The Home Key #19
“The Sound:” An Interview with Knox Chandler
Knox Chandler, in NYC, back in the day, played music with almost everyone, it seemed, with every band of note or player at the cutting edge, and then, later, in Berlin, he played with everyone there and in Europe (in England, especially), too. For me, I first noticed his work on the next-to-last Golden Palominos album, Dead Inside (1996), where he played a lot of things that were not the drums, and Maggie Estep’s album, Love Is a Dog From Hell (1997), where he is the entirety of the orchestra. But you would be hard-pressed to find a record of note made in NYC in the nineties that was not in some way touched by Knox. In recent years, Chandler has been teaching quite a bit, and, as shown below, making solo electro-acoustic music of a very original kind. His newly released album The Sound (2025) documents, after a fashion (though it is non-documentary), his return to the United States, specifically to coastal Connecticut, where he has been caregiving for his mother. The Sound is available widely, as are many of Chandler’s collaborations, on the streaming services, but will also be available on Bandcamp, especially in insofar as it has a physical iteration. The Sound is an evocative, spooky, unusual record (though “record” is not the right word, as the album includes a booklet with visual images and some text), where sounds you don’t quite expect frequently erupt and stay indeterminately and then move off toward the horizon. The moods are melancholy, reflective, diaphanous. As such, it’s full of surprises and rich with discovery. I’ve known Knox for a long time now, with many friends in common, and so I was very eager to hear him talk about the new record, in that way he has, which is speculative, probing, helixing. We spoke by Zoom in January of this year.
RM: Your new album, “The Sound,” brings a lot of attention—without being at all reductive about it–to natural surroundings. People who know your work over many years, in postpunk and pop, might find that to be a bit of a new wrinkle or a new development. What accounts for this new attention, in the work, to images of nature?
KC: I moved out here to the shoreline of Connecticut, which is right on what they call the Sound, the Long Island Sound, about three years ago, to take care of my mother. Before that, I was living in Berlin in the center of Berlin, Germany, and New York City, Manhattan, and then Brooklyn. And I was just always getting inspired by going out in the street and hearing the noises on the street. The noises, the smells, the visual of it all, and that’s where I got my inspiration from, you know, mechanical sounds, hearing, like, in the East Village, a mix of different kinds of Latin music as well as hip hop. Back when I moved to New York City, it was a real melting pot, that neighborhood. You got all these different flavors and colors. After being in these major cities for over forty years, I moved here, to Connecticut, and I set up in this room in this 1840 federal-style house on this farmland with woods and ponds and fields and streams. And I’d be sitting here trying to work on some of my music—my music is very electronic—and I’d be looking out the window at these beautiful trees and whatnot and just feeling absolutely nothing. No inspiration at all. And I was, like, this fucking sucks. I was just like, you know, give me a city any day. Really, the natural setting didn’t have any impact until I got into fly fishing on the saltwater, fly fishing on the streams, taking hikes in the woods. It was water that really inspired me. Fly fishing, standing in the middle of this river for seven hours in waders, up to my chest and just feeling the current on me and noticing the different rhythms that are happening in the water. I was inspired by these hikes in the woods and hikes along the shoreline and fishing in the saltwater and the freshwater.
RM: You grew up near where you are now, right?
KC: I was in this house, from the age of 13 until 18. And before that, I was here, but downtown, in Guilford. The same situation, farmland. You know, we had sheep and chickens. I bought my first electric guitar selling chicken eggs. Before that, I was in New Haven. We moved nine different times with by the time I was thirteen, including to England. My father was at researching at Cambridge. From 18, I was away and mostly in New York City and in Berlin. When I was first in New York City I think it just overwhelmed me. I mean, it really took a long time to become a city person. Now it’s taking a long time to become a country person again. I don’t consider myself a country person, really. So, I guess I don’t know if there’s an intentional focus on “The Sound” being natural. It sort of comes through osmosis. But I guess the closest I would say is it’s the rhythms in the water that have had the greatest effect on me. And you could probably even hear that in in some of the other stuff I’ve done.
RM: The title of this album, “The Sound,” is about music and audio, the aural register, but it also alludes to the Long Island Sound. Do you want both resonances?
