Knox Chandler: Exploring the Sound of the Shoreline
After four decades collaborating with acts like the Psychedelic Furs and Siouxsie and the Banshees, the veteran guitarist has created his first deeply personal project—a book and album documenting his return to the Connecticut coast.
Today, the Spotlight shines on guitarist Knox Chandler.
Knox’s name might ring a bell from his work with The Psychedelic Furs, Siouxsie and the Banshees, or maybe from his string arrangements on Depeche Mode’s Exciter. However, his latest project takes an entirely different turn. After decades in the music business bouncing between New York, Berlin, and stages around the world, Knox found himself back in his Connecticut hometown caring for his aging mother.
What started as a personal necessity became an artistic revelation. His new project, The Sound, is a collection of guitar-driven soundscapes and a book of paintings, photographs, and written meditations, all capturing his rediscovery of the Long Island Sound shoreline where he grew up. It’s part memoir, part nature journal, and completely unlike anything else you’ll hear this year.
Knox is here to walk us through this ambitious multimedia project and share how returning home can lead to your most honest and creative work.
(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are from Knox Chandler’s album The Sound)
Dig Deeper
• Visit Knox Chandler at knoxchandlermusic.com and follow him on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube
• Purchase Knox Chandler’s The Sound book/album from Blue Elastic or Bandcamp and listen on your streaming platform of choice
Major Collaborations:
• The Psychedelic Furs - Knox’s long-running collaboration
• Siouxsie and the Banshees - Influential post-punk band
• Cyndi Lauper - Ten-year collaboration including multiple albums
• Dave Gahan Paper Monsters - Solo album collaboration with Depeche Mode frontman
Recent Projects:
• Bobby Previte - Previte Chandler album on SubSound Records
• Mars Williams - Late saxophonist, Albert Ayler Christmas shows collaborator
• Jamie Branch - Influential, late trumpet player referenced in “Branch”
Connecticut Music Scene:
• Toad’s Place - Historic New Haven venue
• Woolsey Hall - Yale University concert hall
• New Haven Improvisers Collective - Local experimental music community
Educational Background:
• Bard College - Knox’s alma mater in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
• BIMM (British Irish Modern Music Institute) - Where Knox taught guitar in Berlin
Historical and Cultural References:
• Mashantucket Pequot Museum - Native American history and culture
• Long Island Sound - Geographic inspiration for The Sound
More on Knox Chandler:
• “I was playing a gig at CBGB’s Canteen, and Cyndi showed up. She heckled me throughout the show”
• Interview with Knox Chandler on The Sound
• Guitar, Technology, and Nature Converge in Knox Chandler’s Solo Debut
• guitar moderne: Knox Chandler
(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
Lawrence Peryer: I think just in terms of life stages, we had a similar trajectory, maybe a decade and a half or so apart. I went from Connecticut to New York as well. I left in the mid-nineties and lived in the Lower East Side. And then, like most people of my generation, I ended up in Brooklyn.
Knox Chandler: That's the same thing that happened to me. I was in the Lower East Side for about twenty-seven years and then wound up in Brooklyn for the four years before I moved to Germany.
Lawrence: Tell me a little bit, if you don't mind. I'm really curious. I think like a lot of us interested in music and interested in the culture of the mid- to late twentieth century, there's always this feeling of—especially in New York—what happened right before me is what always intrigued me the most. You know, I got there as someone who was always very interested in the downtown scene and the no wave stuff. I got there right at the tail end of the Kitchen and not really there for the loft stuff, but it was still in the air, and a lot of those figures were still around playing. But I'm curious to go back even a little further. What was happening in New Haven before you left? You know, I hear sort of the history of places like Toad's Place or artists like the Saucers. What was happening musically in New Haven?
Knox: I mean, growing up, we'd go to Toad's Place, and there were a couple other places we'd go to. I forget the names of them. I can't even remember. I drive by and I go, "I remember that place." But it was very rock and roll. Then we had the New Haven Coliseum existed at that time, so we got a lot of bands. You know, like Yes and Jethro Tull, Frank Zappa, Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Then in New Haven, I mean, the first time I saw John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra was at Woolsey Hall, and I think he played it a couple times. I went every time they were in town. That was like early seventies.
