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Will Guthrie.
 The tools of Australian artist Will Guthrie's trade are remnants from his beginnings as a drummer in various configurations - rock, jazz, improv and more. Nowadays residing in Nantes, France, Guthrie makes music via the careful amplification of objects percussive, found and sometimes otherwise classified as junk. He has played with improvisional artists from all over the world including Australians Robin Fox, Joel Stern and The Necks' Chris Abrahams, Tetuzi Akiyama, Cor Fuhler and famed British players Keith Rowe and John Butcher to name but a few. Guthrie has delved into multimedia arts projects, performing with film, dance, theatre, puppetry and installations. In the duo Charlie Charlie with French sound artist and partner Erell Latimier, Guthrie expands his palette with the addition of mini speakers and microphones. Guthrie and Latimier will perform in solo mode when in Adelaide, as well as together as Charlie Charlie.
"My feeling is that the sound sources are often producing the same results anyway no matter what you are working with, so it is more about how you construct your music that is interesting to me," Guthrie explains via email after just returning from time in Tokyo. On his 2003 release 'Building Blocks' on his own Antboy Music label, Guthrie first introduces an eerie bowed cymbal drone, slowly adding layers of grainy electronics and exotic percussive flourishes. It sounds like alien soundtracks: the slow death and rebirth of machines, the imaginary sounds of tiny humans traveling inside some giant bestial body. The piece is fascinating, unnerving and beautiful to wrap oneself inside. Deeper inside the three-track release there is more space - distant rumbles of mechanical obstructions, churning, creaking sounds inadvertently mimicking the hull of a ship, the sound of a neighbour's electric fan during a heat wave. It is infinitely possible to imagine scores of scenarios when immersed in the sound. Compare it with the powerful blast of 2005's 'Spear', bleeding intermittently from both speakers, chopped and encumbered with breaths of powdery and metallic frost, spliced with deranged howls.
"In many musics - maybe more so experimental musics - the sound source is really not so important. It is more what you are doing with it, for example with electronics. But at the same time acoustic practice, like extended techniques, is so advanced that sometimes you couldn't tell the difference between a laptop or an alto sax."
So much is true. One could ponder ad nauseum exactly what Guthrie is adding, subtracting, stroking, manipulating and magnifying but the essence of his music remains the same: his combination of techniques interested in deforming the sound of simple materials to help make the origin of sound insignificant.
Erell Latimier is similarly well traveled and experienced in the ever-expanding field of sound art. She works with dictaphones, Walkmans, recordings of text and concrete sound, and like Guthrie is primarily focused in blurring the concept of origin of sound. Latimier is interested in working inside the world between language and sound thus extrapolating new methods of understanding and defining text.
"For me Erell is really exciting to play with. She came to this music firstly by organising concerts in France for experimental musicians. She is a writer and interested in philosophy so when she started to work with sound it was an attempt to combine her interests in words, the meaning of words, and to try to change the meaning of the words by altering the contexts of the texts. Also I love the fact that she is not a trained musician coming from an instrumental background. She doesn't have the historical baggage that many musicians seem to have."
The upcoming duo performance will be our first chance to sample the sounds of Guthrie and Latimier in collaborative mode. "Charlie Charlie really embraced this idea of just going into the studio and playing, recording, then spending lots of time on the edits, arranging, basically composing in the studio. With our new mini CD 'La Respiration des Saintes' we really enjoyed this method and I think it produced some pretty interesting results." It is poised to be a very interesting match and one definitely worth investigating.
Lenin Simos
 | Charlie Charlie plays the Exeter Dining Room on Tues 26 July. Will Guthrie and Erell Latimier play solo sets at Delicatessen Gallery (9 Anster St Adelaide) on Wed 27 July. |
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