Emerging from Chicago’s fertile post-rock scene in the 1990s, Gastr del Sol stood among the era’s boldest experimental outfits. David Grubbs first assembled the project around his most daring improvisational ideas, after which Jim O'Rourke joined as the second member, deepening the music with his own sensibilities. Their shared language combined abstract acoustic techniques, electronics shaped by musique concrète methods, and song forms that were dismantled with playful intent. From 1993 through 1998 the duo gradually broadened this palette until it reached a strangely approachable pop inflection on the final album, Camoufleur. Once the partnership ended, each musician pursued an extensive solo path. In 2024 the archival set We Have Dozens of Titles gathered unreleased live documents, non-album rarities, and other previously unreleased material from their 1990s activity.
Kentucky-born David Grubbs had already spent the 1980s and the start of the following decade in Squirrel Bait, a proto-math punk band, and then in the experimental post-hardcore group Bastro. Relocating from Louisville to Chicago in 1991 for graduate studies, he joined forces with fellow Bastro alumni Bundy K. Brown and John McEntire to launch the initial three-piece version of Gastr del Sol. That lineup recast leftover Bastro material into quiet, sustained acoustic pieces, which appeared on the 1993 debut The Serpentine Similar. After Brown and McEntire departed for Tortoise in 1994, Grubbs continued with O'Rourke alone. The resulting pair welcomed additional contributors on the 1994 full-length Crookt, Crackt, or Fly and the EP Mirror Repair, weaving in bass clarinet, occasional bursts of punk energy, and understated electronics. Upgrade & Afterlife, issued in 1996, drew from film-score aesthetics and American Primitive fingerstyle guitar; its extended finale featured minimalist composer Tony Conrad on violin for a reading of John Fahey’s “Dry Bones in the Valley (I Saw the Light Come Shining ’Round and ’Round).” Camoufleur, the 1998 release, proved both the most ambitious and the most immediately listenable of their catalog. Markus Popp of Oval supplied a layer of bright, glitch-driven electronics, while a large cast that included Edith Frost, Julie Pomerleau, and Ken Vandermark supplied chamber-pop arrangements built from brass choirs, steel drums, and vocal harmonies recalling the Beach Boys. Following that album the group disbanded, though O'Rourke and Grubbs each sustained wide-ranging activity across subsequent decades.
Drag City, the Chicago independent label that had issued most of Gastr del Sol’s original work, released We Have Dozens of Titles in May 2024. The multi-disc anthology collected previously unheard studio recordings alongside documents from the band’s last concert in 1997, during which several Camoufleur pieces were performed in markedly different live configurations.
