by Matty McPherson (@ghostplanetmatt)
“Big Ears is going to be our first show by the looks of it!” That’s what David Grubbs is telling me about the live prospects of Squanderers, sipping an afternoon coffee, from his accommodations in Berlin, Germany. He is in the capital on a fellowship with the American Academy. A musicologist “really in the early stages” of writing a book on working collaboratively (mostly with visual artists). He’s long been fascinated by how sound can be such a great collaborative space for interdisciplinary studies and open for folks to dive in without formal training. “Writing when I was younger was torture, but now I’m just happy when I have the time. I’ve learned I just do things best when it’s one at a time”. For him, writing works best when you both know something inside and out, and still are learning something in the process; generating the knowledge. And no, a title hasn’t been set yet, although Grubbs has some idea clear in his mind over what it’s to be. Yet, translating the title out of the 10,000 dBs of laughter he mustered in lieu of it is no small feat!
His season in Berlin has been one of “hopping around”. Grubbs has been coming to Europe since a 1989 Spring tour with Bastro when the Wall was still up, and still returns quite frequently for gigs. Yes, he’s been able to book an ample tour once more for this fall, but he’s been exploring Berlin in a way the maverick never has – a reference to KM28, an esteemed bar where one of the Horse Lords may be tap handling clues me to the knowledge there’s good comradery around. That kind of serendipity and openness has also been reflected in the 2020s releases of Grubbs. Collaborations across Drag City, Husky Pants, Room40. He’s just got a lotta friends you see! Yes, the COVID-19 pandemic sparked a change of sorts; a hunger to play and jam where previously he might not have. “Life is all the richer for it!”
Sometimes, it can take decades for a collaboration between friends to spring forth into an album. An example Grubbs offered was when he met Jan St Verner, while opening for Mouse on Mars in 1995. They only just had a collaborative album release in 2022 (if not sooner). 27 years would be the record, but David’s friendship to recording timeline with Kramer goes back to meeting him at Noise New York for the recording of Unrest’s Malcolm X Park in 1987. 35+ years between that fateful meeting, Kramer reached out to respond to Grubbs’ Records to Ruin, while proposing a long distance collaboration. “He’s my new friend, we met in 1987!”
Kramer’s Shimmy-Disc was a meeting point for the avant… especially within the realm of gut-busting rock (Bongwater, Gwar, Ruins, Boredoms, Naked City, Ween, King Mystic, amongst many a Kramer collaboration). The troubadours that passed through the label in that spirited late 80s/early 90s moment created a forward thinking catalog that now still stands as its own fringe of American independent rock. Same for his studio work with Galaxie 500, which was just given a beguiling “Uncollected” compilation of studio outtakes on Silver Current, and Low – to which the continuous pleas for UMG to give Alan the rights to the Vernon Yard works goes unanswered.
Shimmy-Disc originally went belly-up years ago, a long tale for another day. But in the 2020s, under Joyful Noise, the label was revived as a boutique imprint in which Kramer could curate his whims. The thing about Kramer’s return in this capacity is that it carries the same vigor of that halcyon Shimmy-Disc; collaborate with your friends and let the session speak for itself, more or less. The 2023 vinyl box set Rings of Saturn is oozing with this MO, a dialogue unfolding across a generation of journeymen and newcomers alike. When Grubbs and Kramer made the decision to turn Squanderers into a live act, both agreed it could only be achieved with the onboarding of one Wendy Eisenberg.
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Soundcheck was running late for Wendy. They swooped into Berlin via an eight hour train ride a day prior, and now they were hanging on their phone from the back of a green room, as a loud trumpet-heavy soundcheck occurred that both Grubbs and I were oblivious to. Grubbs gave a bountiful welcome to the maverick: “DU BIST EN DEUTSCHLAND! Sorry, I didn’t mean to shout at you.” “No, no! That’s just the custom of the country”. Eisenberg, the composer/songwriter/perceptual being themselves, made a major swing this fall with Viewfinder (on American Dreams), an exceptionally giving 2xLP buoyed by at least two side-long improvisational pieces and their avant-twee observations in the wake of lasik eye surgery. It’s a release to get lost in just like Squanderers, both of which share similar underlying principles involving being lost in the session, unsure of the verbage or passage of time.
The breadcrumbs of press for the trio notes Eisenberg as “a dream of a foil to Grubbs’ grubbslike guitarisms” and if you’ve got your Celini’s Halo or Bent Ring tapes, then the statement’s aptitude is practically glowing. Eisenberg had fallen on Grubbs’ radar sometimes after their stunning LP Auto from 2020–filled with many twangy sonics throwing you back to Louisville–passed on by word of mouth from the album’s producer, Nick Zanca (“Brooklyns a tiny town and New York City is as well” Grubbs sly comments). The two would meet in person in July of 2022 at Unnamable Books during a reading, just shy of 2.5 years ago; they’ve gigged together three times – in an apartment in Chinatown, the Stone, and the Noguchi Museum. Grubbs lights up remembering it all amongst the passage of time. ”So, we’re new friends,” he surmises. Then he turns to my screen and declares “This is my new friend, Wendy!” “Hey, I’m new” they responded, laughing.
