Gastr del Sol

One day I'll have to draw up a family tree of all the bands formed by former members of Squirrel Bait. One of those bare-bones ones, sketched out in pen on a scrap of paper, more or less at random, almost casually, as though it weren't worth much attention. Branches of descent stretching out to touch on key points of late-millennium rock.

The two most prolific fathers are without doubt the two guitarists: Brian McMahan and David Grubbs. The former's path runs through the killing off of rock music in Slint, the acoustic renewal of Palace Brothers, and the delicate introversion of For Carnation. Grubbs's mark has been less deep-cutting. Nonetheless, his contribution has been hugely important: first drawing

the link between post-hardcore and post-rock with Bitch Magnet and Bastro, then progressively paring the sound down with Gastr Del Sol.

A direct evolution of Bastro, Gastr Del Sol formed with essentially the same line-up: David Grubbs on guitar, Bundy K. Brown on bass, with John McEntire on drums.

"The Serpentine Similar" is the first EP recorded by the group, released on Teenbeat in 1993. It's an essential record, not in the sense of fundamental, but understood as reduced to its essence: it presents no defined form, no canon, it's made of very few elements (often just guitar and bass).

It's the stripping of a language down to its linguistic atoms, achieved by subtracting everything that has been built on top of it. Almost an attempt to return to the roots of popular music's signs, to rediscover the primal relationship binding signifier and signified. Similarly to what Slint were doing in those same years, Grubbs and co. annihilate the classic structure of a rock song and leave only its bare corpse on display.

Where the former deconstructed something to make it into a freer, more fluid whole, the latter corrode it down to its foundations, keeping only the load-bearing pillars. Where the former retain a fervor that implodes, suddenly tearing through the apparent calm of the compositions, the latter drain them of all vital sap, abandoning the sonic carpet to silence (who knows how much Grubbs drew from his studies of John Cage at the Chicago Art Institute).

What we're presented with is a preparatory sketch deliberately left as such. An incomplete, illogical work, seemingly random and in constant flux. It's as if Gastr Del Sol were committing the same murder as Slint, attacking the very same body: the murder of an already dead body. The surrender of a certain kind of meaning in music. Sound becomes assessable only on sonic parameters, losing any reference to extra-musical signs: music no longer seems judgeable in terms of linguistic descriptiveness or evoked sensations. No longer poetic music, but sonic music. Rock reduced to its minimal language, a syntax pared down to its fundamental atoms.

An underlying direction that's hard to describe in words, precisely because it goes straight to the relationship between sonic sign and meaning: a relationship that is already language but requires further construction in order to be able to "speak." One can only listen, trying to set aside as much as possible every acquired notion of significance in order to describe its defining traits. The nine minutes of perfect slowcore on "A Watery Kentucky" stretch out infinitely until they fray and become devoid of tension. A slowness slower than slow, a whisper whispered even more softly. A "strumming" worthy of Supreme Dicks lost in Fahey-esque transcendence. "A Jar Of Fat" and "Eye Street" are molecular fragments of piano searching for an organism in which to arrange themselves. "Ursus Arctors Wonderfillis" is folk-jazz built from micro-structures still taking shape. "For Soren Muller" alternates between drifting moments, with a guitar left to improvise languidly, and sudden mathematical accelerations very close to the classic Slint sound. "Eve The Odd Orbit" is a dialogue between guitar and bass, a post-math-rock piece that nonetheless moves through free, improvised forms.

"The Serpentine Similar" is a grammar. A syntax of the rock that was, built to create the language of what would come, the language of the post (or we could also call it the beyond, the uber). Gastr Del Sol would go on to speak their own personal language once Jim O'Rourke joined the lineup. Many others would go on to create their own, using this grammar manual as one of the founding texts of their formation.

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16/09/2010