Kayla Guthrie is an artist working in writing and song. “Blue” is her first release, a sampling of songs culled from her repertoire as a self-taught musician dating back to 2008, when she began her solo career performing primarily in art galleries after moving to New York from her native Canada.
A writer who was also trained as a visual artist, Guthrie’s musical spirit is influenced by the No Wave era and spoken word poetry, as well as artists such as Leslie Winer, Laurie Anderson and Sonic Youth who weave conceptual and poetic elements into a novel approach to music.
Developing a style that foregrounds her unstudied voice and surreal, psychologically-charged lyrics built onto stark, loosely-structured instrumentation, Guthrie has been inspired by figures who fuse ritualism and pathos into expressive hybrids of word, song, and/or performance, such as Patti Smith, Jim Morrison, Nico, Ingrid Caven, Kathy Acker, and Suicide, as well as the urbane fist-person narratives of Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed, and the writer Colette.
Blue is a 4-song EP crafted from the raw materials of Guthrie’s live backing tracks, mixed and overdubbed with new vocal recordings in the home studio of engineer Grady Owens over the period of one year, and includes a cover of Garbage’s “#1 Crush” made in collaboration with Hunter Hunt-Hendrix of Liturgy. - Mixed Media Recordings
