David Grubbs - Whistle from Above

Don’t look up! Whistle from Above is David Grubbs’ first Drag City release in over a decade and his first-ever instrumental album for the label—and why shouldn’t it be? The suspiciously youthful Grubbs is four decades into his career, with former bands including Gastr del Sol, Squirrel Bait, and Bastro, along with a wild ride of collaborators including Bitch Magnet, Richard Buckner, Codeine, Tony Conrad, The Red Krayola, Royal Trux, Dirty Three, Edith Frost, Mats Gustafsson, Susan Howe, Will Oldham, Stefano Pilia, Taku Unami, The Underflow, Ryley Walker, Jan St. Werner, and The Wingdale Community Singers. If all that doesn’t imply “Trying something different,” what ever will?

We’ve savoured David’s singular guitar tone on solo and collaborative releases alike on many other distinguished labels—why shouldn’t we have one for ourselves?

Whistle from Above is the first solo collection David has released since 2017’s Creep Mission. During the 2020 shutdown, David played what he precisely quantified as “a shit-ton of guitar,” more than he could recall playing ever previously. Reinvigorated by this period of enforced woodshedding, he produced a series of new pieces, mostly for guitar, but also a piano composition and an exceptionally eerie bit of musique concrète. These seemed to imply a solo set that would tour marvellously when the time was right again.

Meanwhile, David was reconnecting with the Gastr del Sol archive, as a new collection of old performances was being prepared from extensive archival material. The duo magic of that storied collaboration (released in 2024 as We Have Dozens of Titles) left David hungry to play in this format again—as he had recently with Loren Connors, Alan Courtis, Manuel Mota, and Liam Keenan. These duo experiences showed David the path forward to complete this new solo
material. Thus he sought out collaborations with folks he’s called “some of the musicians whom I adore most on the planet”—Rodri Davies, Andrea Belfi, Nikos Veliotis, Nate Wooley, and Cleek Schrey—and their stunning contributions flesh out Grubbs’ innate, deeply person brand of minimalism.

Whistle from Above is a colourful, compulsive set of instrumental pieces in which David and his chosen collaborators interact amid the steady roll of an expansive landscape based in the hypnosis of David’s immediately recognizable guitar style. Throughout the album, the listener may recall some places visited over the years, but will find them—as David and his traveling companions have as well—changed again, reactivated in a new light.