There was also coming out of that, there was a scene that included Michael Gregory Jackson and Pheeroan akLaff and Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake, Abdul Wadud, Jerry Hemingway. These guys, they were doing more improvisational, free jazz kind of stuff. And I'd go even up to Hartford to see some of these concerts. I don't exactly remember the names of the spaces I saw them at. My memory doesn't serve me well there, but that was what was sort of exciting for me. I know there were some punk clubs on the grotto, but I never really took part in that stuff. I was—by the time seventy-six rolled around, I was already in college and studying music.
Lawrence: I always tell people, and folks who have listened to my podcast hear me go on about it occasionally. I'm a real partisan of New Haven. I feel like as a city it hits above its weight, and it's got such an interesting cultural history. Even going back to all the kind of failed urban renewal experiments. I dunno, I just find it a fascinating area.
Knox: This was the industrial state. That's what it was coined. And there were a lot of factories that came up around the turn of the century. And because of it, there was a lot of pollution. The waters were really terrible growing up. Ospreys, for instance, were endangered. Now there's an abundance of ospreys. We even have bald eagles now. I mean, I saw one just two days ago. Coyotes, bobcats, bears. I mean, this was unheard of when I was growing up here.
A lot of those factories, obviously, have failed. They've turned them into condos or tore them down. So it's a strange state for that reason. It's like there's this failed industrialism that keeps trying to be reinvented. Like New Haven sort of pops up in the New York Times every now and then as the new hip place to live, and you see the rents go up, especially out towards East Rock. But what substance is there, really? It's not like it's a pretty city, that's for sure. I guess the one thing is it's a quick train ride—well, a two-hour train ride—to New York City. And then it's got all these really pretty places on either side of the city, which are shoreline places, which are pretty. But it's interesting culturally. It seems to be very insular. A lot of that culture doesn't really bleed out into some of the neighboring towns.
Lawrence: I think that's right.
Knox: And it just—I'm in Guilford, which is, you know, you have East Haven, Branford, Guilford. And I like to say this place is incredibly beige, vacuous of all culture, but awfully pretty.
And I came back here to take care of my mother, who is now in a residential place. I thought I would be moving to another area where there are more like-minded people around. I've been going up to upstate New York around Saugerties, Woodstock area. There's a lot—all my friends live up there. They have studios, their gigs, all that. And then I found that once my mother got in this facility, I found this was really conducive to me getting a lot of work done without any distractions. (laughter) I have a real love-hate relationship with this place. By the time I was eighteen, I couldn't wait—actually, I wanted to leave when I was sixteen, which caused a lot of fights in my family. But I agreed I'd go to college, so at eighteen I went to Bard College. Every time I come back, it's strange. It's one of these places that there's nothing to do but drink and do drugs and chase girls. And here I am back here, and I'm seeing the same people that I grew up with forty, fifty years later.
It's taking on a new meaning. I'm more engrossed in the whole nature of this area and the fact that it is so plentiful with nature that it was an attractive area for the Native Americans. There were like sixteen tribes in this area at one point, and obviously with everything else, they're gone. There's a reservation where Foxwoods is and Mohegan Sun. They have a pretty good Pequots Indian museum there, but a lot of their history seems to be sort of erased, like just gone, and especially with their music. I've had a hard time tracing down some of their indigenous songs and dances.
Lawrence: It's really interesting that you bring up that particular point because when I moved out here—I came out to the Seattle area in 2016—and growing up and being on the East Coast my whole life up till that point, obviously been out here a lot as a traveler and as a visitor, the Native American presence and the Native American culture is so much more real here and alive and much more—I mean, I don't want to oversimplify it or idealize it, but there's an attempt at least beyond even acknowledgment, like inclusion. There's a—I guess what I'm trying to say is back East it was always so abstract. It was like ancient history.
Knox: Yeah.
Lawrence: God forbid you'd ever actually meet a First Nation or Native American person. But out here we still have the place names, or place names are being restored, and there's much more presence.
Knox: Well, I think also because here it was heavily colonized.
Lawrence: So early.
Knox: So early. I mean, but back up on the West, there was around the time of the gold rush, there were huge slaughters, like something like—I want to, I've read somewhere like seventy-five percent of the Native Americans were murdered. So maybe it's the lack of these many condensed cities that sort of squeezed everything out, or there's more of a revolution to have their name heard.
Lawrence: Absolutely.
