Failed Celestial Creatures

31 Mar, 5 – 7pm
18/F Grand Marine Center

RSVP to [email protected] as this will be a seated event with limited space.

Empty Gallery is pleased to invite you to a very special evening performance featuring acclaimed experimental musicians David Grubbs (Gastr Del Sol, The Red Krayola, Bastro) and Taku Unami (HOSE, Hontatedori). This event represents Grubbs’s Hong Kong debut and a rare appearance by Unami. Grubbs will perform a short solo set of recent compositions for electric guitar and voice, followed by a duo performance with Taku Unami of their new collaborative album, Failed Celestial Creatures, to be released on Empty Editions this Spring.

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. Grubbs has released fourteen solo albums and appeared on more than 190 releases, the most recent of which is Creep Mission (Blue Chopsticks, 2017). He is the author of Now that the audience is assembled and Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording (both Duke University Press). Grubbs was a member of the groups Gastr del Sol, Bastro, and Squirrel Bait, and has performed with the Red Krayola, Will Oldham, Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, and Loren Connors, and many others. His ongoing collaborations include projects with visual artists Anthony McCall and Angela Bulloch as well as with poet Susan Howe. Grubbs is a grant recipient in music/sound from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and director of the Blue Chopsticks record label.

Taku Unami is a performer of multi-instrumental, improvised, and unclassifiable (non-)music. Influenced by cosmic-pessimism, science-fiction, supernatural-horror, and weird-fiction, his work involves the myriad playing of string instruments, piano, synthesizers, recording hardware and software, and “obfuscated everyday, non-musical objects.” He was bandleader and guitarist of depressive easy-listening group HOSE (discontinued), is a member of HONTATEDORI (with Moé Kamura and Tetuzi Akiyama), and has active collaborations with Klaus Filip, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Kazushige Kinoshita, Eric La Casa, Radu Malfatti, Norimizu Ameya, amongst others. Unami has composed for film, including ‘Lost My Way’ (directed by Takeshi Furusawa) and ‘In 1,000,000 years’ (directed by Isao Okishima). He has performed in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and the United States and has released more than 30 records, both solo and in numerous groups and collaborations, for labels such as Erstwhile Records, Enban, map, and others. Recent publications include Species Pluralis with Jarrod Fowler (No Schools Recordings 2016), The Whistler with Graham Lambkin (Erstwhile Records 2017), zymology with Sam Sfirri (Hibari Music 2017), cloud of unknowing (Tenseless Music 2018). Unami also runs the influential experimental music record label and distributor Hibari Music.