Frequency Festival: David Grubbs & RAGE Thormbones
Schedule
Wed, 25 Feb, 2026 at 08:30 pm
UTC-06:00Location
3111 N Western Ave Chicago IL 60618 | Chicago, IL
8:30pm.In his first solo performance in Chicago since 2021, Grubbs will perform music from his acclaimed 2025 album Whistle From Above, while also previewing material from his next solo recording.
David Grubbs is Distinguished Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. He is the author of Good night the pleasure was ours, The Voice in the Headphones, Now that the audience is assembled, andRecords Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording (all published by Duke University Press) as well as the collaborative artists’ books Simultaneous Soloists (with Anthony McCall, Pioneer Works Press) and Projectile(with Reto Geiser and John Sparagana, Drag City). Records Ruin the Landscape has appeared in French, Italian, and Japanese translations.
Grubbs has released sixteen solo albums and appeared on more than 200 releases. In 2000, his The Spectrum Between (Drag City) was named “Album of the Year” in the London Sunday Times. He is known for his cross-disciplinary collaborations with poet Susan Howe and visual artists Anthony McCall, Angela Bulloch, and Josiah McElheny, and his work has been presented at, among other venues, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, the Tate Modern, and the Centre Pompidou. Grubbs was a member of the groups Gastr del Sol, Bastro, and Squirrel Bait, and has performed with Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, Luc Ferrari, Will Oldham, Loren Connors, Jan St. Werner, the Red Krayola, and many others. He is a recipient of the Berlin Prize and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts award in Music/Sound, a member of the board of directors of Blank Forms, and director of the Blue Chopsticks record label.
Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/blackfaurest/?hl=en]
dragcity.com/artists/david-grubbs [https://www.dragcity.com/artists/david-grubbs]
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Weston Olencki and Mattie Barbier, trombones
RAGE Thormbones is a low-frequency duo whose work exists at the intersections of “fuck around” and “find out”. Both members, Weston from Berlin and Mattie from Los Angeles, are classically trained trombonists but abandoned that ship a while ago and have been performing as a duo since 2014. They mainly use trombones to produce sculpted masses of high-density sound, carving metallic resonance and subcutaneous tones to make rooms feel really heavy. They aim to shift the role of brass instruments away from vocal virtuosity and more toward their true selves as improvising organic air compressors - physically-modeled synthesis transcribed back into the acoustic domain.
RAGE has collaborated with a range of artists including Clara Iannotta, Kevin Drumm, Sarah Davachi, Michelle Lou, and British pop maverick Scott Walker. They’ve presented work everywhere from Walt Disney Concert Hall, The Darmstadt Summers Courses, Borealis Festival, Donaueschinger Musiktage, and ISSUE Project Room to their favorite basements/living rooms/warehouses/ crypts, and more recently, as soloists with the Helsinki Philharmonic and the SWR Symphonieorchester.
RAGE Thormbones website [https://ragethormbones.com/ABOUT.php] and instagram [https://www.instagram.com/ragethormbones/?hl=en].
Where is it happening?
3111 N Western Ave Chicago IL 60618, 3111 N Western Ave, Chicago, IL 60618-6409, United States
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