*200 copies limited edition* Rootless is Andy Guthrie’s fourth album for Students of Decay, following 2022’s Gyropedie. Created in part during a 2024 residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts, it finds the San Francisco-based multi-instrumentalist expanding the hermetic electroacoustic language of their earlier work into something even more open-ended and oneiric. Field recordings mingle with French horn, piano, electronics and, increasingly, the human voice, forming environments whose familiar elements progressively slip into stranger configurations.
“Hiraeth” establishes the record’s sense of scale, as field ambience, delicate foley textures, and isolated horn phrases gradually accumulate into a plaintive, nocturnal atmosphere. Elsewhere, recognizable forms appear within Guthrie’s characteristically elusive constructions. On “Brittle Bag,” scattershot drum programming and domestic clatter give way to a smeared, distorted shoegaze anthem, a frayed and unruly song emerging through the unstable surface of the composition before being absorbed again into its surroundings. By the closing “Epiphyne,” this more traditional songcraft comes fully into view. Guthrie’s sung vocals are clear and declarative, articulating themes of identity, intersubjectivity, and love. It makes for an unexpectedly direct conclusion to a record otherwise marked by wildness and mystery.
Taken as a whole, Rootless is concerned with what it means to inhabit places—and lives—without fixed coordinates: music that feels persistently adrift, continually finding and abandoning new forms.
