Brass Orchids

Snapshots of an abandoned city. Fragments of song drifting out of basements and across alleyways, muffled conversations. Scrutinized, the "music" disappears - maybe paracusia? Brass Orchids, Anne Guthrie's second full-length album for Students of Decay, is an entrancing collage of new and old sounds drawn from a variety of beguiling sources. Posthumous contributions from the artist's grandfather, a jazz pianist; obsolete media palimpsests (some vanity, some necessity); tap dancing on a peeling floor... An unsettling and strangely beautiful album - akin to something on the tip of your tongue, which, before you can name it, slips away into forgetting. Includes download code; Edition of 300. Anne Guthrie is an acoustician, composer, and French horn player living in Brooklyn, New York. She studied Music Composition and English at the University of Iowa and Architectural Acoustics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she completed her Ph. D in 2014. Her music combines her knowledge of acoustics and contemporary composition/improvisation. Her electronic music has focused on exploiting the natural acoustic phenomena of unique architectural spaces through minimal processing of field recordings. Her composition has focused on the orchestration of non-musical sounds, speech in particular. Her French horn playing has focused on electronic processing and extended techniques used in improvisatory settings, as a soloist and with Fraufraulein and Delicate Sen, among others. Her acoustics research has focused on the use of ambisonics for stage acoustics.