. He has collaborated with artists and musicians including Katia and Marielle Labeque, David Tibet, Zu, Oren Ambarchi, John Parish, Fire Orchestra!, Angela Bullock, Oliver Mann, Gianluigi Toccafondo, Laura Agnusdei, WuMing, Phill Niblock, Z’ev, Manuel Mota, Enrico Malatesta, David Maranha and Dean Roberts.
