Albums are a way of grouping together an artist at a certain point in their creative journey. They capture a snapshot of whatever was important to them at that point. As well as the artists, albums, particularly physical ones, often become markers in the lives of their listeners as well.
It’s impossible to not react personally to Gastr Del Sol. The band having a significant place in my own extensive and passionate adventures in music. The track Our Own Exquisite Replica of Eternity is referenced on my wedding ring, but equally, they are the point very near to the epicentre of my endless thirst for weird sounds.
It might have been a small article in the bitstream section of The Wire, back in 1996 where things first took hold. A few short paragraphs hinting Upgrade and Afterlife’s imminent release, and it mentioned Jim O’Rourke, David Grubbs, John Fahey and Tony Conrad…
A month or two later, I finally tracked the CD down. Despite my art student budget constraints, this was something that felt like a vital piece of my creative education. Almost 30 years later, huge swathes of the hundreds of albums I now own, all weirdly connect back to that day and disc.
Back then, the floodgates opened. Buoyed by O’Rourke’s insistence that he found stuff via creative cross referencing, every new purchase became a hot lead, a tip off and cheat code as much as new sounds. All the nerdy details about who played, produced, did the artwork, what else the label released, all spiderwebbed in ways that still yield results today.
An incomplete list of this network started here might look like – John Fahey, Tony Conrad, Voicecrack, Derek Bailey, Keji Haino, Rafael Toral, Nuno Canavarro, Folke Rabe, Arnold Dreyblatt, Space Ponch, Van Dyke Parks, Bill Fay, Fennesz, Pita, Ivor Culter, Eugene Chadbourne, Ivo Malec and last but certainly not least Roland Kayn. A point of orgin, all broadly radiating from of this weird album with exploding wellie boots on the cover!
Gastr Del Sol released four albums: The Serpentine Similar (1993), Crookt, Crackt, or Fly (1994), Upgrade & Afterlife (1996), Camoufleur (1998), and several eps and singles. A duo of David Grubbs, joined by Jim O’Rourke from the second album onwards, aided by a host of stunning collaborators, and yet more names to research further.
The whole angular post-rockish take resulted in the twin peaked excellence of Upgrade and Afterlife and Camofleur. The former a moody layered masterpiece, the later twin, a bright and hugely detailed reconfiguring and dissection of almost normal sounding music.
Even now, all these albums still get played, but it’s weird to be transported back to this heady source. A new collection, almost 2 hours of unheard live recordings, previously unreleased tracks, topped off with hard-to-find tracks… Over time, We Have Dozens of Titles has created a subtle reconfiguration of my nostalgia.
Curious itches around impossible to find EPs like The Harp Factory on Lake Street and 7” singles like 20 Songs Less, and The Japanese Room at La Pagode, are now satisfactorily scratched.
Many of the previous unheard studio records feel like various combinations of loaded ambience, piano fragments, field recordings, and pecked at with subtle electronics. Tracks like Quietly Approaching, Dead Cats in a Foghorn, and The Bells of St. Mary’s all feel like alternative options sumptuously carved in the same thick air as The Sea Incertain (from Upgrade and Afterlife).
Once we finally settle, The Seasons Reverse (live) makes you grin instantly. Immediately rolling along, everything gently layering and whirring with joyful human playing. The piano part could be an embryonic and glorious The Visitor. Despite hearing the lyrics retracing in your head, it somehow takes much longer than it should to realise this version doesn’t have them! Perhaps Gastr Del Sol’s most powerful and catchy song in a live setting highlighting its layered and practical nature, all capped off with the 4th wall taped dialogue as O’Rourke attempts to records a confused stranger setting of firecrackers…
For some reason Blues Subtitled No Sense of Wonder (from Camofleur), was a track I somehow never really connected with at the time, but the 11-minute live version included here is a revelation. Again, the layered live-in-the-moment construction allowing everything to unravel and overlap in surprising new ways. 90 seconds in, a vocal sample from what sounds like a 50’s comedy show suddenly drops out the sky. Random interference at odds with its surroundings but eventually various organ tones and piano accumulates into an orchestral swell, and then subsides for over 5 spellbinding minutes.
The whole collection closes with an 18-minute version of Onion Orange. Originally from Grubbs solo album Banana Cabbage, Potato Lettuce, Onion Orange, released around the same time, an album so subtle it never quite lodged significantly in my memory before. However, here, performed live as a duo, its minimal guitar patterning’s are intensified and beautifully intermeshed with long droning smears. The fragility of the original redrawn more powerfully without ever being insensitive to its inherent beauty.
We Have Dozens of Titles ultimately reminds us that Gastr Del Sol was always a pretty strange project in the first place. Centred on two artists that even now, make music where every new thing is seen as opportunity to pose yet more questions. It’s natural to compared this to the original releases, and whilst We Have Dozens of Titles is superb, it never feels like we were denied anything vital, as we happily lived through the originals.
Any release from the vaults, no matter how it may be marketed, is regularly suited to people already under the artist’s spell. ‘Previously unreleased‘ regularly means junk, inferior, cutting room floor shit re-badged as gold. However, stellar collections like International Harvesters Remains, Angus McLises Tapes, and Roland Kayn’s seemingly infinite cache of gold, and a small group of others, is now joined by We Have Dozens of Titles. Projects whose output was consistently high enough quality, that planning tracklists for each release had several viable options. It wasn’t separating the wheat from the chaff, it was just picking the wheat that fitted best – choices that simply changed the dynamics, or pace, rather than any dip in the continual excellence.
Ultimately, the literal fact, as the lyric/title broadly alludes to, is that they did have dozens of titles that were simply unheard. Gastr Del Sol was a fixed entity in history, the story locked in time, but unexpectedly, over a quarter of a century later, it’s all fluid again…
We Have Dozens of Titles is out on May 24 on Drag City Records.
It’s available as a 3 LP Boxset, 2xCD and digitally here and here
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