Knox: But it's—I mean, because a lot of the really earlier recordings of the drums and the chants that I listened to are all from out West. You know, the Blackfoot, the Hopi, the Apache. I mean, they're—I can see why a lot of people believe that they were the heaviest influence on the American blues. You could hear it in the blues tones in their chants. Practically flat-out minor pentatonic scales. They bend the note and shape it very differently than if you heard the exact same thing played by a blues guitar player.
Lawrence: One of the things that really struck me, and I won't linger here too much longer, was that the last sort of violent skirmish or confrontation between Seattleites even and Native Americans was like 1918. There were people—up until very recently there were still people alive that remembered it. And again, as we said before, back East, it's ancient history. Out here, it was like you were a generation or two removed from that really incredible.
So you covered what brought you home or brought you back. I don't think I quite grokked from some of the material I was researching before our time together, and certainly not from the music, the ambivalence you mentioned or the complexity of your sort of feelings and relationship with the place. Obviously the album is so rooted in place—it's explicitly talked about. I'm curious how literal some of the tracks are as they relate. Are there specific locations that some of your music's tied to?
Knox: Yes. Some of them are actually—probably most of them are. I mean, this is the thing. I came back here. I came to visit my mom after COVID. We were locked down pretty heavy in Berlin, Germany, and finally got a chance to come back. My father passed away about eight years ago, and my mom's in this old farmhouse. This whole area up here in North Guilford was just farmer after farmer after farmer. But she was here in this old farmhouse, and I couldn't figure out how the hell she took care of herself or took care of, maintained the house and all that. And I made a decision to move back here.
So I moved here, and my intention was really on being a caretaker. But I can't—I have to write music or play music or do something. I record music 'cause I'm just fidgety that way. And so I sat at my studio—I guess an hour here, or most of the time I get in there would be really late at night. But even during the day, I'd be sitting here, and I was trying to get some kind of inspiration, and I'd look out the window and I'd be like, "Man, this is so pretty here, but I'm just not feeling anything."
After like forty-some-odd years of living in cities, I gotta go and take a walk if I'm blocked in any—either New York or Berlin. And I'd immediately be getting ideas or feeling inspired. So I sort of put that by the wayside, and I still would go in there and do stuff, but nothing was really clicking until springtime came. And I decided I was gonna take up fly fishing. I knew a little bit about it, but I really wanted to get deeper into it. And so I got rigged up. Bunch of rivers around here. And it was about that time where I started really feeling attachment, mostly to water. And I think I was probably starved from ten years of living in a landlocked city.
And then I was going down to the shoreline, the Sound here, and night fishing or fishing during the day or just walking around. And I started seeing how it was affecting these recordings I was doing—these Soundribbons, I was recording—but it was also—I was journaling a lot. And this more abstract, more like finding a moment and then just do my sort of flow with it. And I was taking a lot of pictures and filming little clips and got back into painting and sketching in these books. And after a while I realized that it all was really connecting together, as well as specific moments when I would be in one place, or like Hidden Hammock Pond, which that comes single with release tomorrow. That's a specific place I go to. So it's really trying to capture going to it and arriving at this place.
"Mars On a Half Moon Rising," that starts with the frogs on the out, the back here on the porch. So there's a pond right there. And I recorded the frogs. And my friend Mars had passed away. So it was an homage to him. A lot of the other pieces, they're specific moments or a combination of moments, but very much related to the experience of this area, being in the moment in these experiences, in this shoreline area.
Lawrence: You know, hearing you talk about the various creative and artistic elements that go into this project. Was the genesis of this recorded music and it evolved, or were you always thinking you had this multimedia approach? How did that all come together in this project?
Knox: Well, I've always been fascinated with visuals. I studied—my mom's an artist. I studied art as a kid. I was a split major up until my senior year in college as a musician-artist. And then I put it down for a long time, and I got back into it living in Berlin. Even before I moved to Berlin, I was making these films and going out and projecting them and playing to these films I made. They're very abstract.
So there's always been this visual thing that I connect to. It also—a lot of what I do musically is visual. I mean, I've had many people say, "Well, this is so cinematic," or "You should—this should be in films and this and that." For me, it's like I try to create the visual with the music.
So when I got to Berlin, I really—this is like going back 2012—I really sort of locked myself in for two years, got deep into creating the soundscapes, which I call Soundribbons, which is—there's no preexisting audio. It's using a class-compliant iPad where I'm grabbing bits and pieces and processing everything from step sequencers to just wild reverbs to granular synthesis. And so they're never the same. It's all in real time. I don't use any synthesizers or samples, so it's guitar. It's like my version of what a guitar sounds like.
