CANCELLED - David Grubbs - "The Voice in the Headphones"

**This event has been cancelled. We hope to reschedule in the coming months.**

“David Grubbs's books are at once bravado poetic performances and incisive works of performance theory. He combines a deep knowing with a willingness to smash everything. I will follow him into any medium.” — Ben Lerner

“It's decades now that David Grubbs has kept my head spinning with ideas about the creation, performance, and understanding of music. To hear or read his work is to be invited into collaboration. We are all audience, all of the time, and every creator worth her salt knows this. Grubbs turns this tenet into poetry.” — Will Oldham

David Grubbs discusses The Voice in the Headphones. The reading and conversation will be followed by a short live performance.

RSVP HERE (Please note your RSVP is requested but not required.)

At the Co-op

About the book: The Voice in the Headphones is an experiment in music writing in the form of a long poem centered on the culture of the recording studio. It describes in intricate, prismatic detail one marathon day in a recording studio during which an unnamed musician struggles to complete a film soundtrack. The book extends the form of Grubbs’s previous Now that the audience is assembled, sharing its goal of musicalizing the language of writing about music. Mulling the insight that “studio is the absence of pushback”—now that no audience is assembled—The Voice in the Headphones details one musician’s strategies for applying the requisite pressure to the proceedings, for making it count. The Voice in the Headphones is both literary work and meditation on sound recording, delivered at a moment in which the commercial recording studio shades into oblivion. It draws upon Grubbs’s own history of several decades as a recording artist, and its location could be described as every studio in which he has set foot.

About the author: David Grubbs is Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. At Brooklyn College he also teaches in the MFA programs in Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA) and Creative Writing. 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 released fourteen solo albums and appeared on more than 190 releases; his most recent solo recording is Creep Mission (Blue Chopsticks, 2017). 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. He is a grant recipient from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a contributing editor in music for BOMB Magazine, chair of the Blank Forms board of directors, and director of the Blue Chopsticks record label.