Audiopile Review: Gastr del Sol was very much a part of the late-80s-early-90s stream of leftfield American rock that came out of Louisville, Kentucky, and made its home in Chicago. The band grew from David Grubbs’s power trio Bastro. When the rhythm section left to concentrate on inventing Tortoise, Grubbs drafted in Jim O’Rourke and the Gastr del Sol sound really took shape. That sound mixed finger-picked folk guitar, literary modernism, free improv chaos, and electro-acoustic abstraction. And the project drew in collaborators ranging from minimalist legend Tony Conrad to professor of glitch Markus ‘Oval’ Popp. Gastr del Sol made some of the most original and oddly beautiful music of the ‘90s and then, when it all started to seem too much like a ‘proper’ rock band, called it a day. Now, after a quarter-century of silence, and following the discovery of a CBC-enabled live recording, Gastr is releasing ‘We Have Dozens of Titles’, a handsome 3LP rarities collection. It’s a salutary reminder of how, like Louisville’s Slint, Grubbs and O’Rourke did something magical with the herky-jerky, cliché-avoiding style of US avant rock that is so often self-consciously ugly. Without losing that style’s militancy, they melted it down into a quicksilver greyscale dreamscape. Which is a darned good definition of ‘post-rock’ if you think about it. The good stuff, mind you, not all that crescendo-heavy emo nonsense (no offence). Point is, this is in no way a fan-club-only selection of ephemera. It’s an opportunity to refamiliarize yourself with enchantment.

Nearly twenty-five years after disbanding, Gastr del Sol have unpacked their archive, stringing together an alternative view to their genre-melting 1993-1998 run. This assembly of previously uncollected studio recordings and beautifully captured unreleased live performances forms a spacious ode to the flux that was their métier; a further set of reinventions that continue to alter the manner in which we hear music, and literally everything else!