Hubble is the guitar-centric solo project of N.Y. native Ben Greenberg, perhaps best known for his gymnastic fretwork in the avant-jazz collective Zs. Like that project, the 26-year-old multi-instrumentalist could be described as DIY Brooklyn's answer to 1970s Manhattan crossover composers like Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham, artists who merged the endless repetitions of minimalism with the amplitude and instrumentation of punk. Greenberg is a trained jazz guitarist who's been gigging around the city in rock bands of all stripes since he was in middle school. He was a founding member of the defunct New York art-punk trio Pygmy Shrews, and was recently recruited to play with local rock iconoclasts the Men, whose Leave Home LP he engineered.
Hubble Drums finds Greenberg channeling his affinity for high-intensity marathon jams into an elemental formula: a guitar, a chain of delay pedals, and a handful of melodic progressions, most of them barely a second long. In the live setting, Hubble's music can feel like a collision between Robert Fripp guitar noodling and minimalist experiments in phasing. As he draws each melodic fragment out into a sprawling, 10-to-20-minute epic, Hubble also becomes the spectacle of Greenberg struggling against himself, pushing up against the limits of his own psychic and physical endurance.
In the context of the contemporary synth revival, the result will hold particular appeal for fans of Emeralds, early Oneohtrix Point Never, Keith Fullerton Whitman, and other stargazing, kosmische-inspired musicians in the practice of mining the meditative potential of the endless arpeggiation. The difference between them being that Hubble's music is partly a showcase of Greenberg's technical virtuosity, the intensity of which makes it exausting for him to perform. Either through conscious manipulation or human error, Greenberg seems to exhaust every possible micro-variation of each of the phrases he attacks. The catch is that none of the the melodies ever resolve themselves, creating a state of suspension that can feel either like euphoria or anxiety, escapism or entrapment, without us even noticing the change. (Note that, though I wasn't involved in its selection, a track by Greenberg appears on a compilation I'm organizing with a friend.)
Where Hubble Drums really inspires, however, is when Greenberg introduces a bit more textural play, cranking the distortion on 20-minute closer "Glass Napkin" just enough to evoke a scorched Grateful Dead jam or a slightly over-indulgent Hendrix solo. It's uncomfortable and pleasingly familiar at the same time, and it makes minimalism à la Terry Riley sound eerily compatible with what is probably the most maximalist rock-n-roll trick in the bag: shredding. Greenberg's recent collaboration with Tiffany Borders from the Space Telescope Science Institute and video artist Sheena Callage, which sets "Hubble's Hubble" to imaging of actual Hubble telescope data, gives a good visual metaphor for our listening experience, both here and elsewhere on this beautifully troubling debut: an endless back-and-forth between details and expanses, wide angles and extreme close-ups, anxiety and awe.
