August 15, 1981 was a Saturday with temperatures

in the 70s—on the cool side for the

height of summer in Minneapolis. Diana Ross

and Lionel Richie’s Endless Love was at number

one on the Billboard Hot 100, and MTV

had been on the air for precisely two weeks.

This was uninteresting, though, to the crowd

pushing into 7th St. Entry, a one-year-old,

black-box annex to Sam’s Danceteria (months

later to be rechristened First Avenue), a

downtown music club in the former Northland-Greyhound bus depot fast becoming one of the

Twin Cities’ premier music venues for emerging

talent. They were here for punk rock,

and for the homecoming of three young musicians

from St. Paul: Grant Hart, Bob Mould,

and Greg Norton—collectively known as Hüsker Dü–returning to town at the end of a tour

they named the “Childrens’ Crusade.” The

tour marked Hüsker Dü’s international breakout,

as it began in Calgary and Victoria. It

then meandered from Seattle to Portland to

San Francisco and Sacramento and back to the Midwest through Chicago and Madison. But here

at the Entry (as it was called by its regulars),

Hüsker Dü was a fixture, having played

the venue on at least 50 occasions—sometimes

several times in one week—since January 1980.

The cramped Entry—capacity 250—had been

hewed from the bus depot’s former cloakroom

and cafe. In its corner was the low-ceilinged

stage, swathed in peeling black paint and

scattered with plastic beer cups. It barely

accommodated Hart, Mould, Norton, and Hart’s

Ludwig drum kit, inherited at age 10 from his

older brother, tragically killed by a drunk

driver. The crowd in the smoke-filled room

was partying, restless, waiting to experience

the contagious energy that by now they knew

well. Touring had tightened up the material,

and new songs had been written on the road,

so the band knew it was a moment to capture.

Short on funds for a studio album, they had

cobbled together $300 to record the show with

the intent of releasing it as a live LP.

From the moment Hüsker Dü took the stage,

the first set was unrelenting. It began

with “All Tensed Up” and proceeded to compress

17 songs into less than a half hour,

kept on pace by Hart’s ferocious, high-speed

drumming: insistent, decisive, with clear

purpose. The LP would be called Land Speed

Record and was released shortly thereafter

with assistance from Mike Watt of the Minutemen and his label New Alliance. The

jacket, like those of many hardcore punk and

ska records of the time, was requisite black

and white, its DIY graphics (designed by Hart

via his pseudonymous Fake Name Grafx with

Xerox copier and Sharpie marker) advocating

the same urgency and immediacy as the music

within. While less melodic and textured than

Hüsker Dü’s subsequent albums, this one

was special in its unruliness: it not only

revealed a band on the verge of its collective

potential, but also captured the essence

of the venue that had been its incubator. For

26 minutes and 35 seconds within its enveloping

black walls, 7th St. Entry became a

creative tinderbox, encapsulated within Land

Speed Record.

*

Eighteen years later, Hüsker Dü had disbanded,as had Hart’s subsequent band, NovaMob. By the channels through which artistsand performers often discover shared sensibilities,Grant Hart, now a solo performer,met Chris Larson. Both were from St. Paul,both had a fascination with a certain historyof American culture, both understood music’srelationship to art. Their friendship throughthe years became a collaborative one: Hartappeared in Larson’s live performance workShotgun Shack and his film Crush Collision(both 2006), and Larson provided album artfor Hart’s independent release Good News forModern Man (2014).

A musician in addition to being a visual

artist, Larson has broad interests. His roots

in sculpture have led him to explore film,

video, photography, performance, drawing, and

painting. His most memorable projects have

stemmed from architecture—from vernacular

building types (coal mine tipples, shotgun shacks) to imaginary, illogical structures—which inspire sculptural or filmic environments

rooted in his skilled carpentry. These

structures are layered with a strong narrative

armature; he often lays plans within

them for some unexpected action, such as the

rural shack in Deep North (2008) encrusted

inside and out with ice and housing a

strange, human-powered machine, or the floating

house adrift on a lake in the film Crush

Collision (featuring Hart among its performers),

in which a rough-hewn machine, a gospel

quartet, and a drummer share parallel narratives

and spaces within.

