this interview was conducted by Krystian Woznicki, a critic and curator based in Tokyo, for the magazine _SoundArts_ vol.13 & 14, published in english and japanese by the XEBEC corporation in Kobe, Japan.

When David Grubbs first came to Tokyo with The Red Crayola, Gastr del Sol's nocturnal follow up to their 93 debut album _The Serpentine Similiar_ had just been released. I remember asking him about band projects prior to Gastr del Sol -- of which he together with Jim O'Rourke is a founding member. His answer was plain ("Oh, just louder, and faster, but basically the same program") and anything but unsettling as it retroactively is, upon facing last year's reissues of his college punk band Squirrelbait, and upon listening to _Sing the Troubled Beast_ (1990) by short-lived rock experiment Bastro. With six albums in the last four years, various contributions and collaborations (such as one still in the making with Oval), Gastr del Sol has been far more exhaustively featured by the press than Bastro was at its time. During the following interview (conducted via e-mail in the second half of July) I learned that Jim O'Rourke has left the unit after completion of their forthcoming album _Camoufleur_. Speculation about a possible end in the not-too-distant future evokes a deja vu. That is, breaking up at this point would leave the media much where it was then: 'exegesis' has hardly begun... David Grubbs' insisting on a certain sense of continuity, suggests there being an aesthetical "program" beyond genre categorizations (with their inherent hierarchical order); a "program" not limited to the social baggage dictated by a recognizable "style"; redeeming composition from drowining in its own sources. These traits have been embraced and strechted by critics to the point of a continuous mis en scene: reviews of new Gastr del Sol material reviewing the reviewers surprise, incapability, etc. In short, reception resorting to the dubiously fruitful endeavor of engaging upon what the music is not about. In addition to the aforementioned, linguistic and cinematic references to Gastr del Sol's compositional agenda are no novelty. They have, above all, equally staged what is not there, lacking, missing.

David Grubbs, now 29, has been also active in the field of film music. Along with Ken Vandermark, Jim O'Rourke, and Will Oldham, he recently appeared on the soundtrack for the film _Dutch Harbor: Where the Sea Breaks Its Back_. Mayo Thompson's The Red Krayola, of which he and Jim O'Rourke are steady members, have finished a soundtrack for Norman and Bruce Yonemoto's _Japan in Paris in L.A._. Gastr del Sol had also music in Doug Aitken's _The Diamond Sea_ (which was in the Whitney Biennial).

Has he come full circle? Can we see his music making activity as finally being (visually) completed? What would be an affirmative way of approaching music that supposedly defies description, without stepping into the pitfall of "easy" acceptance entailed by enshrining it e.g. as "beautiful"?

Answers are not to be found in David Grubbs' academical career. But mention should be made of it at this juncture, since it touches upon some of the issues brought forth. This year winter for example, he is teaching a creative writing course at the University of Chicago entitled _Sound Texts_, "in which students will have to join a community access recording studio and execute radio plays based on their work." Since 1996, Grubbs works on his dissertation, which deals with John Cage's aesthetics as seen from the disciplines of literature, sound, and the visual arts. One chapter of it is dedicated to recorded sound.

His first solo album _Banana Cabbage, Potato Lettuce, Onion Orange_ has been released earlier this year on the Atlanta based Table of the Elements label. Three solo pieces entitled BA, PL, OO, generate recurring patterns of sparse tonal harmonics and silences. Written for piano, untreated electric, and acoustic guitar they tend to communicate within inner structures, as much as they do with the listener. It made a lasting impression on me, when, I think it was in Autumn 1995, I received a fax message from him, of which the head was the very title of his current album.

Krystian Woznicki (KW): When and how did you initially come up with _Banana Cabbage, Potato Lettuce, Onion Orange_?

David Grubbs (DG): The title comes from a fruit market sign in my neighborhood that I noticed four years ago. Its text is laid out in such a way that it looks like it's advertising three items with compound names rather than six. Compound names for types of produce are not unheard-of; for example, there are banana peppers and acorn squash and so forth. So the sign was a bit of a found object that had its meaning in combination rather than juxtaposition of terms. Instead of a making-strange, for me it suggested more or less plausible compound names -- "'banana cabbage,' hmm, i've never had banana cabbage before." It was considered as a title before Gastr del Sol settled on _Upgrade & Afterlife_, but seemed a little too aggressively unfocused. A too-red herring. Then when I started thinking about doing a record by myself, it occurred to me that I could do three instrumental pieces, that the pieces would be entitled "Banana Cabbage," "Potato Lettuce," and "Onion Orange," and that the album title would be the combined title of all three pieces. So yes, the title(s) preceded the recording and ultimately was suggestive of how it could be structured.

KW: How did it end up on your letter head?

DG: By using it as a heading, I was probably seeing if it pushed anyone's buttons without having to ask directly.

