Video Interview: Amber Burns of Guhts & Witchkiss on Blood Feather and More
This Friday, Aug. 6, marks the release date of Blood Feather, the debut four-song/25-minute EP from New York atmospheric heavybringers Guhts. At the core of the band is the pairing of vocalist Amber Burns and guitarist/synthesist Scott Prater, both also of the atmospheric sludge/post-metal outfit Witchkiss. As Burns explains it in the interview below, Prater was writing music for Witchkiss and began to embark on a separate project during pandemic lockdown last year. When she came aboard — at her insistence, again, to hear her tell the story — the roots of Guhts were set, and though she also drums in their “main outfit,” Blood Feather‘s programmed drumming allows for the exploration of new melodic ideas and textures without having to essentially be in two places at once in terms of headspace.
The four songs included on the EP — “Eyes Open,” “Handless Maiden,” “The Mirror” and 10-minute closer “The Forest” — are rounded out by the guitar/synth of Dan Shaneyfelt and the bass 
of Jesse Van Note, both of Asheville, North Carolina’s Black Mountain Hunger (the latter also plays in Bask), and like many newcomer outfits in 2021, Guhts seem to have emerged as a result of reaching out in new ways during a time when reaching out via live performance was an impossibility. Not gonna say I haven’t been there. Like many, Guhts, and Burns as lyricist and vocalist — the one putting words and melodies to the instrumental processions — seems to have used the opportunity to exorcise ideas and perhaps some of the existentialist tension that living through the last year-plus has wrought. Who are we when we’re denied crucial parts of who we think we are? Where to go from there.
I’m not sure what genre you’d put Guhts in on Blood Feather aside from a catchall word like “heavy,” which the EP most certainly is. There are shades of ambient doom and post-heavy rock in the intertwining keys and guitars, and certainly plenty of heft bearing down in the material, but that’s paired with an ethereality of purpose as well that, should Guhts continue to develop alongside Witchkiss, already feels like a direction of its own worth a deeper dive. In the meantime, this is a debut EP that listens an awful lot like a debut album, and I was glad to have the chance to talk to Burns about it.
Please enjoy:
Guhts Interview with Amber Burns, July 29, 2021
Guhts’ debut EP, Blood Feather, is out Aug. 6 and will be available direct from the band. More info at the links.
