GASTR DEL SOL - Camofleur

2024's retrospective box We Have Dozens of Titles brought the revelatory 1993-'98 output of Gastr del Sol back into the world of physical objects, following a decade in which most of their music was mostly available online.

The ruckus that the box generated in the so-called real world was intense enough to warrant some more fun excursions; thus, we begin our vinyl reissue series of the Gastrlog at the end of the line, with their "art-pop masterpiece" (somebody's words, not ours-but we'll take 'em): Camoufleur.

Gastr del Sol released Camoufleur in February of 1998. It was a ringing down of the curtain on an extraordinary five years of music making (and unmaking) with one of the best albums of that era-or any other.

The backstory: Gastr first appeared out of the ashes of David Grubbs' postpunk band Bastro, whose final lineup-a furious electric triad of Grubbs, John McEntire and Bundy K. Brown-evolved into Gastr del Sol with The Serpentine Similar, an album of songs and singing that turned away from the loud and into the acoustic.

Brown and McEntire then departed, to focus on the newly-founded Tortoise, just as improviser/tape manipulator/musical polyglot/total freak Jim O'Rourke joined. Picking up on Gastr's acoustic fascination, Grubbs and O'Rourke twisted in oblique strains of modern classical, avant garde, tape music, world music and SPACE-lots of space-launching on an entirely transformative tear with the Crookt, Crackt, or Fly LP, "Mirror Repair" EP and Upgrade & Afterlife 2xLP.

Nothing prepared one for the inquests of each successive record, and yet, Camoufleur managed to top them all, by presenting their (so-called) avant explorations-which by this time were also incorporating glitchy power-book electronics-as pop music.

Released on LP and CD, Camoufleur had a prescient quality: like something that existed beyond such simple formats as LP and CD, or even the designations of "record" and "album."
It was the nascence era of the burnt CD, unmarked or attributed in any fashion. Twenty-seven years later and well into the digital era, we've come to understand it, by and by: these things of music are far more than the sum of their parts, and duly exist in many forms beyond that of a simple physical platter.

Further, the combination of divergent styles into one music is much more comprehensible in this era of the cloud, where music = data (and (IOHO) > "content," because, yeucchhh!).
Gastr may have pointed at data; their clamor may have suggested tags such as post-, art- and experimental rock, but their expression of all and sundry was one of purest soul.

Compelled by a similarly intense provocative love of the non-sequitur, they drafted in contributions from a diverse lineup (Markus Popp, Rob Mazurek, John McEntire, Julie Pomerleau, Steve Butters, Darin Gray, Jeb Bishop, Ken Vandermark, Jeremy Ronkin, Edith Frost and Stephen Prina) that flowed through the songs with an equal weight of improbability and appeal.

This was a startling set of sing-along tunes-or you could whistle along with the music, or keen along with the sound you couldn't identify, however you liked.
Once out in the world, Camoufleur went over like gangbusters.
Listening in today, it still does-time has only burnished its unique superpowers.
Upon release, of course, and with the same sense of enigma in which they'd issued their music, Gastr del Sol abruptly vanished, leaving all that stuff to time. And by golly, in time we've found it again, and huzzah almighty, have recommitted it to ol' reliable, the singular magic of the vinyl platter, for the enjoyment and edification of a new nation.

Vinyl release of Gastr Del Sol - Camofleur. Released through DRAG CITY and available on LP.