“In Australia, it’s really different. When you’re a musician, you do a lot of different things. You don’t just do improvised music, or jazz. So I played in rock groups, in hip-hop groups, in jazz groups, with a Flamenco dance company, a lot things like that. And then I went to conservatory to study improvisation.”* For American ears, it is hard to comprehend how Australian expat percussionist Will Guthrie’s improvisations manage to make so much sense in so many different contexts. Last year, between one-off collaborations with members of the European electro-acoustic and free jazz community (Jérome Noetinger, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Clayton Thomas, Ferran Fages), he took to the French autoroutes with banjo player Scott Stroud and smashed old bluegrass standards like “Pretty Polly” and “Cripple Creek” into a shower of wooden splinters–while still leaving his listeners longing for the Appalachian mountains.
Whether he sits behind a conventional drum kit or a jumble of microphones and recycled junk, Guthrie’s playing invariably marries the responsiveness and deep listening of jazz with a love for counter-intuitive structures and asymmetrical chops. And if we listen closely enough, we’ll catch a whiff of that signature rhythmic mischievousness–usually accompanied by a smile–that tells us that his punk side is coming through. Like Cable#, the experimental music collective he runs out of the city of Nantes (France), and Antboy Music, his independent micro-label, Guthrie simply refuses to respect the invisible boundaries separating one “scene” or one musical language from the next. Rather, he treats them as pieces of wisdom to live by, summoning them at the flick of a wrist, twirling them around, and plugging them back into a higher virtue–one that is harder to define, and can probably only be called “musical.”
Spike-s, his new 7 inch out on Norwegian label Pica Disk, is less a showcase of the tools he keeps hidden in his gigbag than of his ability to set them in motion. Somewhere between his more “mental” output (read: rapid-fire and twisted) and the ambience of Charlie Charlie (his collaboration with wife Erell Latimier), Side A registers like a mouse cantering gleefully on his wheel, sustaining a feeling of euphoric hyperactivity that we may only recall experiencing the last time we witnessed the Corsano-Flower duo in concert. Like Corsano on record, Guthrie’s rapid pummels and skips are set at a physical remove, alternately muted and obscured by what sounds like a single synth drone passed back and forth over an old walky-talky. On Side B, Guthrie takes this simple elemental equation and switches on a musical equivalent of nightvision; instead of the constant drum pulse, we experience an equally resonant empty space, studded with metallic concrète sounds, static-drenched samples, and some pretty sadistic knob-turning.
The hidden link between these two tracks is one that we are likely to sense, but unlikely to concretely identify: the “synth drone” that we hear on the first track is a sample of a melody Guthrie ripped from an lp of traditional folk music from Brittany, which he proceeds to mash up, reloop, and rewire on the second. And who knows how many other secret constellation points Guthrie is plotting in our head? Whether you’re looking for a good noise record, some extremely on-point free-jazz drumming, or even the kind of “new new age” transcendentalism that has become so popular in the last year or so, you will find something in Spike’s to thoroughly enjoy; just remember to listen with your gut instead of your consumer preferences.
Words: Emilie Friedlander
* Interview with Visitation Rites‘ own Sophie Pécaud, Magazine Fragil, December, 2007. Translated from the original French by Emilie Friedlander.
Listen to Side A on YouTube here.
Tags: Antboy Music, Cable#, Chris Corsano, Clayton Thomas, Corsano-Flower Duo, Elwood & Guthrie, Ferran Fages, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Jérome Neotinger, Mick Flower, Will Guthrie