You never know when that tap’s going to come. How about now? (Not for you to decide.) Or exactly what it means—except in the aftermath.

Mutual admiration society and David Grubbs and Ryley Walker had been taking notes on one another’s playing for some time before they hit the stage together on a couple of blistering occasions immediately pre-pandemic. (One of these live sets was released earlier this year as Fight or Flight Simulator on Café OTO’s Takuroku label.)

Studio sessions were clearly in the cards, and the result is A Tap on the Shoulder, a collection of duo performances that veers from crystalline instrumental compositions (“A Tap on the Shoulder,” “Accepting Most Plans,” “Dorothy Kept”) to animated alien chatterfests (“Leslie Steinberger”), and from ecstatic extrapolations charging this way and that (“Pump Fake on the Death Rattle,” “The Madman from Massachusetts in an Empty Bar”) to, I don’t know, words don’t do the trick (“Uglification”). Don’t think for a second that these shorthand descriptions suffice.

Electric guitars make electronic music. Ryley’s hellion musical fearlessness lights a fire under the more typically Apollonian, chess-masterly Grubbs. What’s good for the geezer is good for the, etc. And where the duo’s live performances thus far have been set-length juggernauts, A Tap on the Shoulder toggles effortlessly between microscope, telescope, and Cinemascope, letting the smallest of gestures land in all of its sonic specificity before opening the scene up to disorienting panoramas.

Listen to A Tap on the Shoulder in the context of Ryley’s glorious Course in Fable; listen to it in the context of Grubbs’s playing with Loren Connors, Jim O’Rourke, Taku Unami, and others; or listen to it as if you’ve never heard note one from these soulful odd birds, the two of them curiously, quixotically committed to working inside and beyond song form.

TRACK LISTING

1. A Tap On The Shoulder (5:42)
2. Accepting Most Plans (3:04)
3. Uglification (13:30)
4. Leslie Steinberger (4:27) 
5. Pump Fake On The Death Rattle (8:26)
6. Dorothy Kept (2:50)
7. The Madman From Massachusetts In An Empty Bar (7:53)

‘Concordance’ is Susan Howe’s and David Grubbs’s fifth album in the fifteen years of their unexpected and richly satisfying collaboration. Here they’ve pared down their materials to voice and piano, aspiring to the hushed intensity of their live performances. What had previously resulted from Grubbs’s recomposition of recorded materials now arrives as unadorned duo performance.

“Howe is a poet who has spent her career reminding us that our experiences of meaning and sound are synchronous.” - Tess Taylor, The New York Times

‘Concordance’ is Susan Howe’s and David Grubbs’s fifth album in the unexpected and richly satisfying collaboration that began with ‘Thiefth’ and includes ‘Souls of the Labadie Tract’, ‘Frolic Architecture’ and ‘WOODSLIPPERCOUNTERCLATTER’. Where these works feature the fragmentation and multiplication of Howe’s recorded voice - in a style akin to her celebrated text collages - with ‘Concordance’ they’ve pared down their materials to voice and piano, aspiring to the hushed intensity of their live performances. After fifteen years of working together, the subtleties of inflection and interaction that previously resulted from Howe’s nuanced delivery and Grubbs’s composition using recorded materials now arrives as unadorned duo performance.

One of America's greatest living artists, Bollingen Prize-winning poet Susan Howe’s text for ‘Concordance’ originates in a collage poem of the same name published by Grenfell Press, which then became the title work in her most recent book, published to acclaim by New Directions in 2020. She has continued to rework the text for this performed version, incorporating material from her 2015 book of essays, ‘The Quarry’. Her source material is scissored from print concordances of the poetry of Milton, Herbert, Arnold, Browning, Dickinson and Coleridge, as well as old field guides to birds, rocks, trees, moths and mushrooms; Howe’s fiery commitment to placing these echoes of the past in dialogue with the present speaks to her position as one of America’s essential artists.

David Grubbs is Professor Of Music at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. He is the author of ‘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) and, with Anthony McCall, Simultaneous Soloists (Pioneer Works Press). Grubbs has played in Gastr del Sol, The Red Krayola and Squirrel Bait and performed with Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros and Will Oldham, among many others.

TRACK LISTING

CONCORDANCE (Part One)
CONCORDANCE (Part Two)

If ‘mission creep’ refers to a long haul fatigue cited with increasingly regularity in the present political moment, David Grubbs imagines ‘creep mission’ to be a talismanic utterance in the effort to turn this ship around.

‘Creep Mission’ is an album of instrumental compositions with Grubbs’s effortlessly recombinant electric guitar at its core, and its modus operandi is to go both deep and wide. The album goes deep in the sense that the guitar becomes the relentless, meditative focus of these songs without words and it goes wide in that these pieces utilize a discontinuous set of arrangements that make the most out of an extraordinary group of musicians convened for the mission at hand.

Drummer and most simpatico sparring partner Eli Keszler picks up where his brilliant contributions to Grubbs’s 2016 ‘Prismrose’ left off; trumpeter Nate Wooley defies you to identify his range of sounds as coming from a single player; and Jan St. Werner (Mouse on Mars, Lithops) can hardly contain his joy in transforming the proceedings into electro-prismatic splinters. For his part, Grubbs’ guitar playing has never before so confidently mangled commonsensical distinctions between composed and improvised music.

The album’s opener, ‘Slylight’, wends its way through a sequence of instrumental combinations in a manner redolent of Gastr del Sol’s ‘Camoufleur’. Before the album has concluded with the melancholy country raga of ‘The C In Certain’, waystations between have assumed the character of sludge-rock power trio (‘Creep Mission’, ‘Return Of The Creep’), pointillistic electroacoustic improv (‘Jeremiadaic’), and bejeweled nylon string guitar miniatures (‘The Bonapartes Of Baltimore’, ‘Jack Dracula In A Bar’).

David Grubbs’s solo albums often have a “the band has left the building” quality of dramatic left turns in the final act; on ‘Creep Mission’, peripatetic playing is basic strategy.

TRACK LISTING

Skylight
Creep Mission
The Bonapartes Of Baltimore
Jeremiadaic
Jack Dracula In A Bar
Return Of The Creep
The C In Certain

"Arborvitae" opens and closes with the pairing of David on piano and Loren on an electric guitar played so quietly that at times his pedal-stomping is wondrously distinct. "Blossom Time" and the title track positively float, with Loren alternating between soaring single-note lines and playing the rough, barnacled anchor to David's relentless tide.