Polydeism (from Greek πολύς ( 'poly' ), meaning 'many', and Latin deus meaning God) is a polytheistic form of Deism encompassing the belief that the universe was the collective creation of multiple Gods, each of whom created a piece of the universe and then ceased to interact with the universe. This concept addresses an apparent contradiction in Deism – that a monotheistic God created the universe, but now expresses no apparent interest in it – by supposing that if the universe is the construct of many gods, none of them would have an interest in the universe as a whole.

History of the term[link]

Creighton University Philosophy professor William O. Stephens,^[1] who teaches this concept to his students, suggests that C. D. Broad projected this concept^[2] in Broad's 1925 article, "The Validity of Belief in a Personal God".^[3] Broad noted that the arguments for the existence of God only tend to prove that "a designing mind had existed in the past, not that it does exist now. It is quite compatible with this argument that God should have died long ago, or that he should have turned his attention to other parts of the Universe." and notes in the same breath that "there is nothing in the facts to suggest that there is only one such being".^[4] Stephens contends that Broad, in turn, derived the concept from David Hume. Stephens states:

David Hume's criticisms of the Argument from Design include the argument that, for all we know, a committee of very powerful, but not omnipotent, divine beings could have collaborated in creating the world, but then afterwards left it alone or even ceased to exist. This would be polydeism.

Use of this term as a portmanteau for this purpose appears to originate at least as early as Robert M. Bowman, Jr.'s 1997 essay, Apologetics from Genesis to Revelation.^[5] Bowman wrote:

Materialism (illustrated by the Epicureans), represented today by atheism, skepticism, and Deism. The materialist may acknowledge superior beings, but they do not believe in a Supreme Being. Epicureanism was founded about 300 BC by Epicurus. Their world view might be called "polydeism": there are many gods, but they are merely superhuman beings; they are remote, uninvolved in the world, posing no threat and offering no hope to human beings. Epicureans regarded traditional religion and idolatry as harmless enough as long as the gods were not feared or expected to do or say anything.

Etymologically disjunctive uses of the term[link]

The term, polydeism, has occasionally been used as a direct substitute for polytheism – a usage which does not consider certain distinctions which have arisen between the respective root words, deism and theism. The above description of polydeism would be a distinct subset of polytheism.

Sociologist Susan Starr Sered used the term in her 1994 book, Priestess, Mother, Sacred Sister : Religions Dominated by Women, which includes a chapter titled, "No Father in Heaven: Androgyny and Polydeism". Sered states therein that she has "chosen to gloss on "polydeism" a range of beliefs in more than one supernatural entity". Id. at 169. Sered used this term in a way that would encompass polytheism, rather than exclude much of it, as she intended to capture both polytheistic systems and non-theistic systems that assert the influence of "spirits or ancestors". Id. This use of the term, however, does not accord with the historical misuse of deism as a concept to describe an absent creator god.

References[link]

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Bret Easton Ellis
Born	(1964-03-07) March 7, 1964 (age 48) Los Angeles, California
Occupation	novelist
Genres	Satire
Literary movement	Postmodern, Transgressive
Influences Ernest Hemingway, Joan Didion, Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Stephen King, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, James Joyce, Gustave Flaubert, Honoré de Balzac, Truman Capote, Raymond Chandler (with regard to Imperial Bedrooms)
Influenced Michel Houellebecq, Christian Kracht, Chuck Palahniuk, Joe McGinniss Jr., Alberto Fuguet
www.breteastonellis.com

Bret Easton Ellis (born March 7, 1964 in Los Angeles, California) is an American novelist and short story writer. His works have been translated into 27 languages.^[1] He was regarded as one of the so-called literary Brat Pack,^[2] which also included Tama Janowitz and Jay McInerney. He is a self-proclaimed satirist, whose trademark technique, as a writer, is the expression of extreme acts and opinions in an affectless style.^[3][4] Ellis employs a technique of linking novels with common, recurring characters.