KC: When I was a kid in England what was inspiring was the first time I heard the music of The Beatles. This was, like, 1963, I think. I was completely mesmerized by the sound. The sound blew my mind. Nothing else sounded like that. I didn’t know what it was. I was just really excited. I was just jumping up and down the bed. And then as it progressed, my interest in music, Hendrix came along. And it wasn’t so much his playing that just mesmerized me, it was the sounds he was creating. Even in the studio with the tapes slowed down and backed up and all that stuff. That’s what caught my ear. By that time I was living downtown here, in Connecticut. And I sold these chicken eggs to get a very first electric guitar, which was a Mustang. And my dad and I had an old Bogan PA head that he used for a stereo. For some reason, there was a 15-inch speaker that he’d rigged up. And I was living in the attic, and I just would sit there and just wail on the Mustang with feedback for hours—with the whammy bar. That was me practicing at that age. We’d built a shortwave radio and I rigged it up so I could play it through a wah pedal and switch the channels. That’s been my whole approach to the guitar in many ways.
I moved to Berlin in 2012, basically, to reinvent myself. By that point, I’d sort of finished a long haul of playing with these legacy acts. And I felt that I wanted to get back to what I want was doing way back when, in college, for instance. I wanted to get more experimental and, so that’s when I sold all my gear and went deep into using iPads. They were just coming out with class compliant mode, which means you can rig them up to an interface. You’re using the audio drivers in the interface rather than the Mac drivers. And I started fooling around with that and fooling around with Ableton Live, and I created this musical building block that I call a sound ribbon, which is basically a continually unfolding soundscape. There’s this this rule I have where I don’t use any preexisting audio. Every time I do one of these pieces or when I play it live, I’m creating it all in real time. I started doing shows with this rig and part of it was, I originally called it “Sound Ribbons Tone Poems.” What I do is I find a little melody, like, a tonal melody, that I deconstruct within these sound ribbons. That’s what I have really focused on. It took me two years doing this, and I was just exploring all these different apps and plugins and everything just to try to get the sounds I was hearing in my head. Spent a lot of money on apps I didn’t even use! It was a real research project. And then I started doing shows, and then I then I was able to bring the ribbons to these other, platforms, genres, like singer-songwriters, free jazz, dance music. Then I moved back here, and now I’m getting deeper into this whole sound ribbon thing. It’s how I start with any kind of piece of music. I start with the sound ribbon, and then I’ll add to it and manipulate it.
Originally, at this point, I was going to release a different record, called Sea of Stars, that I recorded in Berlin. It’s all mixed and mastered. I was thinking of putting that out, but then a friend of mine, Sue Jacobs, told me should start doing art around this work. Around these pieces of music. And so I started pulling in paintings and drawings and sketches. Somehow I was connecting to doing it. I was finding this other impulse, and it was being inspired by the same set of concerns. Bascially, I was seeing and hearing this natural environment that I’m in. Then I put Sea of Stars on the back burner. I was trying to think about this what I call this record, this collection of pieces of music and art and writings. And I’d taken a trip to the Cape, and painting and drawing, and so on, and while I was there I had to give some hotel people, my license plate, you know, for parking. I went out and I took a picture of the license plate. And on the license plate, it said: “The Sound.” I looked at the license plate and I thought, Well, I’ve got the album cover. That’s how it all happened.
RM: Is any of the material through composed at all? Do you ever pick up a guitar and say, I’m going to walk up from the root note to the five? Or does the technological system cause the outcomes?
KC: The latter. Whenever I sit down it’s same process every time. I bumped into Bobby Previte not long ago at a Hal Wilner tribute show in New York, and I’d done some stuff with him in the past, and he’s, like, Are you back in in the States? We gotta do something! In that particular case, I send him sound ribbons and plays to them. And then I take the tracks and edit. When I’m by myself doing this record, it’s a lot of sound ribbons. It has to be on the spot. Do I think about chord changes or any of that? Absolutely not. Once I start doing that, I get I get trapped. So it’s kind of an improvisation. Even though I will think about, like, oh, what if I take this progression and I put it through this step sequencer. What would that sound like? More questions than really knowing. It’s all through experimentation. And then I’ll spend hours listening to them. And because, of course, you know, if I can sit through and listen to this sound ribbon over and over and over again and still like it, then it’s something to work with. It’s all about being in the moment. On some level, when this process is working well, I’m not thinking about it. And honestly, when it’s good, I don’t think it’s me. I don’t think I have any role in it. I just feel like I am just channeling it, you know what I mean? Because some of the stuff I listened to, I am, like, How the fuck did I do that? I kind of look at the electronical part of it as these different frequencies. It’s like picking things out of the electric side of the atmosphere. Every everything has some sort of electricity to it. And, then it forms into a piece of music.
