David Grubbs is Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. He is the author of Now that the Audience is Assembled and Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording (both published by Duke University Press), as well as two forthcoming books: The Voice in the Headphones and, with Anthony McCall, Simultaneous Soloists. Grubbs has released fourteen solo albums and appeared on more than 190 releases, the most recent of which 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.

Susan Howe’s collection of poems That This, won the Bollingen Prize in 2011. In 2017 she received the Robert Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in American poetry. Her earlier critical study, My Emily Dickinson, was re-issued in 2007 with an introduction by Eliot Weinberger. Four CDs in collaboration with the musician/composer David Grubbs, Thiefth, Souls of the Labadie Tract, Frolic Architecture and WOODSLIPPERCOUNTERCLATTER, were released on the Blue Chopsticks label. In October 2013 her word collages were exhibited at the Yale Union in Portland, Oregon, and in the Whitney Biennial Spring, 2014. Spontaneous Particulars:The Telepathy of Archives was published by Christine Burgin and New Directions (2014). New Directions published The Quarry, her selected essays, in 2015 and Debths (2017). Debths won Canada’s Griffin Prize for poetry in 2018. A new limited edition Concordance has just been published by Leslie Miller’s Grenfell Press.

Souls of the Labadie Tract [excerpts], 2008
This work is the second in a series of collaborations between Gastr Del Sol’s David Grubbs and the poet, scholar, and essayist Susan Howe. In Souls of the Labadie Tract the spoken word shares space and time with Laotian free-reed mouth organs and a VCS3 synthesizer in recordings that embrace forms of chance poetics.

Susan Howe and David Grubbs contributed with this audio work in the ( ) – space.