Will Guthrie - Body & Limbs Still Look to Light
CD in oversized digi from cathnor (cathnor02)
Buy Now $15.00 from Antboy Music
REVEIWS:
The enigmatically titled Body and Limbs Still Look to Light is a powerful solo set by Australian percussionist Will Guthrie, recorded at Apo33 in Nantes, France, during 2005. Guthrie isn't a 'pure' percussionist in either the classical or jazz tradition, he's just as likely to work with electronics and found sound, and much of "Peak" the second of the CDs three tracks, involves a dense montage of sounds sourced mostly from radio. The raw material of these pieces is the result of improvisation and chance, but Guthrie carefully sculpts the sounds and arranges them in intriguing ways. The electroacoustically adjusted gong tones and bass drum booms of "Taken" are strung along a line of swift, skittering percussion (muted metallophones and small drums) that sounds remarkably like the work of Paul Lovens. The final track, "Withdrawal", charts a withdrawal from, rather than into, silence. It's fairly quiet during the first five of its 17 minutes, but as the volume gradually increases so too does the intensity. Deep chiming figures are thickly overlaid with percussion of all kinds, together with electronic and electroacoustic sounds, and the pace of the piece, despite the different speeds at which some of the material comes and goes, remains stately throughout.
Brian Marley - The Wire
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If distortion and overload are the grit that leads to the pearl in the oyster, Will Guthrie's incisive editing hand offers a resolute knife-hold to separate the gem from its clammy casing. Anyone who's seen Guthrie live in recent times would be aware of how brutal his performances can be, maxing the volume while unleashing rough, unruly swarms of detourned electronics and manhandled percussion that move the air in the room. More interested in grain than drone, privileging volume and physicality over undemonstrative reductionism, Guthrie edits and arranges for maximum impact. He's interested in dirtied sound, dropping chunks of asphalt-texture feedback through Body and Limbs' opening tracks "Taken" and "Peak", the latter of which opens with the pedalling of the dial of a radio, the broadcasts swathed with static. Towards the end of the disc's final piece "Withdrawal", Guthrie scours away layers of sediment, allowing a recording of raspy breathing to briefly assume centre stage. This gesture personalises the tension in proceedings: though it sounds meticulously planned and obsessively edited, Guthrie hasn't sucked the lifeblood out of these three compositions, which lends them an exploratory, sometimes anxious air. Indeed, as has been noted elsewhere, its searching nature initially comes as a surprise after the brutish swagger of 2005's musique concrete masterpiece Spear, released as a limited CD-R on Guthrie's own Antboy Music label. I can't help but think of Body and Limbs as content to Spear's form - the latter as the decisive formal shift that allowed for the exploration and elaboration of the former.
Jon Dale - Paris Transatlantic