Orchestrations by Guy Buttery

In 2012 Guy Buttery sat down with the KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic Orchestra to perform three of his compositions, which had been arranged for the 52-piece ensemble. An exhilarating and terrifying experience, by his own admission, this performance launched Buttery into a 12-year long experiential deep dive into orchestral explorations that has resulted in his latest album, Orchestrations.

Buttery is an extraordinary multi-instrumentalist, who is well-known in his home country of South Africa, where he has been bestowed with numerous accolades, including the Standard Bank Young Artist Award – the first time that the prestigious award was given to an artist falling outside the category of classical music. He is likewise lauded by foreign audiences because of his insatiable appetite for experimenting with new sounds and instruments, underpinning his work’s global appeal. Setting him apart throughout his career, Buttery’s voracious curiosity, combined with his acute sensitivity and attention to detail, is audible throughout Orchestrations, which in many ways is a tableau of these accumulated interests and investigations.

Orchestrations has been picked up, put down, abandoned, revisited, buried and resurrected countless times by Buttery over the last 12 years. Despite coming close to never seeing the light of day at all, the project has been described as something of a “magnum opus”. With Buttery’s own guitar forming the heartwood of the work, Orchestrations extends outwards like growth rings. Consisting of 14 tracks, the album features collaborative contributions from several renowned artists recorded across ten countries, including Kaki King in New York, Derek Gripper in Cape Town, Julian Sartorius in Berne, Madala Kunene in Durban, and Mudassir Khan in New Delhi. The overall structure is held together by Chris Letcher’s expansive orchestral arrangements that stretch out like a great canopy.

The first track on the album, Two Chords and the Truth, provides an apt entry point into the nature of the project. Building sound, layer upon layer, each instrument (or instrument modification, such as paper threaded through cello strings) adding its own vibration to the context of two chords, the song reaches fever pitch, recedes, and rises again, recedes again, with each rise and fall exploring a different aspect of sounds in relation to each other.

The layers of audio that create this sound become a mountain range, with sound waves stacked like geological strata, like a vast mycelial network that connects all the trees in an ancient forest. Secured by a commitment to these two chords, and their myriad offshoots and variations, micro-adjustments and incremental changes become fertile ground for experimentation.

What is often not said about the creation of a magnum opus — which is true of any great work in art and in life — is that the loftiness can be at odds with the drudgery of returning, over and over, to the same path. Mixed in with the moments of elation, joy and the rush of creativity, there are times of boredom, of despair, and a certain kind of madness that commits to pushing every aspect of a soundscape through to its limits, and often beyond those edges.

Orchestrations is not short on the high moments, which are complex, swooping, elated. It also dives right down, and herein lies the depth of the project, where Buttery has insisted on returning, listening again and again with ever increasing sensitivity to everything each sound could be. It holds the listener like a great big bowl, and with the certainty of a root system, upon which multiple influences, collaborations and experimentations weave themselves into an elaborate network of outstretched branches.

“Guy Buttery is something of a National treasure”, says South Africa’s leading newspaper The Mercury. Guy’s distinct unification of South African guitar music is the musical advocate for everything positive and beautiful about the place he calls home. An ambassador of South African music, Guy inspires people across the world with his homegrown style at the very heart of his talent and tenacity.

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