That piece you said you like the best, “Mars on the Half Moon Rising,” that melody, there was a sound river going and I sat down and wrote that melody. You know, it’s in the booklet. You can see the melody in the book. But, yeah, that all came from a natural sound. I live on a pond and there’s a wraparound porch in the back of the house. And in the spring and summer, we have this amazing volume of frogs in there, from bullfrogs to peepers to tree frogs. I went out there and did a field recording of it. Then I did a little sound ribbon thing underneath it. Then I sat down with an acoustic guitar and just, you know, over a couple days wrote the melody. I mean, it’s a very simple melody. I wanted to keep it simple. And it’s somehow the inspiration was through my friend Mars Williams passing away. He was a sax player, in the Psychedelic Furs, but he was also big on the free jazz scene. And, every winter, I used to do a tour of Europe with him, doing the Mars Williams Albert Ayler Christmas. He passed away a little over a year ago, from liver failure and cancer. He was very much present in writing that melody.
RM: There’s another track that’s got a bass hook on it. A really beautiful acoustic bass part, right? And did you write the ribbons first and then sort of decide you wanted to have the bass part underneath?
KC: Yeah. And then I have a lot of hand percussion around here I use. It often starts with the rhythms, you know? Every everything except for except for “Mars,” which started with frogs. It’s the rhythm of the spine. And then there’s a song “Branch” on there, which is, an homage to Jamie Branch, who was a trumpet player. She played on the Albert Ayler shows we did. She passed away a couple years ago.
RM: I knew her too. She sat in with a band I was in briefly.
KC: Oh, she was a sweetheart. So cool. Just the coolest person. Yeah. I spent a lot of time talking on the phone over the past over the couple years before she passed away. And I saw her she did her show in Berlin right before I left, and I have to say it’s probably one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. She was just absolutely phenomenal.
RM: Let’s talk about the art that goes with The Sound a little bit. Did you have any training in visual arts?
KC: I’m embarrassed to say so, but yes! When was that? Well, my mother’s an artist, and so there were times when she’d get these other artists from out of town coming in, and they would do workshops. And I think I took one or two of those, and then I studied art in high school. Then when I went to college, at I was a double major until my senior year. But then for my senior project I had to decide on whether to do it in art or music. I did it in music because that was more my passion. But the way they went about the visual arts there, I had such a I had such an immature and negative reaction to it that I was, like, I was, like, fuck you. Fuck me. I’m never gonna do art again. Come on. Pissing vinegar, at 20 years old or something. But then I always fooled around with it. When I was first in New York City, there was no place for me to really do any art. Plus, I was so busy doing music and being a being a dad. There was no space or time. It wasn’t until I moved to Berlin that I actually got a space where I could do art. So I did a lot of painting and drawing in Berlin. And then I came back here, and there’s an art studio. My mom’s got this art studio that she’s not even using. And I decided, well, I’d like to try some different try different mediums. You know? And so I started experimenting with gouache and alcohol ink, and I kinda went down that rabbit hole a bit.
RM: What’s the technique? Is it like the music?
KC: What I like about the sound ribbons is that whatever you put into it, you have no idea what’s going happen. There’s a lot of chance involved, a lot of chance, and the trick is from there, try to try to, massage it, mold it into some kind of music composition, whatever you want to call it. Same thing is true with these inks. When they mix, they do different things. It’s a lot of experiment. It could be just one shade or something completely different. So it’s hours of just manipulating this. And then, of course, a lot of these things I just would chuck away until I found the one that actually spoke to me. I sort of dabble with this work just a little bit, to get to the point where it’s where I feel it’s done. Also, I do visual stuff when I do my shows, and I’ll send you a clip of it. I’m working with an iPad that controls video clips. And you can mix these video clips together and process each clip and process the whole image. And I have that hooked up to a beam where that projects onto me. And so it’s the same thing. It could be a clip of the flowers, a clip of the water, and I can distort it and process it, whatnot. Every time I mix them together, it’s going to do something different. It’s how do I manipulate that the same way I’m manipulating the sound. You know, these shows that I do, they’re very they’re very exhausting. I mean, I love doing it because they’re really challenging because it’s a lot of it’s about, like, troubleshooting, on the spot. But it’s so rewarding. I mean, to me, it’s just I’m in that world where I’m trying to juggle and hold on to things that are just not in my control. I can’t go in there into doing a show or piece of music thinking that I know what’s doing and what the outcome’s going to be. I have a rough idea. You know? I know what it sounds like when it’s working, you know, when something is speaking to me. That’s what I always try to get to a place where something speaks to me, and I also feel, for me, it’s really important that I’m able to get lost in it. I’m manipulating, but I’m not thinking.
