Luke Fowler and David Grubbs meet for the first time on J’ai pensé sans paroles, a work that brings together two artists whose practices have long moved between experimental music, composition, film and sound. Glasgow-based Luke Fowler is an artist, filmmaker and musician whose work explores the relationship between documentary, experimental cinema and music. His films have often taken the form of portraits of composers and musicians, including Cornelius Cardew, R.D. Laing and Brunhild Ferrari, and his practice has been recognised with the inaugural Derek Jarman Award and a Turner Prize nomination.
Based in Brooklyn, David Grubbs has been a central figure in experimental music for more than three decades. A founding member of Squirrel Bait, Bastro and Gastr del Sol, he has since developed an extensive body of solo work as a composer, pianist and improviser, alongside collaborations with artists including Pauline Oliveros, Tony Conrad and Susan Howe. His work also extends into writing and teaching, reflecting a sustained interest in the intersections between music, literature and the visual arts.
The album’s first piece, J’ai pensé sans paroles, was created in the wake of Fowler’s two portrait films about French-German composer Brunhild Ferrari, N’importe quoi (for Brunhild) (2023) and N’importe quoi (Extérieur Jour) (2024). Ferrari is a composer of electroacoustic and musique concrète whose work developed in close proximity to the Parisian musique concrète tradition. She was also the longtime collaborator and partner of composer Luc Ferrari, working alongside him for more than four decades before developing an increasingly independent body of work.
The piece incorporates sound material provided by Ferrari, as well as field recordings made by Eric La Casa during the production of Fowler’s films in Paris and Montreuil. These materials are joined by an excerpt from Wolfgang Meyer Tormin’s Vom Klavier für’s Klavier IV – Sieben Stücke (1987), alongside newly recorded piano and electronics by Fowler and Grubbs, recorded in Glasgow, Brooklyn and at La Muse en Circuit in Alfortville, France. Mixed by Fowler and Grubbs with Samuel J. Smith at Green Door Studio in Glasgow, the piece unfolds as a fluid assemblage of archival material, field recordings, voice, piano and electronics.
Rather than functioning as a documentary record of Ferrari or Fowler’s films, J’ai pensé sans paroles transforms these disparate materials into a new compositional space, where memory, place and sound continually overlap. The processes of listening, recording and recontextualising become part of the composition itself, extending Fowler’s engagement with portraiture while opening it into a collaborative musical language with Grubbs.
The album is completed by Verbal Equinox, recorded between Glasgow and Brooklyn. More direct and open-ended, the piece extends the dialogue established in J’ai pensé sans paroles, foregrounding the intuitive interplay between the two musicians and their shared interest in the unstable territory between composition and improvisation.
Together, the two works mark the beginning of a collaboration between Fowler and Grubbs, bringing their distinct but closely connected practices into a shared space of listening, transformation and encounter.
