David Grubbs - A Tap On The Shoulder '2021

Tracks list

       You never know when that tap’s going to come. How about now? (Not
for you to decide.) Or exactly what it means—except in the aftermath.
Mutual admiration society and David Grubbs and Ryley Walker had been taking
notes on one another’s playing for some time before they hit the stage
together on a couple of blistering occasions immediately pre-pandemic. (One of
these live sets was released earlier this year as Fight or Flight Simulator on
Café OTO’s Takuroku label.)
Studio sessions were clearly in the cards, and the result is A Tap on the
Shoulder, a collection of duo performances that veers from crystalline
instrumental compositions (“A Tap on the Shoulder,” “Accepting
Most Plans,” “Dorothy Kept”) to animated alien chatterfests
(“Leslie Steinberger”), and from ecstatic extrapolations charging
this way and that (“Pump Fake on the Death Rattle,” “The
Madman from Massachusetts in an Empty Bar”) to, I don’t know, words
don’t do the trick (“Uglification”). Don’t think for a
second that these shorthand descriptions suffice.
Electric guitars make electronic music. Ryley’s hellion musical
fearlessness lights a fire under the more typically Apollonian, chess-masterly
Grubbs. What’s good for the geezer is good for the, etc. And where the
duo’s live performances thus far have been set-length
juggernauts, A Tap on the Shoulder toggles effortlessly between microscope,
telescope, and Cinemascope, letting the smallest of gestures land in all of its
sonic specificity before opening the scene up to disorienting panoramas.
Listen to A Tap on the Shoulder in the context of Ryley’s glorious Course
in Fable; listento it in the context of Grubbs’s playing with Loren
Connors, Jim O’Rourke, Taku Unami, and others; or listen to it as if
you’ve never heard note one from these soulful odd birds, the two of them
curiously, quixotically committed to working inside and beyond song form. 

David Grubbs - Guitar/Piano
Ryley Walker - Guitar
Ben Greenberg - Engineer/Mixing
Taylor Deupree - Mastering
Letitia Quesenberry - Artwork
Michael Vallera - Layout

1.01 - David Grubbs - A Tap On The Shoulder (5:44)
1.02 - David Grubbs - Accepting Most Plans (3:05)
1.03 - David Grubbs - Uglification (13:22)
1.04 - David Grubbs - Leslie Steinberger (4:28)
1.05 - David Grubbs - Pump Fake On The Death Rattle (8:23)
1.06 - David Grubbs - Dorothy Kept (2:52)
1.07 - David Grubbs - The Madman From Massachusetts In An Empty Bar (7:43) 

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