Anthony Guerra – Cold Victory – Kingdoms III CD

Since its inauguration in 2005 with the first release on the Black Petal label, the Empty Kingdoms series has been the home of Anthony Guerra’s most deeply personal solo music. Originally released last year in a small cassette edition on Stefan Christiansen’s C/Site Recordings, Cold Victory – Kingdoms III now returns on compact disc, perhaps a more appropriate medium for its wide frequency spectrum. Presenting six pieces sequenced into two side-long suites, Cold Victory brings together numerous facets of the idiosyncratic musical practice Guerra has developed over the last two decades. Still grounded in what the promotional material for the first Empty Kingdoms called ‘melancholy guitar and disembodied moans of sadness’, the third entry synthesises Guerra’s distinctive approach to song with aspects of the electro-acoustic improvisation he focused on in the early 2000s, the tumbling percussion foundations of the Love Chants trio with Michael Zulicki and Matt Earle, and even some distant echoes of crunchy free rock projects like Your Intestines.

Opening with shimmering cymbals and mysterious tactile thumps, ‘Cold Victory’ suspends Guerra’s slowly arpeggiated chords and delicate voice over a field of abstract sounds. Eventually, everything but the cymbal drops away, soon accompanied by buzzing electronics and unidentifiable percussive pops and thumps. Untraceable sound sources of this kind – somewhere between a crudely manipulated drum kit, the incidental sounds of domestic chores, and post-Cartridge Music object manipulation – return repeatedly throughout the record, standing in stark opposition to the sparkling clarity of Guerra’s guitar. After the first side closes with a lyrical solo guitar improvisation, the second suite begins with crisp, highly amplified textures; the listener might think of the austere experiments of Riedl’s Paper Music until an incidental aside from Guerra’s voice reframes the sounds as more quotidian. The remainder of the side layers repeated chord progressions accompanied at points by piano and drums over chiming metal, rough texture, and bowed tones. Though the harmonic language remains dreamily melancholic throughout, the music is subtly unpredictable in its structure and dynamics, as layers of sound abruptly cut in and out asynchronously, sometimes making unexpected reappearances. In its own humble and intimate way, Cold Victory – Kingdoms III stakes out a unique space between the emotional immediacy of song, the freedom of improvisation, and the radically expanded electro-acoustic sound field. Twenty years after Guerra’s first published forays into this territory, which he shares with only a few like-minded souls, the results are richer than ever.

– Francis Plagne 2024