Though Ellis made his debut at 21 with the controversial 1985 bestseller Less Than Zero, a zeitgeist novel about amoral young people in Los Angeles; the work he is most known for is his third novel, 1991's American Psycho. On its release, the literary establishment widely condemned the novel as overly violent and misogynistic; though many petitions to ban the book saw Ellis dropped by Simon & Schuster, the resounding controversy made it a paperback bestseller for Alfred A. Knopf later that year. Four of Ellis' works have been made into films; notably, Less Than Zero was rapidly adapted for screen, and a starkly different Less Than Zero film was released in 1987, and Mary Harron's adaptation of American Psycho was released to predominantly positive reviews in 2000. In later years, Ellis' novels have become increasingly metafictional. 2005's Lunar Park, a pseudo-memoir and ghost story, received positive reviews, and 2010's Imperial Bedrooms, marketed as a sequel to Less Than Zero, continues in this vein.

Work[link]

Ellis' first novel, Less Than Zero, a tale of disaffected, rich teenagers of Los Angeles, was praised by critics and sold well (50,000 copies in its first year). He moved back to New York City in 1987 for the publication of his second novel, The Rules of Attraction, which follows a group of sexually promiscuous college students and sold fairly well, though Ellis admits he felt he had "fallen off", after the novel failed to match the success of his debut effort. His most controversial work is the graphically violent American Psycho. The book was intended to be published by Simon & Schuster, but they withdrew after external protests from groups such as the National Organization for Women (NOW) and many others due to the allegedly misogynistic nature of the book. The novel was later published by Vintage. Some consider this novel, whose protagonist, Patrick Bateman, is both a cartoonishly materialistic yuppie and a serial killer, to be an example of transgressive art. American Psycho has achieved considerable cult status.

His collection of short stories, The Informers, was published in 1994. It contains vignettes of wayward Los Angeles characters ranging from rock stars to vampires, mostly written while Ellis was in college, and so has more in common with the style of Less Than Zero. Ellis has said that the stories in The Informers were collected and released only to fulfill a contractual obligation after discovering that it would take far longer to complete his next novel than he'd intended. After years of struggling with it, Ellis released his fourth novel Glamorama in 1998. Glamorama is set in the world of high fashion, following a male model who becomes entangled in a bizarre terrorist organization composed entirely of other models. The book plays with themes of media, celebrity, and political violence, and like its predecessor American Psycho it uses surrealism to convey a sense of postmodern dread. Ellis's novel Lunar Park (2005), uses the form of a celebrity memoir to tell a ghost story about the novelist "Bret Easton Ellis" and his chilling experiences in the apparently haunted home he shares with his wife and son. In keeping with his usual style, Ellis mixes absurd comedy with a bleak and violent vision. Imperial Bedrooms (2010) follows the characters of Less Than Zero 25 years later; it combines the violence of American Psycho and the postmodernism of Lunar Park with the unaltered ennui of Ellis' debut novel.

Biography[link]

Ellis was born to a wealthy California household. His father, who he said was abusive, became the basis of Ellis's most well-known character Patrick Bateman, and the frosty relationship between Victor and his father in Glamorama is based in part on this as well. He attended Bennington College, where he met and befriended fellow writers Donna Tartt, Jonathan Lethem, Francis Lombard and Joseph McLaughlin, none of whom were aware of his literary aspirations. After rising to fame with Less Than Zero in 1985, Ellis became closely associated and good friends with fellow Brat Pack writer Jay McInerney: the two became known as the "toxic twins". The writer became a pariah for a time following American Psycho (1991), which later became a cult hit, more so after its 2000 movie adaptation. It is now regarded as Ellis' magnum opus and is favorably looked upon by academics. The Informers (1994) was offered to his publisher during Glamorama's long writing history. Ellis wrote a screenplay for The Rules of Attraction's film adaptation which was not used. Ellis records a fictionalized version of his life story up until this point in the first chapter of Lunar Park (2005). After the death of his lover Michael Wade Kaplan, Ellis was spurred to finish Lunar Park and inflected it with a new tone of wistfulness.^[5] In Lunar Park, through his fictional alter ego and the character's relationship with his own son, Ellis resolved some of the issues surrounding his father.^{[citation needed]}