RM: So the visual pieces then are procedurally similar to the musical work flow?
KC: Yeah. Very similar.
RM: How about the texts then? How do they function?
KC: It’s a little intimidating, you know, to show you my text. But it’s just what comes out. It’s all written during the same period where I would just get ideas and at the same thing, it’s like, you know, if you if you heard the original sound ribbon for some of those pieces, you would you would probably go, oh, yeah. That’s what the text is. Because if I sat there and then took the basis of that text and actually worked it out and developed it, it might actually become something good. But it’s just, you know, the feeling is what’s happening at that moment, at that time, and that’s basically it.
RM: My original analysis of the whole project was that, in a way, it’s a transcendentalist project. It’s an ecstatic response to your natural surroundings. That was what I originally thought about the album. But the way you’re talking about it is so much more about, sort of releasing each medium to express itself where it doesn’t really need Knox Chandler in a way. Knox Chandler is just the node. You know? However, the text is the one spot in the project where it feels expressive in this, you know, much more traditional, you know, transcendentalist, or romantic. I mean, romantic in the old sense, the 19th century sense, art making where there’s a you, there’s an I, a narrator trying to express this thing about, the natural world and its meanings. The text for me seems different from the visual material and the music, it’s really expressivist, and yet the way you’re talking about it now, I’m thinking maybe the language is freeing itself from this need to express, and maybe it’s just language.
KC: It all does come from this this inspirational place of nature, for sure. Absolutely. I carry around this book with me. It’s a little book. I go for a lot of hikes. And I might hike into the woods, and then and then I will sit down, and I will just write, you know, just streaming from being in the nature. And it might have nothing to do with the actual nature. And when I’m playing the sound ribbons, right, obviously, there’s some part on the guitar where I’m trying to manipulate different harmonies, which I’m aware of, and experimenting with different little melodies in there. You know, that’s what’s going on even though I’m trying not to think too much about it, and sometimes there actually is a written-out melody. The writing is almost like, you know, I’m just trying to put together the letters into words, you know, little pieces of writing. That’s not different from the actual ingredients of what a melody or a chord progression would be. It’s what comes to me. The thing about the writing is that I don’t write as much, and some of these writings came out of a much bigger book like this where I’m actually doing artwork too. I can’t cut a lot of these pages out because I’ll do a piece of artwork and I’ll just write in a moment. But the thing is I don’t sit and then try to massage it and try to do anything to it or edit it. Maybe a little bit editing, but it’s been very much, because writing is a thing I do the least. And I felt like it was, I felt like I wanted it to just to put it out there as being as raw and vulnerable as possible. I’m not concerned about people judging me. You know? It’s just who I am. And the whole point of this project is I consider it a musical memoir of the past couple of years. You know? So, yeah, so there were things in my artwork and things in my writing and are things in my music, which are flawed. You know? But they all came from me.
RM: Here’s an adjacent thought. I also can’t help but listen to the piece in a way as refractive of the significant emotional hardship of doing caregiving work. Do you feel like that’s in the project?
KC: That’s a really good question. I would say this has been the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. My mother is in a residential facility now. But I was living with her for two years. That’s a lot of time spent caretaking. So I might find, like, an hour or two hours a day to be able to do some work under those circumstances. But then she’d go to bed at night, and then that’s when I’d work. From 9 P.M. on, I worked until the wee hours or whatever. It’s, you know, it was a very tough relationship with my mom. And now she’s now 90. And I still I still have to take care of a lot of things. I actually have to take her to the get an ultrasound tomorrow. I can’t really deny the dynamic with her. There is there is a dark cloud there for me. Absolutely. It’s very emotional. And that’s why I think, you know, I think as a child, the reason I got involved in music, especially listening to it before I was playing anything. I really dove deep into music as an escape. I mean, that was my escape from the family life. And, in so many ways that’s what has been happening here too. I was really I was really hungry for inspiration in this setting. So when I actually felt I found it, I really escaped into it. At the same time, I got back into therapy and started doing a lot of EMDR work. And that has been very helpful. And I have a personal spiritual practice, which I try to do every day. And as hard as it’s been doing this, being with my mom, it’s been a gift. I’ve been able to experience it, work through it, and some of that was done within the music for sure. More in the music than the art or but it it’s in some of the writing for sure. Everything that happens to me is part of the growth process. You know? And, I mean, if you were to ask me two years ago how I felt, I’d be, like, this is a this is a horror show. But now I know that it was happening for a reason, and it was something I had to go through. And I look back on it as a very positive experience. You know, plus it’s your mom. It’s reconnecting to a lot of stuff. A lot of stuff I didn’t understand when I moved back here. I’ve learned a lot. I’ve seen a lot. And during that past, you know, what, forty years or so, I’ve dipped into, like, trying to do my own thing and doing shows and recordings and whatnot. And I moved to I moved to Berlin to do that. And then I got sidetracked with, you know, working with other people, which always happens. And then COVID hit. And that’s when I said, okay, I really just want to focus on doing my own music. I’m kind of listening to myself a little bit more rather than being swayed by offers to do things, and so I got a plan. Anyway, I don’t see myself dyeing my hair, losing thirty pounds and putting on skinny jeans and jumping up and down on stage. Not at my age!
