Ugly Duckling Presse | One and One Less

One and One Less

David Grubbs & Eli Keszler

Poetry/Music/Sound Art | $30 $25

Spring 2017

"The listener wins again." — Stewart Lee, Sunday Times

One and One Less is the first collaboration between David Grubbs and Eli Keszler and the first release in the UDPR series.

One and One Less consists of a performance and an installation, both of which draw upon a single source text—David Grubbs’s ongoing One Poem, and the LP is split between these two forms: the live performance for reader (Grubbs) and percussionist (Keszler), and a recording of the installation version from the MIT List Visual Arts Center.

The original installation (at the MIT List Visual Arts Center from October 10, 2014 to January 4, 2015 as part of the show Open Tunings) used recorded excerpts from One Poem to trigger a range of mechanical strikes within seven custom-made, sculptural sound boxes, each of which contained an elaborate mechanism of motors and speakers built by Keszler that acoustically filtered the voice, creating a constantly changing composition—one equally verbal and percussive. Subsequent to the live performance, the installation at MIT was intended as an aural afterimage, in which the clean visual disposition of the gallery space was contradicted by the intensity of the acoustically produced sound field.

This LP is printed in a limited edition of 300 copies and includes an insert with the text of David Grubb's poem-in-progress.

[UDPR is a series for collaborations and interplay in the fields of poetry and music reproduced and distributed on high quality vinyl records with accompanying printed materials.]

Excerpt ˇ

Excerpt

Two breaths vectored

Two breaths insensate

Two breaths just sliding past

Two breaths shaped and detached

Two breaths set on glide, the both unaware

Two breaths exiting opposite, and neither moves the other

Close ˆ

About the Author

David Grubbs is Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. At Brooklyn College he also teaches in the MFA programs in Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA) and Creative Writing. He is the author of Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, The Sixties, and Sound Recording (Duke University Press). Grubbs has released twelve solo albums and appeared on more than 150 commercially-released recordings. He is known for his cross-disciplinary collaborations with poet Susan Howe, visual artists Anthony McCall, Angela Bulloch, and Stephen Prina, and choreographer Jonah Bokaer. His work has been presented at the Guggenheim, MoMA, the Tate Modern, and the Centre Pompidou. Grubbs was a member of the groups Gastr del Sol, Bastro, and Squirrel Bait, and he has performed with the Red Krayola, Will Oldham, Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, and Loren Connors, among many others. He is a grant recipient from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts; a contributing editor in music for BOMB Magazine; director of the Blue Chopsticks record label.

Eli Keszler is a New York-based artist, composer, and percussionist who situates his practice within the intersections of architecture, performance, installation, notation, and composition. Keszler’s installations and visual work have appeared at the Victoria & Albert Museum, MIT List Visual Arts Center, The Kitchen, South London Gallery, Barbican, Luma-Foundation, Tectonics Festival Reykjavik, and Centraal Museum in Utrecht among many others. Keszler has toured extensively throughout Europe, Asia and the United States, performing solo and in collaboration with artists such as Christian Wolff, Phill Niblock, Tony Conrad, Oren Ambarchi, Joe McPhee, Jandek, Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Coleman, T Model Ford, and Ilan Volkov with the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra. His writing and work has appeared in BOMB Magazine, The New York Times, Wire Magazine, Frieze, and Modern Painters. He has received commissions and awards from Gaudeamus, National Public Radio, and the Foundation For Contemporary Art. Keszler is a graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music.

Links

David Grubbs at Drag City
David Grubbs at ubu web
David Grubbs with Susan Howe at Penn Sound
Eli Keszler's home page
Eli Keszler at Blouin Art Info

Book Details

Special Edition
Publication Date: May 1, 2017
Distribution: Direct only

Advance Praise

[praise David Grubbs]

Grubbs has self-consciously split his brain to exacerbate the essential creative conflict, the experimental academic battling the sentimental artist on a darkling plain. The listener wins again. —Stewart Lee, Sunday Times

[praise for Eli Keszler]

Few artists have courted chaos as diligently and scientifically as the percussionist and composer Eli Keszler. —Steve Smith, (New York Times re