Later, Ellis was approached by young screenwriter Nicholas Jarecki to adapt The Informers into a film; the script they co-wrote was cut from 150 to 94 pages and taken from Jarecki to give to Australian director Gregor Jordan, whose light-on-humor vision of the film was met with unanimously negative reviews when the film was released in 2009. Despite setbacks as a screenwriter, Ellis teamed up with acclaimed director Gus Van Sant in 2009 to adapt the Vanity Fair article "The Golden Suicides" into a film of the same name, depicting the paranoid final days and suicides of celebrity artists Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake. In 2010, Ellis released the sequel to his debut novel, in the form of Imperial Bedrooms. Ellis wrote it following his own return to LA and fictionalises his work on the film adaptation of The Informers, from the perspective of Clay. Positive reviews felt it was a culmination of the themes began respectively in Less Than Zero, American Psycho and Lunar Park. Negative reviews noted the novel's rehashed themes and listless writing.

Personal life[link]

When asked an interview in 2002 whether or not he was gay, Ellis explained that he does not identify himself as gay or straight. He explained that he is comfortable to be thought of as gay, bisexual or heterosexual and that he enjoys playing with his persona, identifying variously as gay, straight and bi to different people over the years.^[6] In a 1999 interview, the author puts forward that his reluctance to definitively label his sexuality (in his own words, he is "very coy and weird about it") is for "artistic reasons", because "if people knew that I was straight, they'd read [my books] in a different way. If they knew I was gay, 'Psycho' would be read as a different book."^[7] In an interview with Robert F. Coleman, Ellis refers to his as an "indeterminate sexuality", and said "any other interviewer out there will get a different answer and it just depends on the mood I am in".^[8] In a 2011 interview with James Brown, Ellis again states that his answers to questions about his sexuality have varied from interviewer to interviewer, citing an example where his reluctance to refuse the label "bi" had him labelled as such by a Details interviewer. "I think the last time I slept with a woman was five or six years ago, so the bi thing can only be played out so long," he clarifies. "But I still use it, I still say it."^[9] Responding to Dan Savage's It Gets Better campaign, aimed at preventing suicide among LGBT youth, Ellis tweeted "Not to bum everyone out, but can we get a reality check here? It gets worse."^[10]

In his semi-autobiographical novel Lunar Park, the fictional Bret continues both transient affairs and long-term relationships with men and women at various points in the novel. Lunar Park was dedicated to his lover, Michael Wade Kaplan, and Ellis's father, Robert Ellis, about whom he speaks openly in interviews promoting the novel. Robert Ellis died in 1992. In one interview, Ellis describes feeling a liberation, in the completion of the novel, that allowed him to come to terms with unresolved issues regarding his father.^[11] In the "author Q&A" for Lunar Park on the Random House website, Ellis comments on his relationship with his father, and says he feels that his father was a "tough case" who left him damaged. Having grown older and having "mellow[ed] out", Ellis describes how his opinion of his father changed since 15 years ago when writing Glamorama (in which the central conspiracy concerns the relationship of a father and son).^[12] Even earlier in his career, Ellis based the character of Patrick Bateman from American Psycho on his father.^[13] In a 2010 interview, however, he claims to have "lied" about this explanation. Explaining that "Patrick Bateman was about me", he confesses "I didn’t want to finally own up to the responsibility of being Patrick Bateman, so I laid it on my father, I laid it on Wall Street." In reality, the book had been "about me at the time, and I wrote about all my rage and feelings".^[8] To James Brown, he clarified Bateman was based on "My father a little bit but I was living that lifestyle, my father wasn’t in New York the same age as Patrick Bateman, living in the same building, going to the same places that Patrick Bateman was going to".^[9]