RM: Your new album, “The Sound,” brings a lot of attention—without being at all reductive about it–to natural surroundings. People who know your work over many years, in postpunk and pop, might find that to be a bit of a new wrinkle or a new development. What accounts for this new attention, in the work, to images of nature?
KC: I moved out here to the shoreline of Connecticut, which is right on what they call the Sound, the Long Island Sound, about three years ago, to take care of my mother. Before that, I was living in Berlin in the center of Berlin, Germany, and New York City, Manhattan, and then Brooklyn. And I was just always getting inspired by going out in the street and hearing the noises on the street. The noises, the smells, the visual of it all, and that’s where I got my inspiration from, you know, mechanical sounds, hearing, like, in the East Village, a mix of different kinds of Latin music as well as hip hop. Back when I moved to New York City, it was a real melting pot, that neighborhood. You got all these different flavors and colors. After being in these major cities for over forty years, I moved here, to Connecticut, and I set up in this room in this 1840 federal-style house on this farmland with woods and ponds and fields and streams. And I’d be sitting here trying to work on some of my music—my music is very electronic—and I’d be looking out the window at these beautiful trees and whatnot and just feeling absolutely nothing. No inspiration at all. And I was, like, this fucking sucks. I was just like, you know, give me a city any day. Really, the natural setting didn’t have any impact until I got into fly fishing on the saltwater, fly fishing on the streams, taking hikes in the woods. It was water that really inspired me. Fly fishing, standing in the middle of this river for seven hours in waders, up to my chest and just feeling the current on me and noticing the different rhythms that are happening in the water. I was inspired by these hikes in the woods and hikes along the shoreline and fishing in the saltwater and the freshwater.
RM: You grew up near where you are now, right?
KC: I was in this house, from the age of 13 until 18. And before that, I was here, but downtown, in Guilford. The same situation, farmland. You know, we had sheep and chickens. I bought my first electric guitar selling chicken eggs. Before that, I was in New Haven. We moved nine different times with by the time I was thirteen, including to England. My father was at researching at Cambridge. From 18, I was away and mostly in New York City and in Berlin. When I was first in New York City I think it just overwhelmed me. I mean, it really took a long time to become a city person. Now it’s taking a long time to become a country person again. I don’t consider myself a country person, really. So, I guess I don’t know if there’s an intentional focus on “The Sound” being natural. It sort of comes through osmosis. But I guess the closest I would say is it’s the rhythms in the water that have had the greatest effect on me. And you could probably even hear that in in some of the other stuff I’ve done.
RM: The title of this album, “The Sound,” is about music and audio, the aural register, but it also alludes to the Long Island Sound. Do you want both resonances?
KC: When I was a kid in England what was inspiring was the first time I heard the music of The Beatles. This was, like, 1963, I think. I was completely mesmerized by the sound. The sound blew my mind. Nothing else sounded like that. I didn’t know what it was. I was just really excited. I was just jumping up and down the bed. And then as it progressed, my interest in music, Hendrix came along. And it wasn’t so much his playing that just mesmerized me, it was the sounds he was creating. Even in the studio with the tapes slowed down and backed up and all that stuff. That’s what caught my ear. By that time I was living downtown here, in Connecticut. And I sold these chicken eggs to get a very first electric guitar, which was a Mustang. And my dad and I had an old Bogan PA head that he used for a stereo. For some reason, there was a 15-inch speaker that he’d rigged up. And I was living in the attic, and I just would sit there and just wail on the Mustang with feedback for hours—with the whammy bar. That was me practicing at that age. We’d built a shortwave radio and I rigged it up so I could play it through a wah pedal and switch the channels. That’s been my whole approach to the guitar in many ways.
