Kramer, never content to sit still for too long, is adding a brand new LP with an all-new collaborative lineup. Squanderers are the glowingly new—2024 vintage—trio of guitarists Wendy Eisenberg and David Grubbs (Gastr Del Sol, Bastro) alongside multi-instrumentalist/ producer Kramer. Having begun Squanderers as a duo in 2023 for Kramer’s “Rings of Saturn” box set, Grubbs & Kramer now enter the arena of live performance with the addition of bona-fide guitar slayer Eisenberg, a dream of a foil to Grubbs’s grubbslike guitarisms, setting the scene for Kramer’s bass to follow his musical divining rod.

The debut collaboration by three unique composers/musicians, If a body Meet a Body (Shimmy Disc), out November 22, 2024, explores the instantaneous relations between sound, gesture and space. All pieces are the results of spontaneous composition, the group playing together live and wild, in a New York studio. One afternoon of dream torched thoughts colliding, proving that hands on strings open lines of direct commune with the vastness of a collective unknown. 

Given the almost absurd collaborative skillsets of these three supremely versatile Squanderers, who knew which directions the group might have taken for their first album, much less what’s yet to come? Squanderers’ music pivots around improvisation, and shockingly little was decided in advance of their convening; Kramer, Wendy, and David came to the group’s assembling with the confidence of what would be would be, que sera sera.  You couldn’t divine these results. The first single being shared from If a body Meet a Body is “Theme for Squanderers,” accompanied by a piece of ambient-cinema by Kramer.

In Grubbs’s book-length poem, The Voice in the Headphones, “Squanderer” is the nickname that most deeply troubles of the book’s unnamed protagonist: “Hang your head, Squanderer. You’ll never darken the doorway of Studio A.” Will this trio of inveterate Squanderers redeem themselves?