Fictional setting and recurring characters[link]

Ellis often uses recurring characters and settings. Major characters in one novel may become minor ones in the next, or vice versa. Camden College, a fictional New England liberal arts college, is frequently referenced. It is based on Bennington College, which Ellis himself attended, where he met future novelist Jonathan Lethem and befriended fellow writers Donna Tartt and Jill Eisenstadt. In Tartt's The Secret History (1992), her version of Bennington is given as "Hampden College", although there are oblique connections between it and Ellis' Rules of Attraction. Eisenstat and Lethem, however, use 'Camden' in From Rockaway (1987) and The Fortress of Solitude (2003), respectively. Though his three major settings are Vermont, Los Angeles and New York, he doesn't think of these novels as about these places; they are intentionally more universal than that.^[14]

Camden is introduced in Less Than Zero, where it is mentioned that both protagonist Clay and minor character Daniel attend it. In The Rules of Attraction (1987), where Camden is the setting, Clay (referred to as "The Guy from L.A." before being properly introduced) is a minor character who narrates one chapter; ironically, he longs for the Californian beach, where in Ellis' previous novel he had longed to return to college. On "the guy from L.A.'s door someone wrote "Rest In Peace Called"; R.I.P., or Rip, is Clay's dealer in Less Than Zero; Clay also says that Blair from Less than Zero sent him a letter saying she thinks Rip was murdered. Main character Sean Bateman's older brother Patrick narrates one chapter of the novel; he will be the infamous central character of Ellis' next novel, American Psycho. Ellis includes a reference to Tartt's forthcoming Secret History in the form of a passing mention of "that weird Classics group... probably roaming the countryside sacrificing farmers and performing pagan rituals". There is also an allusion to the main character from Eidenstadt's From Rockaway.

In American Psycho (1991), Patrick's brother Sean appears briefly. Paul Denton and Victor Johnson from The Rules of Attraction are both mentioned; on seeing Paul, Patrick wonders if "maybe he was on that cruise a long time ago, one night last March. If that's the case, I'm thinking, I should get his telephone number or, better yet, his address." Camden is referred to as both Sean's college and the college a minor character named Vanden is going to. Vanden was referred to (but never appeared) in both Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction. Passages from "Less Than Zero" reappear, almost verbatim, here, with Patrick replacing Clay as narrator. Patrick also makes repeated references to Jami Gertz, the actress who portrays Blair in the 1987 film adaptation of Less Than Zero. Allison Poole from Jay McInerney's 1988 novel Story of My Life appears as a torture victim of Patrick's. 1994's The Informers features a much-younger Timothy Price, one of Patrick's co-workers in American Psycho, who narrates one chapter. One of the central characters, Graham, buys concert tickets from Less Than Zero's Julian, and his sister Susan goes on to say that Julian sells heroin and is a male prostitute (as shown in Zero). Alana and Blair from Zero are also friends of Susan's. Letters to Sean Bateman to a Camden College girl named Anne visiting grandparents in LA comprise the eighth chapter.