I moved to Berlin in 2012, basically, to reinvent myself. By that point, I’d sort of finished a long haul of playing with these legacy acts. And I felt that I wanted to get back to what I want was doing way back when, in college, for instance. I wanted to get more experimental and, so that’s when I sold all my gear and went deep into using iPads. They were just coming out with class compliant mode, which means you can rig them up to an interface. You’re using the audio drivers in the interface rather than the Mac drivers. And I started fooling around with that and fooling around with Ableton Live, and I created this musical building block that I call a sound ribbon, which is basically a continually unfolding soundscape. There’s this this rule I have where I don’t use any preexisting audio. Every time I do one of these pieces or when I play it live, I’m creating it all in real time. I started doing shows with this rig and part of it was, I originally called it “Sound Ribbons Tone Poems.” What I do is I find a little melody, like, a tonal melody, that I deconstruct within these sound ribbons. That’s what I have really focused on. It took me two years doing this, and I was just exploring all these different apps and plugins and everything just to try to get the sounds I was hearing in my head. Spent a lot of money on apps I didn’t even use! It was a real research project. And then I started doing shows, and then I then I was able to bring the ribbons to these other, platforms, genres, like singer-songwriters, free jazz, dance music. Then I moved back here, and now I’m getting deeper into this whole sound ribbon thing. It’s how I start with any kind of piece of music. I start with the sound ribbon, and then I’ll add to it and manipulate it.
Originally, at this point, I was going to release a different record, called Sea of Stars, that I recorded in Berlin. It’s all mixed and mastered. I was thinking of putting that out, but then a friend of mine, Sue Jacobs, told me should start doing art around this work. Around these pieces of music. And so I started pulling in paintings and drawings and sketches. Somehow I was connecting to doing it. I was finding this other impulse, and it was being inspired by the same set of concerns. Bascially, I was seeing and hearing this natural environment that I’m in. Then I put Sea of Stars on the back burner. I was trying to think about this what I call this record, this collection of pieces of music and art and writings. And I’d taken a trip to the Cape, and painting and drawing, and so on, and while I was there I had to give some hotel people, my license plate, you know, for parking. I went out and I took a picture of the license plate. And on the license plate, it said: “The Sound.” I looked at the license plate and I thought, Well, I’ve got the album cover. That’s how it all happened.
RM: Is any of the material through composed at all? Do you ever pick up a guitar and say, I’m going to walk up from the root note to the five? Or does the technological system cause the outcomes?
KC: The latter. Whenever I sit down it’s same process every time. I bumped into Bobby Previte not long ago at a Hal Wilner tribute show in New York, and I’d done some stuff with him in the past, and he’s, like, Are you back in in the States? We gotta do something! In that particular case, I send him sound ribbons and plays to them. And then I take the tracks and edit. When I’m by myself doing this record, it’s a lot of sound ribbons. It has to be on the spot. Do I think about chord changes or any of that? Absolutely not. Once I start doing that, I get I get trapped. So it’s kind of an improvisation. Even though I will think about, like, oh, what if I take this progression and I put it through this step sequencer. What would that sound like? More questions than really knowing. It’s all through experimentation. And then I’ll spend hours listening to them. And because, of course, you know, if I can sit through and listen to this sound ribbon over and over and over again and still like it, then it’s something to work with. It’s all about being in the moment. On some level, when this process is working well, I’m not thinking about it. And honestly, when it’s good, I don’t think it’s me. I don’t think I have any role in it. I just feel like I am just channeling it, you know what I mean? Because some of the stuff I listened to, I am, like, How the fuck did I do that? I kind of look at the electronical part of it as these different frequencies. It’s like picking things out of the electric side of the atmosphere. Every everything has some sort of electricity to it. And, then it forms into a piece of music.
That piece you said you like the best, “Mars on the Half Moon Rising,” that melody, there was a sound river going and I sat down and wrote that melody. You know, it’s in the booklet. You can see the melody in the book. But, yeah, that all came from a natural sound. I live on a pond and there’s a wraparound porch in the back of the house. And in the spring and summer, we have this amazing volume of frogs in there, from bullfrogs to peepers to tree frogs. I went out there and did a field recording of it. Then I did a little sound ribbon thing underneath it. Then I sat down with an acoustic guitar and just, you know, over a couple days wrote the melody. I mean, it’s a very simple melody. I wanted to keep it simple. And it’s somehow the inspiration was through my friend Mars Williams passing away. He was a sax player, in the Psychedelic Furs, but he was also big on the free jazz scene. And, every winter, I used to do a tour of Europe with him, doing the Mars Williams Albert Ayler Christmas. He passed away a little over a year ago, from liver failure and cancer. He was very much present in writing that melody.
