The Wire
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
ParisTransatlantic
TIf 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
Bagatellen
Will Guthrie’s “body and limbs still look to light” does indeed have a more luminous character than the listener might have expected given the rather brutal nature of recent work such as “Spear” or his fine collaboration with Ferran Fages, “cinabri”. The three pieces on this disc are more contemplative and even airy, less slab-like in nature.
Each piece is also very different from the other in the basic sound palette employed. “Taken” contrasts skittering, small percussive sounds with soft, deep gongs and smatterings of electronica at its start. It’s relatively brief, stays on a single, gentle track and works quite well as a self-contained examination of a given area; terseness as a virtue while hinting at larger spaces. The second track, “Peak”, concentrates on radio usage and, while it has moments of sharp, concise, beauty, it also serves to illustrate how difficult it is to plow this particular field. The line between the arbitrary and serendipitously revelatory is a tough one to negotiate and, too often, this teeters into the first territory, at least to this listener’s ears. When, about midway through the piece, the radio steps aside to act as companion for some Muller-esque electronics, things gel enticingly into a slithery, warm plasma. “Withdrawal”, the longest track here at about 15 minutes, is my favorite work on the disc. After an initial ultra-quiet section, Guthrie spends the bulk of the performance contrasting eerily similar pitches culled from very different sources, overlapping them in irregular waves. It’s a beautiful idea, beautifully realized as ship horn-like toots, thin sine waves, rough percussive scrapes, and other tones from who-knows-where that sound oddly related (some radio too, I think) weave and slide over and beneath each other. It’s like a rug made from varicolored and differently textured strands of the same thickness. If it loses a bit of steam 12 or so minutes in, well, it’s been a great ride up until then.
The disc has a something of a searching quality to it, perhaps surprising after the overt confidence of previous Guthrie works, but encouraging as well. It’s a solid, rigorous, sometimes probing recording, one that significantly whets one’s appetite for future endeavors.
Brian Olewnick
Touching Extremes
If you expect sparkle and chime, look somewhere else. Will Guthrie’s latest solo effort goes for the grimy gusto of a multitude of interwining sound collages layered over the course of three pretty long pieces, the sources being voices, noises and signals - from both the ether and the (un)real world - and more orthodox (?) instruments (Guthrie remains first and foremost a percussionist). Many of the malformed onslaughts heard in this CD come from quite undefinable patches sapiently handled by the Nantes-based Australian, who puts them in relation with transversal landscapes made with radio waves and broadcast snippets, cut-and-paste-and-cut-again economical discordances subordinated to the sheer beauty of a bell sound or to the transgressive grumble of some kind of human/instrumental bionic chorale, apparently born from a shapeless harmonic conformation which gets constantly mashed, gulped and digested by Guthrie to fight sonic obsolescence. But what really stands out in this artist’s work is the effective – striking, one would say – raw allure he’s able to generate by adjoining “poor” and “rich” qualities in the space of short segments, thus creating a “pariah vs brahman” stratum of progressively unquiet staticity that is enthralling to say the least. At first, the mind needs to adapt a little bit, then its cognitive capabilities progressively respond with positive impulses; as the process goes on, we develop immunitary defenses against the addiction to consonance, which has been - and always will be - the ruining factor in many brains destined to perennially refuse sonic evolution. “Body and limbs still look to light” is a fulgid example of improvement in that sense, a thoroughly intelligent effort by an acute dissenter whose creative output grows more and more in terms of artistic quality and wry-smiled, illuminated bitterness.
Massimo Ricci