Patrick Bateman appears briefly in Glamorama (1998); Glamorama's main characters Victor Ward and Lauren Hynde were first introduced in The Rules of Attraction. As an in-joke reference to Bateman being portrayed by Christian Bale in the then-in-production 2000 film adaptation, the actor himself briefly appears as a background character. The book also includes a spy called Russell who is physically identical to Bale, and at one point in the novel impersonates him. Jamie Fields, who has a major role in the book, was first briefly mentioned by Victor in The Rules of Attraction. Bertrand, Sean and Mitchell, all from The Rules of Attraction, appear in a Camden flashbacks and several other Rules characters are referenced. McInerney's Alison Poole makes her second appearance in an Ellis novel as Victor's mistress. Lunar Park (2005) is not set in the same "universe" as Ellis' other novels, but contains a similar multitude of references and allusions. All the author's previous works are heavily referenced, in keeping with the book-within-a-book structure. Jay McInerney cameos. Donald Kimball from American Psycho questions Ellis on a series of American Psycho-inspired murders, Mitchell Allen from Rules lives next door to and went to college with Ellis (Ellis even recalls his affair with Paul Denton, alluded to in Rules), and Ellis recalls a tempestuous relationship with Blair from Zero. Imperial Bedrooms (2010) establishes the conceit that the Clay depicted in Zero is not the same Clay who narrates Bedrooms. In the world of Imperial Bedrooms, Zero was the close-to-non-fiction work of an author friend of Clay's, and its film adaptation (featuring actors Andrew McCarthy, Jami Gertz and Robert Downey, Jr.) exists within the world of the novel, too.

Bibliography[link]

• Less Than Zero (1985)
• The Rules of Attraction (1987)
• American Psycho (1991)
• The Informers (1994)
• Glamorama (1998)
• Lunar Park (2005)
• Imperial Bedrooms (2010)

See also[link]

Novels portal

• List of novelists from the United States
• List of horror fiction authors
• Transgressional fiction

Footnotes[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Bret Easton Ellis

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Bret Easton Ellis

• Official website of Bret Easton Ellis
• Bret Easton Ellis at the Internet Movie Database

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (November 2011)

Harold Budd
Harold Budd in Japan Photo: Masao Nakagami
Background information
Born	(1936-05-24) May 24, 1936 (age 76) Los Angeles, CaliforniaUnited States
Genres	Ambient, drone
Occupations	Musician, composer, poet, professor
Instruments	Piano, guitar
Years active	1962–present
Labels	Opal Records, Land Records, Darla Records, Samadhi Sound, New World Records, All Saints Records, E.G. Records, 4AD

Harold Budd (born May 24, 1936) is an American ambient/avant-garde composer and poet. Born in Los Angeles, he was raised in the Mojave Desert, and was inspired at an early age by the humming tone caused by wind blown across telephone wires.^{[citation needed]}

Education and academic career[link]

Budd's career as a composer began in 1962. In the following years, he gained a notable reputation in the local avant-garde community.^{[citation needed]} In 1966 he graduated from the University of Southern California (having studied under Ingolf Dahl) with a degree in musical composition. As he progressed, his compositions became increasingly minimal. Among his more experimental works were two drone music pieces, "Coeur d'Orr" and "The Oak of the Golden Dreams". After composing a long-form gong solo titled "Lirio", he felt he had reached the limits of his experiments in minimalism and the avant-garde. He retired temporarily from composition in 1970 and began a teaching career at the California Institute of the Arts.^{[citation needed]}

"The road from my first colored graph piece in 1962 to my renunciation of composing in 1970 to my resurfacing as a composer in 1972 was a process of trying out an idea and when it was obviously successful abandoning it. The early graph piece was followed by the Rothko orchestra work, the pieces for Source Magazine, the Feldman-derived chamber works, the pieces typed out or written in longhand, the out-and-out conceptual works among other things, and the model drone works (which include the sax and organ "Coeur d'Orr" and "The Oak of the Golden Dreams", the latter based on the Balinese "Slendro" scale which scale I used again 18 years later on "The Real Dream of Sails").^{[1][citation needed]}

"In 1970 with the "Candy-Apple Revision" (unspecified D-flat major) and "Lirio" (solo gong "for a long duration") I realized I had minimalized myself out of a career. It had taken ten years to reduce my language to zero but I loved the process of seeing it occur and not knowing when the end would come. By then I had opted out of avant-garde music generally; it seemed self-congratulatory and risk-free and my solution as to what to do next was to do nothing, to stop completely."