At the same time I started doing all these clips and kind of doing the same thing with another iPad where I'm processing them, mixing them, grabbing bits and pieces and projecting them while I'm also performing the audio end of it. It's demanding, but I love it. You're really in the now, and you're in the now, and the whole purpose is to get lost in the now. (laughter) That's when it becomes quite—
About that time, I was working with this guy, Peter Freeman, doing a record with him and Rick Cox, and Peter was a big fan of the way I worked with the guitar, and he wanted me to make a guitar album. He was also my technical mentor. He got me into using computers in the nineties, and I had always—in the back of my mind, I always, "Eventually I will do this. Eventually I will do this."
So I got back here when I started getting more and more inspired. I was like, "I gotta be doing this." But in the meantime, I was working with Bobby Previte on this album, Previte Chandler, that came out in February on Subsound. And so I was applying a lot of this stuff that I was experiencing with this area to that record. And then when I finished that, I was like, "Okay." And that's also about the time that my mother moved into this facility. I said, "Okay, I got a lot more time on my hands. I really gotta focus on doing this guitar album."
And so I started that process, and then at the same time, as I mentioned before, I was doing these paintings and photographs and whatnot, and went down the path of manipulating that, which felt very similar to the way I manipulated audio. And I was saying, "Okay, and this is all connected to Salmon River," or "That's all connected to Chaffinch Island," or "It's all connected to the pond that's up through the woods there."
I don't know, it just naturally happened for me, which is kind of unusual 'cause usually I have to search for things to bring it all to fruition. I was probably well into documenting this experience when I really decided, "Okay, it should—I don't wanna do a CD, and I don't wanna do vinyl, but I want something tangible. So I'll make it a book." And I was able to just be able to look at the bulk of the writing I had done and the paintings and sketches and the Soundribbons that I was putting together as compositions, and going, "This is just one of the same."
Lawrence: Yeah.
Knox: And then it really is a documentation of my musical memoir from beginning three years ago.
Lawrence: I love that reception of what a format can be. As frustrating as it can be to think about some of the things we've lost in the digital era, and I try not to bemoan that too much. I don't want to sound like I'm yelling at you to get off my lawn. I accept that things change. There's sort of a freedom in the fact that even twenty years ago, you might have thought about this as maybe just a more complex CD packaging with beautiful imagery in it. But today you get to completely reimagine what the format is for delivering this piece. And that's kind of exciting, isn't it?
Knox: Yes. It's been a lot of work.
Lawrence: Yeah. It's ambitious.
Knox: And there had been some roadblocks, and getting back to the Native Americans, the pages that are like sort of blank pages with those symbols on them, those are all Native American symbols for many gods, lots of fish, the turtle, which is—quite a few tribes, especially the Pequots, believe that the earth was formed from the back of a turtle.
So my fascination with that came into it also. I almost went with the whole LP vinyl thing. And I'm like, "But then it's gotta be just all these pages." And not a lot of people have vinyl—have record players—but a book, I always like art books. And this is sort of like a book that's got—it depicts moments of time in a collage format. So there's a lot of collage work in there, bringing to life some of these feelings I had, some of these emotions. And I think it really touches base to having grown up here, coming back here, being a caretaker. There's some stuff that sort of connects with that too.
This sort of dichotomy of finding something new, but it's really not new. And then I'm burdened down with this family situation. It's sort of a complicated experience, but really trying to find beauty in it all. And it's quite often I find that beauty is more powerful when it has contrast, like the beauty in flowers. It always is amazing when it pops up in some decomposition. Or like the beauty in finding this new stage of my life crops up in the really difficult time of trying to take care of a ninety-year-old woman who's not easy. (laughter)
Lawrence: Well, not going gentle. To share a little bit, it's a little poignant for me to talk to you at this particular moment because I was back there. I've been back twice in the last few months after not being back for a while. My mom passed away in March. I was able to come out there with my son who had just turned twenty on his spring break from school. She passed away like right before spring break started, and so unfortunately for him, he spent spring break with Dad going to a funeral. But we stayed out there for the better part of a week and sort of went and visited all the old ghosts. We got to my childhood home and all the places that I used to visit around the shoreline in New Haven, up in the woods.