Larson’s works are often linked—a sculpture

becomes a film set that then becomes

a photograph, for example—and are also

regenerative, as an element used in one

piece has the potential to appear again in

another. While his earlier works embraced

archetypal structures and improvised apparatus,

more recent endeavors have investigated

specific architectural sites. For

Celebration/Love/Loss (2013), he meticulously constructed a full-scale wood-and-cardboard

facsimile of the only Marcel Breuer–designed

modernist home in the Twin Cities, then proceeded

to torch it in a grand spectacle of

flame. For Larson, the process of replication

is a route to new meaning.

With Land Speed Record, his latest video

installation, he focuses on the objects (and

memories) left behind when their context and

architectural enclosure have disappeared. In

2011, Hart’s childhood home in South St. Paul

caught fire and partially burned. The smoke-blackened

contents—furniture, appliances,

antiques and collectibles, Studebaker parts,

ephemera from gigs, art supplies, clothing,

master tapes, guitars, and drums—had

to be quickly cleared from the home, and

Larson volunteered his studio as a storage

space. For almost two years, the accumulation

occupied the studio, itself a former

warehouse for furniture in transit from factory

to home. Hart would occasionally rearrange

things on periodic visits, but Larson

lived with and contemplated the items as they

sat dormant, without framework or circumstance,

unmoored from the house in which they

had been collected, where Hart had learned

to play the drums used at 7th St. Entry on

August 15, 1981.

Larson did not focus on the house.

Instead, he began to build another machine,

this time a motorized track for a camera that

could provide new perspective and capture a

slow, methodical pan across the 85-foot-long

drift of Hart’s possessions. This became a

pair of films—one in color, one black and

white—each mirroring the 26:35-minute duration

of Land Speed Record. At first the

films, at once reverential and haunting, were

silent. But the work wasn’t finished. Larson

began a new sculptural element, this time

using the less physical materials of sound,

memory, and place. He bought drums from Twin

Town Guitars (“Keeping your life loud & local

since 1997”)—a crystal-clear Ludwig Vista-

Lite kit in mint condition. He commissioned

a young musician with a passion for hardcore

punk to learn the drum track of Land Speed Record, in its entirety and to meet him at

7th St. Entry when he was ready. The empty

venue was unlocked, lights turned on, and the

transparent drum kit arranged on the stage.

Quietly placed alongside it was a Ludwig

snare, unearthed from the pile of burned

objects. After recording equipment was set

up, the musician, sticks poised, donned headphones.

Seven seconds passed, during which

one could faintly hear through his headset

the sound of a crowd, a squeal of feedback,

and the opening chords on Land Speed Record.

Then he began drumming, playing with surgical

precision alongside the recording of

Hart. Live then and live now. This time, distilled

and stripped away from band and crowd,

Larson’s recording captured just two things:

the crystalline syncopation and the walls of

7th St. Entry that carried its sound.

In Larson’s installation within the dark

gallery space, this pure and specific sound

is layered with sculpture (based on the

venue’s black room divider/drink rail) and

with the films. The sound interrupts, then

fades through the filmed images, wrapping

Hart’s inert and orphaned belongings in the

moving image with the liveness of August 15,

1981. Recorded by the camera and scaffolded

by sound, the charred objects are no longer

ruins but are emancipated—they no longer

require the enclosure of the house, the studio,

or specific recollections.

When Land Speed Record hit stores just

before Christmas 1981, a local critic admiringly

called it “a repository of strength and

horror” (City Pages). For Larson, the notion

of the repository remains rich and spacious,

filled with the possibility for reinvention.

Likewise, the vestiges of what a space has

once held, whether objects, sounds, words,

or memories, can perpetually be re-embodied.

In Larson’s Land Speed Record, these remnants

layer to form a larger narrative.

Hüsker Dü was named after a family board game

that tests one’s ability to recall images: a

childhood home, a music venue, a furniture

warehouse. The words are Norwegian for “Do

you remember?”