Guthrie, Anne & Barry Chabala

Preston Hollow

Label: Roeba Country: USA

"My first contact with Anne Guthrie's music was her release standing sitting on Engraved Glass. A really fantastic disc and a great introduction to Anne's music. As further releases came out, a more complete picture began to emerge and I found out that along with her fantastic usuage of field recordings she is also a bad-ass french horn player!

When this opportunity came up to work with Anne i was very excited. I think the piece is really great and I am really happy to have it come out here on my label.

Anne hangs out in Preston Hollow and plays french horn to the space, I come by and play a little guitar."-Roeba Music

"As Richard mentioned a couple of weeks back, this is a collaboration at a distance, Guthrie having recorded her fine, often plaintive French horn in an apparent avian paradise named Preston Hollow with Chabala adding his thoughts, on e-bow guitar, at a later date. Both elements work extremely well, Guthrie's ruminations unforced and open to the environment--one imagines she may have entirely forgotten that she was recording the vent--Chabala's commentary considered and complimentary. It proceeds from a relatively fractured onset, Guthrie playing clearly but not throughout (the birds take that roll), the guitar entering now and then. But about midway through, Chabala sets a lovely, multi-tiered drone in motion, something that risks being overbearing but, to my ears, enhances the existing music in a lovely manner that moves the entirety of the work into an adjacent, perhaps surprising space, unifying all three elements. Toward the end, Guthrie adds a series of marvelously "human" notes, wistful, self-questioning, even vaguely imitative of the flies we've heard buzzing about, maybe trying to sublimate into the environment. Very beautiful, whatever the rationale (if any) and a really fine achievement for both musicians (and the birds)."-Brian Olewnick, Just Outside