I relate to that feeling of kind of walking some of those paths again, but also seeing them. I was able to have an experience, and then I went back again a couple of weeks ago with my significant other, and we did a very similar thing, except we also went into the Hudson Valley and saw some of the places I loved there.
Knox: Yeah.
Lawrence: It is a very special opportunity to go back and revisit place. I think without the feelings of baggage, it's rare that you get to go without—I didn't feel a reassessment. I just felt a joy, I guess, in seeing some of those places and the comfort and the consistency as well as the sort of marveling of what changed.
I don't know. When you talked about how this record came to you in a different way than other—or this music came to you in a different way than how you normally work. I'm curious if you've been able to identify, like, was it because you were there and the state it put you in? Is there a vulnerability? I'm really—ever since you said it, I've been curious to ask you, like, why do you think it was different this time?
Knox: Well, I'm older. (laughter) All those projects I've worked on in the past, there's been—I've worked a lot of different people. They all brought me to this place. I figure I've looked at every single time I've been in a studio or been on the road or played a gig or television performance, I've always learned something. That's something I've always been very focused on is that this life I'm living is about learning, and I have to keep learning.
So I got to a point where I figure I've just done it all, and somehow, how can I really learn more? And there's a record I made in 2005 called Turquoise that I never—I never put it out. I sold it on my website and I gave it to friends. It was more of a—it was right after I was working with Dave Gahan on Paper Monsters. I just really had to free myself and just do something totally for myself. Maybe it was a bit self-indulgent of me, but I didn't put it out, but I knew I could do something like that. And that played a role in, as a springboard in that I knew I could do this record.
I mean, people expect it to be something else judging from all the different folks I've worked with, and it is probably very different than this music that I'm kind of known for. It's the same to me 'cause it's the same voice that I've just extrapolated on. I mean, every time I go into a session or working with, I try to bring my voice to it. I think I probably took a bit of a deep dive when I got here as far as spending a lot of time by myself when I wasn't with my mother, really trying to figure out what is my voice. I know I reinvented it in Berlin with the Soundribbons approach, but I knew that it was a time for me to really stay put for a bit and just do the work.
And in the process of it, learning all different stages, like setting up a business—Blue Elastic as the label—then I had to learn Adobe Illustrator to create the logo, and then I'm gonna do this book. So I had to learn InDesign to do the book. And then I'm making these video clips, so I have to learn Premiere. And so every single day I'm learning something. I even had to learn how to build a website to build my website, and rather than hiring people, 'cause that's what I've always done in the past, but I never learned anything. I might be frustrated 'cause it's taking too long. "Why did that happen?" or "This happened," and you get an answer, and maybe it was a mistake somebody else made, but you can't understand what the mistake is unless you experience it yourself.
I figured, "Okay, I'm in a luxurious place where I can live here. I can do this. I can make my own mistakes and just learn something." And at the same time learning a lot about myself. So how—and that definitely reflects on what the music does. I wouldn't—there's a record I made in Berlin that I'll put out probably next year called Sea of Stars. I was actually trying to do some artwork for that, but was having a hard time connecting it to the music. In the meantime, this is what happened, and it is very much, as you asked, it's a product of the experience of being here, of this mixture of this rural inspiration from urban inspiration, that sort of metamorphosis of where I am today. And then so there's—you do get some vapor trails of urban life in there as well as moving back in, being a caretaker for my mother for two years, which brought up all this other stuff.
So I got back into therapy, doing a lot of EMDR work as well as increased my meditative practice—my meditations on a daily basis. So it is a total product of being here.
Lawrence: You're at a very interesting point in life, not only to be creating, but to be talking to. It's sort of fascinating to hear you articulate a lot of what you've been experiencing and how you've been integrating it and how it's manifesting in your work.
To shift gears just a little bit and to get a little mechanical. I'm curious, could you talk a little bit about the Soundribbons approach? You talked about it a little bit before, but I wanted to come back to it because you mentioned also how that sort of nexus or that manifestation of visualization in music. And it occurred to me when you were saying it that a ribbon is something tangible and visible. And so to combine the words—and I like word plays—and I'm curious about the origin of the Soundribbons approach, what it actually means. You walk into your work environment or the studio or wherever it is, you have a blank sonic palette. What happens?
