Up for Grubbs

     In his 20-year musical career, Assistant Professor and avant-garde rocker David Grubbs has never hesitated to explore new art forms and collaborate with other artists.
     So, while he may not be the only English PhD to have switched from poetry to teaching contemporary music, these collaborative qualities certainly make him well suited to be the director at the Brooklyn College Performing and Interactive Media Arts Program.
     Grubbs just released An Optimist Notes the Dusk, an album that uses his native Kentucky as a motif and displays a more pronounced spiritual undertow than evident in his earlier productions. The record release show was on October 7 at Le Poisson Rouge club in Manhattan.
     Trained as a classical piano player from the time he was a child, Grubbs picked up the guitar in his teens.
     “I became interested in punk rock and new wave music,” he says.
     After attending Georgetown University, Grubbs went to the University of Chicago to study modern and contemporary American poetry in the English Department.
     “Although I started studying contempo-rary poetry, I always pursued the parallel goal of writing music, making music, touring, and recording,” says Grubbs.
     Because the University of Chicago has no separate media programs, its  

English Department encompasses film, television, and recorded music studies, something that appealed strongly to Grubbs’ eclectic nature. 
     This fall, Angela Bulloch, the Canadian-born sculptor with whom Grubbs has collaborated before, invited him again to compose a piece for an upcoming collective exhibit, “theanyspacewhatever,” which opens on October 24 at the Guggenheim Museum. As Grubbs describes it, his new composition for Bulloch’s Hybrid Song Box.4 is a 26-minute soundtrack that incorporates six distinct variations on a four-minute composition, creating a sense of both the familiar and the unexpected to the careful listener.
     Grubbs will be playing five solo shows from October 21-26 in France. His next scheduled show in New York is a free in-store at the Cake Shop on Saturday, November 1 at 6:00 pm. 
    Please visit: http://www.guggenheim.org