1. DUO SINGLE, SOLO POTATO

KW: You play guitar since the mid-80's, continually in bands, units, however always in a different musical context; with Squirrel Bait it's been (post)punk, with Bastro experimental punk rock, with Gastr del Sol experimental pop. Now you have again changed the context, and are recording for the first time outside the social context of collaborators. I wonder what it meant to you to write these pieces and to go alone into the studio.

DG: In some ways, it began with a play on words based on the ambiguity of the term "solo." One speaks of a member of a group stepping out to make a "solo" record, meaning that it comes out under his or her name. But "solo" also refers to performances by one person alone. I decided that I would be the arch-literalist and make a solo record that was bound to the concept of recording solos. I suppose that's my sense of humor on display because the joke is that most solo records are really indulgent, that someone decides that they finally have the place and courage to say what is theirs alone to say; they blurt it out; and then it's later seen as some kind of so lipsism that they had to get out of their system. The cliche is that solo records are about someone breaking through the frustrations of collective work and really 'communicating' with an audience. That's why it can be such a dismal, interesting genre.

KW: As is the band. With Gastr del Sol you have constantly expanded its underlying presumptions. Starting with instrumentation, or rather orchestration on _The Harp Factory on Lake Street_(94) where eight additional members (including Gene Coleman on bass clarinet, Jeb Bishop on trombone and others) come together. Then you would perform rather duo oriented projects as _Crookt, Crackt, or Fly_, or _Upgrade & Afterlife_, where a rather clear cut notion of the duo constantly blurrs anyway, you would perform it, among variants, as a (semi) accoustical guitar duo, respectively arranged for guitar and piano. Dialogism, internal to the music, is disrupted, if reversals in sounds with traceable/untraceable sources occur, challenging the listeners position.

DG: Right, I forgot that the only thing more dismal (but also perhaps more interesting) than a solo project was a group project. The literalist idea of a solo project needing to consist of strictly solo performances is something that I was compelled to do for _Banana Cabbage..._, but it need not be the only way to do solo work in the future. The irony is that Gastr del Sol is technically now only myself, Jim having left the group upon our completing the forthcoming album. And I'm going to take my time and wait before I make any decisions about whether or not the group Gastr del Sol will continue. The one thing that I feel strongly about at this point is that I don't want to make records entirely by myself and have them appear under the name Gastr del Sol. To me, the act of an individual assuming some sort of collective nomenclature seems particularly played out at the moment. This is not to suggest that people who having been doing so for some time ought necessarily to reconsider, but rather the idea of launching anew some sort of one-person project under the auspices of a group name really, from where I sit, seems stale.

2. PROGRAM (s) AVAILABLE?

KW: On the last Gastr del Sol album you play a piece by guitar innovator John Fahey called "Dry Bones in the Valley" on which Tony Conrad plays violin. Both are highly individual musicians/composers. I however wonder whether the fact that they both in their own way catalyzed rock music at its crucial stage, that is, them as historical capital, had any impact on the decision-making concerning your work?

DG: The impetus to have Tony play on "Dry Bones in the Valley" came from seeing Jim [O'Rourke] play it alone onstage as an encore to a Gastr del Sol show in Atlanta and standing next to Tony Conrad, who was literally dancing with excitement. So yes, I'm sure it would have been possible for us to come up with the idea of bringing these two figures together who each have so much history attached to them, but what made it palpably obvious was this small, epiphanic scene of seeing Tony weaving and bobbing and really thrilling to the music.

KW: Does your current project however aim at enrolling a 'program' in reference to influences and legacies?

DG: Playing with people like Mayo Thompson or Tony Conrad or coming into proximity with John Fahey makes my relation to their history less abstract. That is, I don't find myself working on solo material or material in Gastr del Sol that explicitly tries to articulate my senses of influence or precedent. To give a concrete example, on _The Serpentine Similar_ -- the first Gastr del Sol record and the only one made before I knew Mayo -- I worked the title of a song from Mayo's solo record into a lyric as an homage. Since working with Mayo, I haven't expressed that sense of influence or precedent compositionally. I guess it's because now to get his attention I call him on the telephone.

KW: Using the title of a song from Mayo's solo record into a lyric as an homage, was nothing but trying to get his attention?

DG: It was not exclusively an attempt to get his attention, but that was a component of doing so. It's also about trying to get the attention of those people for whom the reference to Mayo's solo record would have meaning, and in particular some sort of emotional affect. A surprise.

KW: Does a sense of influence or precedent come to expression other than compositionally?

DG: Sure. It can be expressed in all matters of conception, from modes of sociability to business arrangements to matters of style and image presentation. It's expressed in all modes of self-representation.