"I resurfaced as an artist in 1972 with "Madrigals of the Rose Angel", the first of what would be a cycle of works under the collective title The Pavilion of Dreams. Madrigals refused to accommodate or even acknowledge any issues in new music. The entire aesthetic was an existential prettiness; not the Platonic "to Kalon", but simply pretty: mindless, shallow and utterly devastating. Female chorus, harp and percussion seemed like a beautiful start. Its first performance was at a Franciscan church in California conducted by Daniel Lentz." ^{[2][citation needed]}

Composer and recording artist[link]

Two years later, while still retaining his teaching career, he resurfaced as a composer. Spanning from 1972-1975 he created four individual works under the collective title "The Pavilion of Dreams". The style of these works was an unusual blend of popular jazz and the avant-garde. In 1976 he resigned from the institute and began recording his new compositions, produced by British ambient pioneer Brian Eno.^{[citation needed]} Two years later, Harold Budd's debut album The Pavilion of Dreams was released.

Since then he has developed a style of ambient music. His two collaborations with Brian Eno, The Plateaux of Mirror and The Pearl, established his trademark atmospheric piano style. On Lovely Thunder he introduced subtle electronic textures. His thematic 2000 release The Room saw a return to a more minimalist approach. In 2003, Daniel Lanois, the renowned producer of U2 and Bob Dylan, and occasional collaborator of Brian Eno, recorded an impromptu performance of Harold playing the piano in his Los Angeles living room, unaware, and thus realized the album La Bella Vista.

His album Avalon Sutra from 2004 was billed as "Harold Budd's Last Recorded Work" by the record label Samadhi Sound. Their press release continued: "Avalon Sutra brings to a conclusion thirty years of sustained musical activity. Asked for his reasons, Budd says only that he feels that he has said what he has to say. With characteristic humility, he concludes, "I don’t mind disappearing!"^{[citation needed]} A special celebration concert featuring Budd and guest-starring many of the musicians he had worked with throughout his career was presented at Brighton Dome in May 2005, also billed as being Budd's last public performance. In spite of this, Budd's soundtrack to the film Mysterious Skin (a collaboration with Robin Guthrie) and Music for 'Fragments from the Inside' (with Eraldo Bernocchi) were both released in 2005.

David Sylvian's independent record label Samadhisound released Perhaps in February 2007, a live recording of Budd's improvised performance in tribute to his late friend (and associate teacher at the then newly formed California Institute of Arts) James Tenney. Recorded at CalArts on December 6, the album is only available as a digital download.

Samadhisound released a podcast of Harold Budd in conversation with Akira Rabelais in April 2007. In this (Samadhisound Podcast #2), Harold said although he had believed at the time of recording Avalon Sutra that it would be his last album, he no longer felt that way. "It was a time in my life when things weren't just falling together for me, and I thought that I was just going to let it all slide ... and I was sincere about it but if I had been more conscious of my real feelings and had explored my inner sanctum more I would've seen that it was a preposterous thing to do ... I was dreadfully lonely; I was living alone in the desert and had been for too long, really, and I felt that isolation very severely after a while, and it's probably a version of self-pity, I'm sorry to say, to have publicly said something like that, but there it is, I said it, turns out I wasn't telling the truth - I didn't know it at the time."

Darla Records released two CDs by Robin Guthrie and Harold Budd in June 2007, After the Night Falls and Before the Day Breaks. Recorded in Spring 2006, each features nine tracks with linked titles, e.g. "How Distant Your Heart"/"How Close Your Soul" and "I Returned Her Glance"/"And Then I Turned Away".

In October 2008, a collaboration with Clive Wright entitled Song for Lost Blossoms was released by Darla Records. It includes recordings that were done live and in-studio at different locations, including both artists' homes. The album features some of their work done together between 2004 and 2006. A second collaborative effort with Wright, Candylion followed in 2009, again on Darla Records.