Knox: Oh, that's a good question. I've always been fascinated with the electric guitar, even though—I mean, I remember hearing the Beatles in sixty-two or sixty-three on the radio when I was living in England, and that sound just—but going back to even Hendrix, I mean, when I heard—started listening to those Hendrix records, it wasn't his lead playing so much as the sound, the feedback, the tape manipulation, even like on Electric Ladyland, the putting the jacks the wrong way around in a wah pedal to get that flute sound—sounds like seagulls. And I mean, all that stuff really fascinated me.
So by the time I got to New York, I was playing around with different processing boxes, stock boxes. When I joined the Psychedelic Furs, that's when I got into the TC 2290, which is—it's got a sampler in it, but it's got this really amazing sounding delay with all this steep modulation, and you really have to program it like a computer. And I got deep, way deep into that. And by the time we did the World Outside album, I spent a bit of time, even with Steven Street, who was producing the record, manipulating this 2290, and that just sounds so exciting.
So I think I was—at that time there were a lot of synthesizers around. There was something fascinating about synthesizers, but they all, to me, sort of sounded the same. There's always this sort of saw wave or sine wave that just—you get a lot of that, and I had a lot of respect for it, but I wanted to really try to make guitar do what that did to some extent. Because I enjoyed the graininess that you got out of a guitar string or a cello or even—I do some electric trumpet stuff—where just the sound of the breath going through it, and then you manipulate it like you would a sine wave or a saw wave.
So that got me really interested in processing the instrument. And so there are all these records I did in the nineties with these—they called it adult contemporary, these sort of singer-songwriter types, and it was actually Michael Vallely, who was our A&R guy for the Psychedelic Furs, was putting me in these sessions and sight unseen, music unheard. I would just create—try to create these sort of soundscapes for them, something—add something that was textual and added an extra feeling to the piece of music. I just got deeper and deeper into this stuff.
And then by the time I got to Berlin, I was at the tail end of work—doing a lot of—I did ten years with Cyndi Lauper, and that ended. I'd done some movie stuff. I just felt like I had to do something different. I had to change up, and I didn't really wanna stick around and hop on another legacy act. I thought I had to get back to truly what was me being—I was a tourist to what was me over the years. I never really engaged. I never really put everything in.
So at that time, my friend Peter, who I mentioned before, he was pushing me to start using class-compliant iPads as the iPad would be the workstation. And instead of using the Apple audio drivers, you would hook it up to an interface and use the audio drivers in the interface—just a much better sound quality. He was dabbling—he was turning me on all these apps. Plus he invented an app called Loop Reverse, which was a simulated—the Electrix Repeater, which is one of the boxes I use, which is a forward channel looper that you could really stretch sound with. And I was beta testing that. I also was really interested in doing a deep dive in Ableton Live. I had been working primarily in Logic at the time, so I decided I'd move—I moved to Berlin, moved originally to live with Budgie, the drummer from the Banshees, who was a very good friend of mine.
I would not take any foot pedals. I wouldn't take any rack spaces stuff. It'd be just an iPad with an interface, a computer, guitar, and a suitcase. I said, "I'm just gonna approach it like the whole workstation is gonna be on the computer and the iPad." And I just did a deep dive with that, and once I got in there a little bit, I started hearing what I want to do. I started hearing what could be the new me, and certain things spoke to me then. So there's buying a lot of apps that I don't even use, combining apps and stuff, and then also working with the computer learning Ableton, and then later Max for Live.
Previously, I fooled around with MaxMSP and Jitter primarily for the use of manipulating visuals with sound or vice versa, but that just got too intense, and I wasn't making music. This was another way for me to get in and make music pretty quickly. For like two years, I just explored it and didn't play with anybody else, didn't play out. I really kept to myself.
And then I started doing some shows with Budgie. I played with some dance music people, some free jazz people, even this indigenous Nepalese band. I found—I realized that this works with anybody I'm playing with.
Lawrence: Mm.
Knox: So it crosses genres, which really excited me. "Okay. So I'm onto something good." I purposely called it—and Soundribbons just came 'cause it—visually, that's what it feels like. It feels like I'm sending off these sort of multiple ribbons, and sometimes they wrap around something, and then I can sit there and maneuver it and manipulate it into shaping it on some compositional level. So these things can go on forever, or you can compose on the spot as short pieces of music. And I accept the liminal spaces that—it's just gonna be whatever instrument is plugged into it, mostly guitar. And so there's no preexisting audio, there's no synthesizers, there's no drum machines, there's no samples.
