More thoughts on Anne Guthrie’s “Perhaps a Favorable Organic Moment”. In particular the first two tracks, Bach Cello Suite No. 2, Prelude (i) and Bach Cello Suite No. 2, Prelude (ii). I’ve been listening to this quite a bit of late, and am finding a lot to enjoy and a lot to think about. Not sure if I’ll give the other tracks the same treatment, which isn’t to say they’re less interesting or less enjoyable just that I lack follow-through. Also worth noting, this isn’t really a review, more an attempt to capture in writing some of what I find so interesting in this music.
That first track starts off so unassuming. A field recording, room tone, voices passing, steps, cars or trains in the distance, and it just sits, stays. Until that french horn comes in. It’s loud. Not jarring, but loud. The foreground suddenly becomes the background, and what at a first pass comes off as simple french horn playing, reveals a whole intimate world of secondary sound. Weaving in and out of her playing are these very intimate noises, making it seem like you’re right next to her. Her breath between phrases, her fingers on the valves, and later, missteps, notes slightly off, phrases repeated in a way that is obviously not written. That’s not to malign her playing, as I think it’s beautiful, and works perfectly. But you get a sense of voyeurism, or less weirdly perhaps, of being invited to watch a practice. But through it all is still the environment, making itself known occasionally with a noise obviously not from Guthrie. It’s somehow private and public, and on headphones especially, startlingly intimate.
As soon as the second track starts you can hear the similarities, but there’s a distance, a remove, and what sounds almost like a doubling. The room tone of the field recording becomes a bit ominous. The natural resonance affected into a deeper hum, and soon enough you hear the french horn, but this time it’s not natural at all. Not intimate, but alien. A weird doubling again, sounding like multiple french horns all playing snippets out of sync, bent, refracted. And the environment becomes alien as well, car horns repeating themselves, public space divided into chiming overtones, crystalline, unnatural. And it’s frankly beautiful. A slow crawl, the hum growing and growing, the doubled french horn fading in and out of focus, at times stretched, at times clipped, always alien.
I love the relationship between these two pieces. They’re both somewhat unsettling, but in very different ways. On the one hand there’s that mix of intensely close, intimate recording and the cavernous sounding field recording in a public place. And in the second track we know the source material, have in fact just listened to it, but now it’s both recognizable and alien all at the same time. What was almost sweet in a way becomes something a bit more forbidding (foreboding?). We can recognize it as coming from something familiar, but the result is unfamiliar.
There’s an element of the magician revealing her tricks to this record that I appreciate. Or more accurately, of an artist sharing her source material. And that, I think, gets at what I like so much. I’ve (over)-used the word intimate when talking about this record because it feels so accurate. It’s both intimate and inviting, even when sounding ominous and alien. Guthrie shares both source and result, and presents them on equal ground, making it clear that the first track is as much a work, complete and ready for other ears as the second track. I want to talk about honesty, but that feels cliched, but maybe not inaccurate.
Still highly recommend you buy this, if it’s not clear.