Eisenberg had been drawn to the work of and working with Grubbs and Kramer because “they drop into a ‘no-time’ space”. The moment itself does not need to be in haste, but an eternal thing to enter and let take over the time, one where if four hours playing passes they’re left wishing it could go on for another four hours. It’s a spacious and patient aesthetic, bringing an “endlessness” to their often fiery solo-improv style. It oozes out of the trio’s statement If a Body Meet a Body (“recorded before lunch!” Grubbs amusingly lets slide). You can also see it in the way Grubbs and Eisenberg respond. The latter, quite frenetic, while the former with a stoic face, head back, muttering “MMM”. It’s something Grubbs confesses as a “Mayo Thompson response,” a lasting influence dating back to Red Krayola’s Drag City days.
Squanderers in this trio state was described as “something of a book club”. When I ask about the idea of the band as a book club though…no, that doesn’t mean they read them simultaneously, nor aloud to one another. Still, Grubbs declares “that’s what the tour is; a live audiobook tour! With my soporific voice… slowly” to which Eisenberg chimes in “With Kramer’s velvety voice pleading at you, reading Maxwell and making you cry”.
I’d still attest to If a Body Meet a Body being primo bookstore music: a whole lotta western pulp doused in dusty riffs crafted as inquisitive sentences and delicate quandaries; concise in their prepositions and verbiage, pragmatic with detail. The seven themes each carry a sense of space, with epiphanies that are best described as “preconscious,” activated across the forty minutes only when you do find yourself lost in that endlessness Eisenberg describes. “Weirdly economical!” Grubbs opines about those seven themes, curiously noting how close the album defers to “songs” despite working far more as a full piece or Side A/Side B listen.
Kramer plays bass and results as a presence across the album’s low end, akin to Agustín with his divining rod in El Sur, subtle and mysterious; supernaturally precise. He’s wicked good at getting his collaborators to say “yes!” If he is a puppet master though, then he’s a merciful one who also lets Eisenberg and Grubbs pull the strings and cast their own fates; “it’s a little Zorn - Cobra like in the way we call shots!” Eisenberg declares about recording If a Body Meet a Body, recalling their time in Zorn’s rollicking execution of the piece at the 2023 Big Ears. Yet, Eisenberg also notes their deferring characteristics across the album, reinforcing or teasing bits of Grubbs’ sound rather than outright calling a shot; the result is never callous nor studious, more like two generations figuring a stable reference and tradition to build forth from, pre-lunch and all.
Eisenberg is about to hash out a setlist and take to the stage for their gig. So we end, musing on changes in approaches to improvisation and ourselves over time. Another Kramer collaborator, Mark Nelson, told me last year of feeling like he could approach his turn of the century dub works only because his cells had changed and he had grown as a person. Grubbs noted the reference to the “Ship of Theseus” and expressed an early fascination with the mindset of visual artists simplifying their practice akin to Ad Reinhardt. It’s something that he doesn’t see applying to him at all and his music (“it’s all fair game”), but Grubbs amusingly notes he’ll probably never sing again like he did in Bastro.
He asks Eisenberg if they shed certain techniques and working methodologies, or if they are additive overall. Eisenberg erred the latter: ”There’s things that I just do less often because I’m tired of hearing them. But, there’s things that just suddenly come up because I'm not thinking. Where I once thought that I would get deeper into the tradition and that it would be a refinement of a certain number of techniques, it just feels like now I have more at my disposal. What I choose to do in the moment will be shocking, but I can’t let myself be shocked until it is recorded. And that’s what’s so fun about recording improvisations.”
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Here at the bottom, you’ll find the third cut from Squanderers’ If a Body Meet a Body “Theme for Silent Cowboys,” my favorite of the seven themes. Perhaps the most meticulous of the pieces the trio committed to tape, a warm blanket lullaby meant for the nitrate stock of yonder. Kramer keeps a stoic, steadfast adherence to the periphery with his bass. Enough to let Eisenberg and Grubbs surmount an uplifting melodic progression around 1:52 I’ve obsessed over. Likely because it sort of recalls the sublime atmosphere of Buzz and Glide from Ryley Walker and Jeff Tobias’ It'll Sound Different Once We Get Some Bodies In The Room, another essential 2020s New York jam recording. When that progression sort of returns around the three minute mark, its tone erring low to the ground. By the fourth minute, as if the nitrate was dissipating into ether. A sonic vignette of the highest caliber.