It's a good question you asked about—I sit there with a blank canvas, and it used to be in the beginning, I'd sit there and I'd start it and I'd stop it. "No, that's not it." I'd start it and I'd stop it. "No, that's not it." I start it. Then I had to realize I can't do that. That's not working. That sort of defeats the purpose of there's no preexisting audio files in there or anything. Well, there should be no real preexisting thoughts of what I'm gonna really do with this.
Now I might conceptually have an idea of where I want to take this thing, but it's really about being in the moment and in that moment, grabbing something that just comes to you. And this sort of goes back to a theory I have about the beauty of the first take. Because quite often—and I was teaching in Berlin. I taught at this university for seven years. I was actually the head of the guitar department there, and they put me through school. So I got a degree in education. And I started—and so there's a lot of research in classroom research I was doing, and I was finding that the same way I do it is that sometimes the best ideas just come right away. They're immediately there. And then like your intercession, you get this idea and the producer goes, "Oh, that's brilliant," and then you spend the next half an hour trying to make it better.
Lawrence: I was gonna say ruining it. (laughter)
Knox: And sometimes you might make it better, but the rest of it is ruined. And I was like, "Okay, so where does that come from?" It's 'cause you're not really thinking about it—you're just doing it. I mean, I like to say it's like I'm channeling it from somewhere outside of me. It's—I call it a gift.
So here I am, I'm creating this thing on the spot. It could be just like the groundwork for what will come. And then in there I start adding to it, and that's when the chaos starts to begin. And when I get into that mode, I start hearing the beauty in it. Where I have to direct it, how can I massage it so it works as a piece of music. And when it's really good, I get lost in it. And because I've been doing this so long, I know technically what to do with my hands. But if I don't somehow get lost in it, I don't expect anybody else to get it either. And I've recorded a lot of these, and I listen to them quite a bit. That has been the basis for all my compositions these days.
I start with a Soundribbons thing. I might make it like five minutes long, and then I will sit there and listen and listen and listen, and that's where I start hearing stuff. And then I'll start editing it and adding other ones maybe, and start putting down percussions on my bass. That is—that's been the way I've been working these days. That might change next year, but it's been something I feel has been pretty fruitful artistically for me.
There's one piece on the record, a piece "Mars on a Half Moon Rising," where I recorded the frogs. It was like—again, it gets really loud out there some nights, and I caught this one moment where I recorded about five to ten minutes of these frogs, and they're like peepers and bull frogs and the whole—and I sat there and listened to it. Constantly. And I can—this is a symphony. This is—to me, it sounds so composed. There was counterpoint, and there was register. It just blew me away. And I played it for my friend Sue Jacobson, and she's all, "You should put a record out of these." And I said, "Yeah, but that's not really what I'm doing these days."
And as I was right in the middle of this recording, this record, and so I listened to it and I listened to it. Then I just put it in the studio, and first take I put on a sound with it, and just that first take—and maybe it's 'cause I listened to it so much and I was just connected to it on some level because it certainly wasn't purposeful—and all of a sudden I heard what it was gonna be. I was like, "This is it." And it was—and then I sat down with the guitar and fooled around with this melody that just grabbed me, that fit perfectly in this. And it was all sort of sentimental feelings about Mars's death. He was a very close friend, and so it seemed like—it's almost to him. His name's in the title. It's nothing I think he would ever play. So like I was—"Oh, Mars made that sound, so I'll do that." But it was totally heartfelt. It's my sort of pouring my love out to this guy who taught me so much and was so great.
However, in that song "Branch," that's for Jamie Branch who was also working with Mars and I on the Albert Ayler Christmas shows. The last time I saw her play was in Berlin before I moved back here. And she had this one piece where she was squeaking her sneakers on the stage, and so I was like, "Okay, I gotta get that on the guitar." So there's just little gestures like that, but every song on that record started with a Soundribbons except for "Mars" started with the frogs.
Lawrence: It is really interesting when I hear things like that frog symphony out in the wild, or just recently I had an experience—we're very early in the morning. My significant other, she lives—her property abuts like a green belt with a canyon in it. And so like right before dawn, the birds start. There's so many of them at one point, and I said to her, "I can't help but wonder, what are the birds thinking? Are they in communion with each other? Are they all just doing their own thing separately? What do the birds that aren't the same kind of birds think of what the other birds are saying?" Like it's so curious what's happening when it's just that din.