RM: There’s another track that’s got a bass hook on it. A really beautiful acoustic bass part, right? And did you write the ribbons first and then sort of decide you wanted to have the bass part underneath?
KC: Yeah. And then I have a lot of hand percussion around here I use. It often starts with the rhythms, you know? Every everything except for except for “Mars,” which started with frogs. It’s the rhythm of the spine. And then there’s a song “Branch” on there, which is, an homage to Jamie Branch, who was a trumpet player. She played on the Albert Ayler shows we did. She passed away a couple years ago.
RM: I knew her too. She sat in with a band I was in briefly.
KC: Oh, she was a sweetheart. So cool. Just the coolest person. Yeah. I spent a lot of time talking on the phone over the past over the couple years before she passed away. And I saw her she did her show in Berlin right before I left, and I have to say it’s probably one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. She was just absolutely phenomenal.
RM: Let’s talk about the art that goes with The Sound a little bit. Did you have any training in visual arts?
KC: I’m embarrassed to say so, but yes! When was that? Well, my mother’s an artist, and so there were times when she’d get these other artists from out of town coming in, and they would do workshops. And I think I took one or two of those, and then I studied art in high school. Then when I went to college, at I was a double major until my senior year. But then for my senior project I had to decide on whether to do it in art or music. I did it in music because that was more my passion. But the way they went about the visual arts there, I had such a I had such an immature and negative reaction to it that I was, like, I was, like, fuck you. Fuck me. I’m never gonna do art again. Come on. Pissing vinegar, at 20 years old or something. But then I always fooled around with it. When I was first in New York City, there was no place for me to really do any art. Plus, I was so busy doing music and being a being a dad. There was no space or time. It wasn’t until I moved to Berlin that I actually got a space where I could do art. So I did a lot of painting and drawing in Berlin. And then I came back here, and there’s an art studio. My mom’s got this art studio that she’s not even using. And I decided, well, I’d like to try some different try different mediums. You know? And so I started experimenting with gouache and alcohol ink, and I kinda went down that rabbit hole a bit.
RM: What’s the technique? Is it like the music?
KC: What I like about the sound ribbons is that whatever you put into it, you have no idea what’s going happen. There’s a lot of chance involved, a lot of chance, and the trick is from there, try to try to, massage it, mold it into some kind of music composition, whatever you want to call it. Same thing is true with these inks. When they mix, they do different things. It’s a lot of experiment. It could be just one shade or something completely different. So it’s hours of just manipulating this. And then, of course, a lot of these things I just would chuck away until I found the one that actually spoke to me. I sort of dabble with this work just a little bit, to get to the point where it’s where I feel it’s done. Also, I do visual stuff when I do my shows, and I’ll send you a clip of it. I’m working with an iPad that controls video clips. And you can mix these video clips together and process each clip and process the whole image. And I have that hooked up to a beam where that projects onto me. And so it’s the same thing. It could be a clip of the flowers, a clip of the water, and I can distort it and process it, whatnot. Every time I mix them together, it’s going to do something different. It’s how do I manipulate that the same way I’m manipulating the sound. You know, these shows that I do, they’re very they’re very exhausting. I mean, I love doing it because they’re really challenging because it’s a lot of it’s about, like, troubleshooting, on the spot. But it’s so rewarding. I mean, to me, it’s just I’m in that world where I’m trying to juggle and hold on to things that are just not in my control. I can’t go in there into doing a show or piece of music thinking that I know what’s doing and what the outcome’s going to be. I have a rough idea. You know? I know what it sounds like when it’s working, you know, when something is speaking to me. That’s what I always try to get to a place where something speaks to me, and I also feel, for me, it’s really important that I’m able to get lost in it. I’m manipulating, but I’m not thinking.
RM: So the visual pieces then are procedurally similar to the musical work flow?
KC: Yeah. Very similar.
RM: How about the texts then? How do they function?
KC: It’s a little intimidating, you know, to show you my text. But it’s just what comes out. It’s all written during the same period where I would just get ideas and at the same thing, it’s like, you know, if you if you heard the original sound ribbon for some of those pieces, you would you would probably go, oh, yeah. That’s what the text is. Because if I sat there and then took the basis of that text and actually worked it out and developed it, it might actually become something good. But it’s just, you know, the feeling is what’s happening at that moment, at that time, and that’s basically it.
