Julien Héraud has written a very nice review of my cassette on Notice Recordings. You can find it in the original French here.
A rough English translation (thanks to Travis Bird at Notice) below:
” I’ve received with great enthusiasm all the previous recordings of Anne Guthrie, and it’s not today that that will change, especially with this tape. For those who know her work, this one is less surprising than her recent duo with (Richard) Kamerman. Here, she does more what she’s known for: the dialogue between incredible field recordings and radical French horn playing.
I like cassettes a lot to begin with, and I find that the format works particularly well here, in the way in which the texture of the tape adds to the overlap between field recordings and instrument. Recording with a parabolic microphone in Costa Rica, Guthrie captured flowing atmospheres that don’t yield many clues. They are abstract recordings that are mainly interested in the physicality of sound, with very little sonic evocation or representation. But, far from boring the listener, Guthrie is able to achieve an almost linear narrative in these recordings, sometimes looped, sometimes treated, but always in dialogue with the horn.
The recordings mainly come from a port, which leads to an inevitable juxtaposition: the horn literally drowns in the stream of the recordings. Breaths meld with wind, masts tremble gently in the wind, and soon there’s a deep confusion between the sources. A rich, dense dialogue where the extended techniques and the recordings overlap, then become distinct. They talk and support one another, one seeming to draw the border of the other, but a primordial focus reigns: sound as a physical phenomenon, whether from nature, process, or instrument. And this phenomenon is explored just as well by the instrument (itself recorded) as by the recorded sonic environments; instruments and environments are captured and traded in the same way: a sensible, physical treatment, narrative and poetic. ”
-Julien Héraud