Like a bolt echoing back from the blue,
We Have Dozens of Titles restrikes
the iron of Gastr del Sol, plunging the
listener (that's us!) back into the mael-
strom of their all-too-brief (-but-ultimate-
ly-long-enough-to-change-everything-in-
cisively) passage of 1993-1998 via an
assembly of previously uncollected studio
recordings and beautifully captured unre-
leased live material.
Gastr del Sol's music was of the trans-
formative variety - or was it transfiguration
they were up to? Or transmigration? Flux
was key, to be sure. David Grubbs formed
Gastr from the final lineup of Bastro; on
Gastr del Sol's debut, The Serpentine
Similar, Grubbs, Bundy K. Brown and John
McEntire downshifted from a thrashing
electric outfit into a droning, acoustic-based
one. Following this, the lineup shifted again,
decisively - Brown and McEntire departed
to focus on the project to be known as Tor-
toise, and Jim O'Rourke arrived, pairing
with Grubbs to make a sequence of unpre-
dictable leaps across genre and practical
approach alike, over three LPs and a pair of
EPs that threatened the passage of musical
time as we knew it in the mid-90s.
We Have Dozens of Titles contains
nearly an hour of previously unreleased live
recordings, alongside another near-hour of
studio recordings culled from previously
uncollected singles, EPs, and compilations.
At long last, vinyl purchasers will hear the full
range of "The Harp Factory on Lake Street,"
"Dead Cats in a Foghorn," "Quietly Approach-
ing," and "The Bells of St. Mary's" for the first
time EVER on vinyl - all of it, live and studio
alike, lovingly mastered and remastered by
Jim O'Rourke, and packaged in a three-LP
box set with a wicked Roman Signer image
on its removable lid, interior printing on the
box bottom and inner sleeves for each LP
with performance credits for all the songs.
As much as Gastr del Sol's albums show-
case a group eminently at home in the stu-
dio, they were inclined to thoroughly reinvent
their compositions in performance. While
reviewing live tapes for this compilation, the
studio versions of most things felt more and
more definitive, with the exception of the live
takes included here, which essay startling
new qualities in pieces that have been in the
public ear for several decades.
The majority of these live performances
come from a miraculous find in the CBC
archive - a broadcast-quality recording of
Jim and David from the 1997 Festival Inter-
national de Musique Actuelle de Victoria-
ville. This was the last time they performed
together as Gastr del Sol, during which sev-
eral still-gestating Camoufleur pieces were
presented in radically different forms and
Jim played organ on a track from David's
first solo album, the concert-closing, band
closing (and now album-closing) version of
"Onion Orange."
The studio recordings included were orig-
inally released by the Red Hot Organization,
God Mountain, Table of the Elements, Sony
Japan, Teenbeat and Drag City. Studios uti-
lized in the making of the material were Idful
Music Corporation, Kingsize Soundlab and
steamroom. The extended company of play-
ers on these numbers includes Jeb Bishop,
Bundy K. Brown, Steve Butters, Gene
Coleman, Thymme Jones, Terri Kapsa-
lis, John McEntire, G nter M ller, Bob
Weston and Sue Wolf - a virtual "what's
who wha'?!?" of Chicago's hothouse scene
in those times.
We Have Dozens of Titles revisits the
slow-burning incendiaries of Gastr del Sol,
finding, once again and after so much time
elapsed, another, further set of reinventions
from a group who continues to change the
way we hear music.