RM: My original analysis of the whole project was that, in a way, it’s a transcendentalist project. It’s an ecstatic response to your natural surroundings. That was what I originally thought about the album. But the way you’re talking about it is so much more about, sort of releasing each medium to express itself where it doesn’t really need Knox Chandler in a way. Knox Chandler is just the node. You know? However, the text is the one spot in the project where it feels expressive in this, you know, much more traditional, you know, transcendentalist, or romantic. I mean, romantic in the old sense, the 19th century sense, art making where there’s a you, there’s an I, a narrator trying to express this thing about, the natural world and its meanings. The text for me seems different from the visual material and the music, it’s really expressivist, and yet the way you’re talking about it now, I’m thinking maybe the language is freeing itself from this need to express, and maybe it’s just language.
KC: It all does come from this this inspirational place of nature, for sure. Absolutely. I carry around this book with me. It’s a little book. I go for a lot of hikes. And I might hike into the woods, and then and then I will sit down, and I will just write, you know, just streaming from being in the nature. And it might have nothing to do with the actual nature. And when I’m playing the sound ribbons, right, obviously, there’s some part on the guitar where I’m trying to manipulate different harmonies, which I’m aware of, and experimenting with different little melodies in there. You know, that’s what’s going on even though I’m trying not to think too much about it, and sometimes there actually is a written-out melody. The writing is almost like, you know, I’m just trying to put together the letters into words, you know, little pieces of writing. That’s not different from the actual ingredients of what a melody or a chord progression would be. It’s what comes to me. The thing about the writing is that I don’t write as much, and some of these writings came out of a much bigger book like this where I’m actually doing artwork too. I can’t cut a lot of these pages out because I’ll do a piece of artwork and I’ll just write in a moment. But the thing is I don’t sit and then try to massage it and try to do anything to it or edit it. Maybe a little bit editing, but it’s been very much, because writing is a thing I do the least. And I felt like it was, I felt like I wanted it to just to put it out there as being as raw and vulnerable as possible. I’m not concerned about people judging me. You know? It’s just who I am. And the whole point of this project is I consider it a musical memoir of the past couple of years. You know? So, yeah, so there were things in my artwork and things in my writing and are things in my music, which are flawed. You know? But they all came from me.
RM: Here’s an adjacent thought. I also can’t help but listen to the piece in a way as refractive of the significant emotional hardship of doing caregiving work. Do you feel like that’s in the project?
KC: That’s a really good question. I would say this has been the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. My mother is in a residential facility now. But I was living with her for two years. That’s a lot of time spent caretaking. So I might find, like, an hour or two hours a day to be able to do some work under those circumstances. But then she’d go to bed at night, and then that’s when I’d work. From 9 P.M. on, I worked until the wee hours or whatever. It’s, you know, it was a very tough relationship with my mom. And now she’s now 90. And I still I still have to take care of a lot of things. I actually have to take her to the get an ultrasound tomorrow. I can’t really deny the dynamic with her. There is there is a dark cloud there for me. Absolutely. It’s very emotional. And that’s why I think, you know, I think as a child, the reason I got involved in music, especially listening to it before I was playing anything. I really dove deep into music as an escape. I mean, that was my escape from the family life. And, in so many ways that’s what has been happening here too. I was really I was really hungry for inspiration in this setting. So when I actually felt I found it, I really escaped into it. At the same time, I got back into therapy and started doing a lot of EMDR work. And that has been very helpful. And I have a personal spiritual practice, which I try to do every day. And as hard as it’s been doing this, being with my mom, it’s been a gift. I’ve been able to experience it, work through it, and some of that was done within the music for sure. More in the music than the art or but it it’s in some of the writing for sure. Everything that happens to me is part of the growth process. You know? And, I mean, if you were to ask me two years ago how I felt, I’d be, like, this is a this is a horror show. But now I know that it was happening for a reason, and it was something I had to go through. And I look back on it as a very positive experience. You know, plus it’s your mom. It’s reconnecting to a lot of stuff. A lot of stuff I didn’t understand when I moved back here. I’ve learned a lot. I’ve seen a lot. And during that past, you know, what, forty years or so, I’ve dipped into, like, trying to do my own thing and doing shows and recordings and whatnot. And I moved to I moved to Berlin to do that. And then I got sidetracked with, you know, working with other people, which always happens. And then COVID hit. And that’s when I said, okay, I really just want to focus on doing my own music. I’m kind of listening to myself a little bit more rather than being swayed by offers to do things, and so I got a plan. Anyway, I don’t see myself dyeing my hair, losing thirty pounds and putting on skinny jeans and jumping up and down on stage. Not at my age!
