Two new reviews of my CFYR cd, Perhaps a Favorable Organic Moment, are now posted. The first is by BW Diederich, and can be found here. The second is by Frans De Waard and is part of the Vital Weekly newsletter, reposted below:
ANNE GUTHRIE – PERHAPS A FAVORABLE ORGANIC MOMENT (CD by Copy For Your Records)
The release by Anne Guthrie is surely one of the stranger discs of this week. Guthrie is an ‘acoustician, composer, French horn player and writer’ from Brooklyn. She studies right now at Rensselaer Polytechnic (where Pauline Oliveros teaches) and she is interested in exploring non-musical sounds and acoustic phenomena. Nothing out of the ordinary for Vital Weekly, you might think. There are three pieces on this CD, of which the first and the last are separated into two parts. In the first we hear field recordings, humming quite low in part one and ventilator sounds in part two, over which Guthrie improvises with the French horn Bach’s cello suite No. 2 (the prelude to be precise). The final piece repeats this but with Guthrie singing a folk song. Sandwiched between these two is a recording from Times Center in New York, which seems to be a pure field recordings piece. Its a bit unclear, but perhaps that’s the great thing about music, if she is singing these pieces, or playing the horn, on location or wether she uses various recordings mixed together to create her pieces. Is she in a tunnel, like in the final piece suggests, or on the street in the piece before? Guthrie seems to be interested in creating audio illusions with her music – raising questions as to where and how things were made, if there was any subsequent treatments (which I doubt, but in her Times Center piece also difficult to ignore thinking about) and obviously what it all means. A most curious disc indeed. At first a bit annoying (‘french horn trying to play Bach, what is that all about?’), but the more it is played – and use some more volume here – the better it gets.
Read more: http://modisti.com/11/2011/06/21/vital-weekly-786/