The past few years have put us through some changes, with corresponding changes in our ways. Andy Guthrie is no different. Previously, on records like Gyropedie and Codiaeum Variegatum, the San Francisco-based acoustician has processed combinations of French horn and field recordings into richly textured concentrations of sound. Blemished, which was recorded in 2020-2021, retains those options, but also adds a new medium to Guthrie’s artistic kit bag — songs. Highly lyrically specific and sung in the artist’s high, clear voice, they introduce a more direct mode of expression, which is applied to deeply personal ends.
“Arcade Exterior, 2021” commences the tape (or download, if you don’t move quick; only 25 cassettes were made) with a street recording on which kids whoop, adults banter in various languages and traffic passes by. Guthrie is an inaudible presence; you only assume that they were there because someone had to record the action. “Eulogy” begins in similar fashion, but after a couple minutes a spare piano melody emerges amidst the broadcast voices and rumbling vehicles. Guthrie’s voice joins it, following the instrument’s tune while relating memories of somebody’s chaotic downwards spiral. The song doesn’t so much interact as coexist with the field recordings, and at one point a microphone bump takes the foreground, serving notice that both are figures that have been placed on a wider stage.
Deeper into the tape’s first side, “Our Sturdy Little Hawk” gives some complicating context. Guthrie’s voice perches atop melancholy brass tones, following a cadence of taps and drags — who needs a drummer when you’ve got microphones and things to tap on or near then? The words address some past, broken figure, but the shift of pronouns between “I” and “you” raises questions about the relationship between narrator and subject. On the flip, the perspective shifts. “Cipher” takes an external view of a person who seems to be bumping along, never far from crashing and alienated from the people whose care they need. Guthrie’s vocal strikes a precise balance between precise pitch placement and just enough wobbly to invite the listener into the protagonist’s dark space. Then comes “Bipedal,” on which sounds of things being placed down and rolled suggest a long, solitary passage to the next passage of song.
In the album’s final tracks, the narration shifts to first person, and it becomes clear that the narrator and the observed subject are aspects of the same individual, who seems to coming to some consolidation of a self. “Repair Of Small Objects” ends the album on a hopeful a note of reconciliation, heralding its good news with ascending French horn figures. On Blemished, Guthrie has found a way to make abstracted audio resources project deeply personal communication. Give it some time and you will be amazed.
