With a Field Recorder and French Horn, Andy Guthrie Finds Poetry in Everyday Surroundings

When Andy Guthrie was a kid growing up in Minnesota, their parents told them they had to play a “cool instrument.” The choices: oboe and French horn.

They went with the latter. “It’s kind of a chameleon,” says the San Francisco-based musician and composer. “I’ve gotten a lot of cool extras out of it over the years.”

That’s an understatement. Guthrie’s experimental electro-acoustic music weaves the French horn into rich tapestries of field recordings and found sounds, in which the timbres of musical instruments are often difficult to distinguish from the tumult around them. A San Francisco resident since 2018, Guthrie will perform at Mission District experimental music venue The Lab on December 15, French horn in tow — along with some other curious sound sources they found while rummaging through antique shops.

“I’ve got a bingo ball thing with little wooden balls, and I’ve been using that with a contact mic for a while,” says Guthrie. “I’ve got some messed-up little music boxes.”

Perhaps the most unusual aspect of Guthrie’s upcoming set — at least to those familiar with the dense, textural works on their previous albums — is that they’ll be performing actual songs. Their fourth and latest album Blemished, which came out last May on Modern Concern, is the first to feature Guthrie singing and writing songs on the piano.

“A lot of what I listen to is like indie rock, punk, whatever,” says Guthrie. “I wouldn’t want to not do atonal weird noise stuff, but I was always a little bit like, if I were a better songwriter, I would do that, but I couldn’t do it. And then something just clicked in 2020.”

It’s hard to mistake Blemished for a Modest Mouse album. The arrangements are stripped-back — just Guthrie’s voice and piano — and they weave in and out of field recordings of thick crowd noise recorded at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. The effect is almost as if someone has walked by with a speaker blasting Guthrie’s songs.

Guthrie lives with their spouse Billy Gomberg, with whom they perform in the duo Fraufraulein, and their young child in the Outer Richmond district of San Francisco. Visiting the Boardwalk was one of their first family activities when the world re-opened.

“There was such a limited sound world for two years,” says Guthrie. “That was our first real being out in public again, so it was kind of fascinating. Who are all these people?”

Guthrie only records sounds they find meaningful in some way. “There are ways to use field recordings as a base layer so that you don’t feel uncomfortable in silence, and things can come in and out of it,” they say. “I’m not great at doing that. I get attached. I try to only record things that are unique — I’m not just getting a random hour of noise.”

Guthrie likes the idea of each album having “a story in the background that I am aware of, even if nobody else is.”

2017’s Brass Orchids is inspired by Samuel L. Delany’s influential 1975 sci-fi novel Dhalgren. “I don’t want you to have to know the story to be able to enjoy the work,” they say, “but I like structuring it in my head that way because it helps me compositionally.”

One of Guthrie’s most poignant works is the 2021 album Gyropedie, which connects intimately to their own story. After graduating from University of Iowa with a B.A. in music, Guthrie moved to New York to accept a job as managing director of the long-running new music ensemble the S.E.M. Ensemble. They currently work as an acoustic and audiovisual consultant at sustainable architecture firm Arup.

After working at Arup’s New York office for a decade, Guthrie switched offices to San Francisco in 2018, citing the difficulty of raising a kid in New York. “I always wanted to go west eventually,” says Guthrie. “It just became a longer pit stop than I had planned.”

The recordings on Gyropedie come from Guthrie’s last few months in New York, including audio of a “musical playground” where Guthrie and Gomberg used to take their child to play. Some of the instruments heard on the record are instruments the couple had to get rid of before the move. The music on Gyropedie is fascinating even outside this context, but knowing the story behind the sounds makes it more powerful.

“When we left, I felt like I had mined a lot of the New York soundscape,” says Guthrie. “There are some unique sounds that are New York, but beyond that, no matter where you go, it just sounds like 70 decibels of traffic. So I was very excited to be in a place where there were a whole bunch of what [composer] R. Murray Schafer calls soundmarks — the foghorns, the cable cars, the whistling of the Golden Gate Bridge.”

In a statement on Gyropedie’s Bandcamp page, Guthrie claims California has “something alien about it I’m still trying to grasp.” Over five years after making the move from the East to the West Coast, Guthrie is still in the process of figuring out this quality.

“It’s so much quieter here than in New York,” says Guthrie. “My friend Kevin and I went out at five in the morning to get the sounds of the cables before the [cable] cars started running, because they’re just constant. I like learning about a place by recording it.”

Andy Guthrie performs at The Lab in San Francisco with François J. Bonnet and Stephen O’Malley on Dec. 15. Show details here.

Correction: This piece was updated to correct a reference to R. Murray Schafer.