Eternal Rhythm: Gastr Del Sol's Upgrade & Afterlife
By the mid-1990s, indie rock was undergoing a kind of identity crisis. The underground had surfaced. Nirvana’s Nevermind had blown a hole in the idea that weird music was always destined to stay small. Labels like Matador and Drag City were suddenly industry players. What used to be subcultural was now, oddly, a little chic. And into this atmosphere of post-slacker recalibration came Upgrade & Afterlife, Gastr del Sol’s spectral transmission from the void.
The band — nominally a duo of David Grubbs and Jim O’Rourke — was never interested in traditional song structures. Or tradition, really. But Upgrade & Afterlife, released in 1996 on Drag City, was something even stranger: a chamber record dressed in the rags of a rock band, or maybe a rock record dreaming it was a sculpture. It’s a record about dismantling—of genre, memory, and even self.
If Grubbs’ earlier work with Squirrel Bait or Bastro suggested punk through a postmodern filter, and O'Rourke's experimental catalog betrayed an obsession with process over product, then Upgrade & Afterlife was where those instincts got sublimated into something tactile and yet eerily disembodied. The opener, “The Seasons Reverse,” is a kind of koan: harpsichord, drifting guitar figures, and Grubbs’ vocals so dry they seem parched by their own philosophical resignation. “And we’ll never work this out,” he sings, not as complaint but as principle.
The album is also haunted—by instruments, by ideas, by ghosts of past records. “Our Exquisite Replica of ‘Eternity’” is a reworking of John Fahey’s “The Singing Bridge of Memphis, Tennessee,” but not in the sense of a cover. It’s a reconstruction, a repurposing of acoustic guitar as a memory device. Fahey’s melancholic Americana is chopped, elongated, and reassembled in the form of a minimalist hallucination. It’s homage by way of hauntology.
The album wasn’t just music; it was a statement of artistic refusal. It said: the future of indie music isn’t more polish, more professionalism, or bigger stages. It might actually be retreat. It might be disassembly. It might be silence.
Gastr del Sol never made another record quite like this. Within a year, O’Rourke would begin collaborating with Wilco, eventually joining Sonic Youth. Grubbs would deepen his work in academia and composition. Upgrade & Afterlife is the sound of two musical minds just before the split—locked in a final, quietly radical collaboration. It doesn’t ask for your attention so much as it waits, patiently, for you to come back to it, perhaps years later, with different ears.
And when you do, you might notice something: in a time when everyone was trying to figure out where indie rock should go next, Gastr del Sol chose to disappear.
Upgrade & Afterlife is re-pressed by Drag City and available now