KW: Thinking of "expectations" one cannot overlook an immense sensitivity on part of the consuming public nowadays: isn't it time for yet another "neo" and aren't the composers just mentioned (unwillingly) a part of it?

DG: I don't see that any particularly incisive "neo" has been put forth. There are attempts at loose groupings, cf. The Wire talking about new interest in minimalism or the connection between minimalism and folk music or dance music. And I do think that a lot of the connections being made are a propos in, for example, speaking of minimalism as a more informal practice, having at certain points had participatory ideals that are not apparent in speaking exclusively of canonical figures such as Glass, Reich, or La Monte Young. But making these sorts of connections are not the same things as making convincing "neo" categories. Maybe someone will coin another term that does the work that the term "post rock" did for some. But you have to hope that it will be more convincing (thus more interesting to engage, pro, con, or otherwise) than "post rock" has been. I mean, has "post rock" been enunciated any further than Simon Reynolds' description of a vaguely posthumanist, inorganic, essentially combinatory style? Has anything been added to that description?

3. Write the Aural East

KW: John Corbett's comments about your solo pieces accompany the album. He refers to Morton Feldman...

DG: I didn't quite know how to respond to the Feldman reference in John [Corbett]'s notes. I certainly understand the reference, but, yes, there was something strange about having it printed on the back of your record. I decided to trust John and to trust Jeff Hunt's (Table of the Elements) impulse in having a description and a critical appraisal as part of the package. I think what ultimately appealed to me was to have John's notes appended to this otherwise rigorously abstract CD design...that in some ways it flies in the face of the wordlessness of the layout, but that the excessive abstraction and potentially excessively literal description of the recording were appealingly contradictory. It would never be in my character to say, "No! The design forbids text!"

KW: There are however other ways of having text(s) accompanying music. I for instance remember when you first told me about the work of Bernhard Guenter and that you were writing something that would account of his "abstract" compositions...

DG: I would like to write something for Bernhard Guenter in part because his music seems so forbidding of words and voices (except perhaps for wordless voices). I've made a couple of preliminary attempts, none particularly satisfactory.

KW: Could you dwell upon some of the diffculties?

DG: I have been doing nothing but dwelling on the difficulties, and that's why I haven't completed anything for him! OK, that's a joke. His work demands such focus from the listener, and it seems to me again and again that putting words into his compositions would shatter the listener's concentration; it would shatter the concentration that is required of something as unfamiliar as Bernhard's music by bringing in linguistic reference. But I have by no means given up...

KW: It is sort of telling that reactions upon listening to some of Gastr del Sol's compositions, the acoustic life act (two guitars/piano), but also comments about your solo album often carry the expression "beautiful."

DG: It is an odd fate to make beautiful music. It is odd to be told that what you've made is beautiful. It is usually pleasing, but also leaves you thinking about what other sorts of responses you want to trigger. It's like being told that you're handsome. It's like everyone around you being high. Of course making beautiful music is not my fate. It is a gratifying response, but the judgment "beautiful" also tends to preclude conversation. Often you say something is beautiful and leave it at that, because "beautiful" is your way of signifying ineffable experience, one to which words do no justice.. And I do find real pleasure in many of those aspects that people find beautiful. But for me the words always come pouring back in.

KW: This is exactly what I am trying get an idea of: How to redirect words as a non-descriptive means. If wanting to escape the limitations of accademical writing, is subjective 'lyricism' the inevitable choice?

DG: I don't particularly have an ideal of "non-descriptive" words. I've always gone back and forth over Cage's way of honoring Joyce by saying that he went further than anyone else in making noise out of words. There's something in the abstract that's very appealing about Cage's suggestion, but I also cringe when thinking of particular free-improvising vocalists making profoundly unfunny avant-garde comedy, you know, bubbling like babies or holding forth like inspired lunatics. Playing the Shakespearean fool. It also makes me think of cloying, really bad performances of Schwitters' _Ursonate_ and how truly painful that can be. That manner of presentation in the name of making words into noise really makes me insane. And I think it makes me crazy because there is so much about bringing out the thorniness or fecund ambiguity of words in their very materiality that appeals deeply to me. It's what appeals to me about Cage's mesostics or much of Louis Zukofsky's poetry (for example, _80 Flowers_) or also the poet Susan Howe's work with textual elements such as marginalia and draft versions. It's what I like about Charles Olson's _Maximus_ poems and much of what I still like most about Pound's _Cantos_.

4. LAST ANSWER

KW: Let me ask bluntly. It's my last question. Could you talk about the signifying aspect of your new album?

DG: The use of the fruit market sign is akin to the use of street names in Gastr del Sol songs. There's a deictic, pointing function that is a pleasure in the making-literal. It's like the pleasure in taking snapshots -- that sign is literally there and who could improve upon it? Why would I want it any other way? It is music -- beautiful music -- to me.

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