Knox: It's fascinating. I've heard people say different things like, "Well, they only tune into other birds that are at that frequency." I don't know that. Somehow I think it's all pretty connected. I mean, I used to—there's this Victorian park, which is about a block away from where I was living in Berlin. I used to go there and just lie on the ground and just listen to the birds, and just try to hear the composition in it. It's funny because what I realized was it wasn't just the birds that was creating this piece of music. It was the car going by, the siren in the back, the dogs barking, a little conversation on the lawn over there. It was all these things that were sort of interacting with these birds. I mean, that's kinda where my mind goes. I can sort of maybe spend too much time doing that.
At one point I actually pulled my guitar out, and I was sitting on a bench there, and this bird came down and started doing a song. And so I started riffing with it on the guitar and went back and forth. It must have been at least a minute, which if you really think about it, it's a good amount of time, and the bird flew off. And I actually had this feeling, "What, do I suck?" (laughter)
I was like, "Well, you rejected me."
Lawrence: Well, that's the sign of a true artist—supremely confident and full of self-doubt. (laughter) But I wanted to ask you a little bit—you said earlier, you were mentioning Turquoise and how you felt that maybe that was a little self-indulgent as a project, and so you didn't release it. Something that strikes me is you've spent so much of your time in other musical contexts, whether it's part of some of these bands that you talked about or working with and supporting other artists, and I can't help but—this is like really bad armchair psychology, so feel free to swat me down on this one. But it does feel like this is kind of your time now, right? Like you've worked in the service of a lot of other artists' ideas and visions. Now you have the chance to just implement, express, like do your thing. Am I far off on that? Am I projecting that on you?
Knox: Oh, no, no. You're absolutely correct. I mean, and I will put out Turquoise at some point. And I do think it's a good record. And probably a good prequel to this, even though it won't be, just by default. I think it's because I moved back here. I'm two hours away from New York City. So it's hard for me to get in there. I mean, I've been in there about two or three times over the three years to do some session stuff, but I'm not being pulled away from what I'm doing out here.
I have lately been going in and working with the New Haven Improvisers Collective. Couple nights a month I go in there and play with those guys and do shows here and there, but it's really—I'm really isolated. It feels very isolated. I have a lot of time to think, a lot of time to reflect. I don't see myself, at sixty-six, jumping down on stage singing "Girls Just Want to Have Fun." I just don't—my mates seem to do that pretty well. I don't see myself doing it. I feel like there's a lot of that is done in me.
I've always—I've never lost the love and passion for music. I've been able to express myself alone, mostly out of sheer joy, and it's not like I'm trying to be something I'm not. I've really come to terms with the fact that this is who I am. I mean, this whole record, the whole book is nothing but my truth. I went into the project that way, and I feel I was very successful. To me, it's a success because whether you like it or not, this is who I am right now. I have nothing to say to support it or to take away from it. It is just what it is. That's a beautiful feeling. That feels very freeing for me, and probably the first time in my life I've been able to really do it and feel that, and that could be an age thing, experience thing.
I am fortunate that I am not distracted here. I am able to stay in this house and to maintain the house and my mother's maintenance on everything around my mother. She's about ten minutes away. I go and see her a couple times a week and bring her stuff, and someone has to be close by for her, but that gives me all this other time.
And yeah, I guess it is a little self-indulgent. It's weird. I don't feel like it is. I feel like I am—it feels like I'm giving up me. It's very vulnerable. There's people that can look at it and say, "Well, he's not really an artist," or "He is not really a writer," or "He's not really a guitarist," or whatever, those voices that you sometimes get in your head. I don't have—I mean, it is what I am. It's just my truth.
As a matter of fact, the first round of drafts I did of the book, all the text that's in there, I had text printing, different fonts, and a good friend of mine, Rick Moody, who's a writer, he went through it and he said, "Knox, you are an artist. Your music's great. The thing is, this is like your journaling stuff. This is your flow in your journaling writing. You should go back and do it all in handwritten." He was absolutely right. So I went—and it took me a while to do it, but I handwrote everything out, and I go, "Yeah, this is what—this is exactly what it's supposed to be. It is a journal." Really simple as that. It's not a book of poems. It's not a book of art. It's really a journal, the same way the album's a journal.
