Codiaeum Variegatum

Based in Brooklyn, Andy Guthrie is a professional acoustician, composer and sound artist whose work combines a highly technical knowledge of natural reverb, field recording and extended microphone techniques with live and processed instrumentation, including French horn, violoncello and contrabass. Their music explores the play of dichotomies: cacophony / beauty, accidental / intentional, unhinged / refined, traditional / outsider. Codiaeum Variegatum is Guthrie’s debut full-length proper, following out-of-print short-run releases on labels such as Engraved Glass and Copy For Your Records, as well as the recently released and critically lauded Sinter, a collaboration with Richard Kamerman issued by Erstwhile Records’ sub-label ErstAEU. The album’s six compositions showcase Guthrie’s acumen as a composer of rich and diverse sonic phenomena. From the keeling strings which open “Branching Low and Spreading,” she guides the listener through dense yet highly structured thickets of sound, juxtaposing astute room / field recordings with classical instrumentation, both dry and processed. On “Unlike More Slender and Graceful,” filtered French horn plumes are wed to cavernous, watery field recordings to forge beautiful yet bleak vistas, motifs to be revisited in a more hopeful light later on. Ultimately, Guthrie’s work occupies a heady middle ground somewhere between the enchantment of the everyday manifested by artists such as Graham Lambkin and Vanessa Rossetto and the high-minded electroacoustic investigations of her fellow Erstwhile alumni.