It was announced that Harold Budd will appear as one of the featured composer/performers at San Francisco's Other Minds festival in March, 2012.^[3]

Discography[link]

Studio albums

• The Oak of the Golden Dreams / Coeur D'Orr (1971), Advance Recordings
• The Pavilion of Dreams (1978), E.G. - Produced by Brian Eno
• Abandoned Cities (1984), Cantil
• Lovely Thunder (1986), E.G. - Produced by Michael Hoenig
• The White Arcades (1988), Opal - Produced by Brian Eno
• By the Dawn's Early Light (1991), Opal - With Bill Nelson
• She is a Phantom (1994), New Albion - With Zeitgeist
• Luxa (1996), All Saints
• The Room (2000), Atlantic
• La Bella Vista (2003), Shout Factory
• Avalon Sutra / As Long as I Can Hold My Breath (2005), Samadhi Sound - Produced by Harold Budd
• Perhaps (2007), Samadhi Sound
• In The Mist (2011), Darla

See also[link]

• Electronic music
• Ambient music
• Brian Eno

References[link]

External links[link]

• Harold Budd Home page
• New Albion Records Harold Budd page
• Samadhisound Harold Budd page
• Ambience for the Masses Harold Budd page
• Harold Budd: American Vision article from Sound On Sound magazine
• soundNET Concert Archives A rare live performance of works by Harold Budd (September 18, 2004) [streaming Quicktime audio]
• Somnambule Review of Harold Budd "Farewell Concert" at Brighton Dome (May 21, 2005)
• Harold Budd: Harold in May article from The Independent (May 8, 2005)

This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (August 2009)

Robin Guthrie (born 4 January 1962, Grangemouth, Stirlingshire, Scotland) is a musician best known as co-founder of the Cocteau Twins.^[1] During his career Guthrie has played guitar, bass guitar, keyboards, drums and other musical instruments, in addition to programming, sampling and sound processing. Guthrie also works extensively as a producer and engineer.

Career[link]

Following the break-up of the Cocteau Twins in 1998, Guthrie released his first solo record, Imperial, in 2003 on Bella Union Records. Guthrie's next release, which was co-written with Harold Budd, was the film score for Gregg Araki's Mysterious Skin.^[2] The soundtrack was released in May 2005 by Commotion and consists of fifteen complete songs based on the short pieces used in the film.

In 2006, Guthrie signed a four-album solo deal with Darla Records, the first product of which was the album Continental. He subsequently released two four-track EPs, Everlasting and Waiting for Dawn.

Two more collaborations with Harold Budd (who had previously announced his musical retirement) were released simultaneously in 2007. After The Night Falls and Before The Day Breaks were both co-composed, co-produced and played with Budd. Like the soundtrack to Mysterious Skin, both albums are slow, drifting pieces primarily utilising treated guitar and piano.

Guthrie has also collaborated with singer Siobhan de Maré (formerly of Mono) as the band Violet Indiana. Their first full-length album, Roulette, was released in 2001. A second album, Russian Doll, followed in 2004. In March 2006 Guthrie reported on his weblog that the group had started work again on new material.

A new solo album, Carousel, was released on Darla Records on 15 September 2009. Additionally, Guthrie issued the Angel Falls EP in early 2009, and the Songs To Help My Children Sleep EP in October 2009. A further EP Sunflower Stories has been recorded but a release date has not yet been given.

Guthrie's most recent releases are Emeralds (2011) and two collaboration albums with Harold Budd, Bordeaux and Winter Garden (with Eraldo Bernocchi) (both 2011). He played guitar on the Telefon Tel Aviv track "The Sky is Black", from The Birds EP (2012).^[3]

He currently works and lives in France with his wife Florence, their daughter Violette, and Lucy Belle, his daughter with Elizabeth Fraser.

Discography[link]

Studio albums

• Imperial (2003)
• Continental (2006)
• Carousel (2009)
• Emeralds (2011)

References[link]

External links[link]