There hasn’t been enough discussion of Will Guthrie here. I’ve briefly talked about his holistic approach to percussion here but not discussed his wider application of these methods. That far-sighted, wide-ranging approach has been heard in its most digested form in People Pleaser, his “Guthrie Goes Pop” release on Black Truffle in 2017. It was such a success that he’s now delivered People Pleaser Pt. II, a second concise serving of short bursts of head-funk that thunder through your ears in a fever-dream collage where you’re never sure if, or what, he’s drumming. It’s a mad collage of dizzy eclecticism and musicological shitbaggery which reaches an early peak when Guthrie seems to be playing something from a bit of half a dozen FM radio staples all at once, before trapping you in more prolonged labyrinths of loops and found sounds. What makes this all work is understanding the difference between randomness and spontaneity; there’s an absurdist anti-logic and unselfconscious irreverence that makes the record a delight, even as it grows more menacing and sombre, like a cheesy horror movie that’s a little too good. The way the sequel differs from the original is explained by the cover art, where Warhol-bright variations have been replaced by a disorienting blur. Even the tracking becomes increasingly arbitrary. It doesn’t clamour for your attention, as it expects it will fascinate, amuse and deceive you in the same way it did its creator.
On the flipside of rewarding/punishing attention, a little while back Takuroku released Jean-Luc Guionnet’s Totality, an album that defies you to listen to it. The thing’s damn near four hours but without any of the usual pacing or development that might get the listener acclimatised. It moves both too fast and too slow, too much and not enough. When elements make a point in outstaying their welcome it seems of a piece with the work’s stated excess. There are lacunae. Voices sporadically appear throughout, in a continuing non-sequitur. Everything is distorted, transmitted imperfectly. It starts to make sense in a meta way, listening to it like you’re randomly tuning a shortwave radio back and forth, searching out meaning but happy to find a place where you can stay awhile, just to see if anything develops. It’s download only, so after initial hearings the best way for listeners to further engage with the work is likely through taking matters into their own hands and flicking the cursor to one place or another at random until the scope of the contents sinks in.
Now, what happens when you put these two together? Guionnet and Guthrie have collaborated for many years, usually on what gets lumped together as free jazz and noise. At least they describe it as “aggressive and antisocial” jazz, so I can dig it. Electric Rag plays out as People Pleaser Pt. II‘s evil twin: the pop-music fever dream returns as once again it can be hard to tell what sound is coming from Guthrie’s percussion and what from Guionnet’s keyboards and sax. Everything’s close-miked, compressed and distorted into bursts of deep-fried noise. The two albums are structured in a similar way, but here the pop references, cutaways and found objects are stripped out for straight-out duets that become increasingly abrasive as the album progresses. Guthrie’s drumming zones in and out of electronic pulses while Guionnet’s instruments verge on feedback and musique concrète. Their playing has an aggression to it that at first seems to become more hostile the deeper you get into the album, until you realise it’s all building up to something more ominous. For all its convulsions, the sounds they unleash share the disruptive and cathartic qualities that always leave me with impression of having just listened to rock.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Jean-Luc Guionnet, Will Guthrie
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Lockdown Roundup: James Rushford, Will Guthrie
Sunday 17 May 2020
Musicians everywhere are getting slugged by Covid-19 shutting down venues and travel for months. What can you do? Keep making music. New pieces are going out on Bandcamp, Soundcloud, streaming live on Youtube and wherever. I’ve talked about James Rushford and Will Guthrie each on this site several times before, but not in the capacity as solo composers. Rushford put up two new items on his Bandcamp on 1 May, the second fee-free day on the site this year. Clerestory is a solo organ performance from a gig at Hospitalkirche Stuttgart in 2017. Organ is always impressive, even John Zorn can’t mess it up too badly, but Clerestory is a more enlightening insight into Rushford’s musical thinking. It’s eclectic, but with an attention span that surprises the listener with unexpected connections instead of trying to dazzle with a rollcall of cultural references. Moody ambience yields to imperious bombast; when the sonorites and textures get thornier, the music perversely opens up into something more allusive and enigmatic for the imagination.
Prey Calling started as an installation at MONA FOMA in Tasmania earlier this year. The description of this stereo mixdown is horripilating: “a mashup of vintage synth and whale song, inspired by the story of Greenpeace expeditioners using the Serge modular synthesiser to communicate with humpback whales”. Blessedly, Rushford’s approach is closer to David Tudor’s in Soundings: Ocean Diary than a head shop: a kaleidoscopic array of complex electroacoustic sounds that verge upon whale song, recognising the ocean as a constant flux and not an inert medium. It constantly refreshes itself with the same invention and dynamism as his improvised duets with Joe Talia (see Paper Fault Line for a good, early example).
Percussionist Will Guthrie’s solo piece For Stephane is a bit older, going back to mid-March this year when it was released. I’ve spoken before about his holistic approach to percussion, observing how his performances resemble the curation of an environment of discrete but interrelated objects: an ecological method. This carries over into his work with electronics. For Stephane recalls the gamelan from his Black Truffle release Nist Nah, producing a hazy montage of distant gongs, sustained humming, hissing and rattles, muted recordings and faint radio broadcasts. The fragmented, ephemeral nature of the piece evokes memory, history, curdled nostalgia and remoteness.
