Stripping back the gentle folk of last year’s Solid Love, the New York guitarist writes drifting, mostly instrumental songs marked by a profound sense of interiority.
In the 1983 film Sans Soleil, Chris Marker’s experimental documentary travelogue, a narrator relays a letter from a companion looking to understand “the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining.” It feels counterintuitive: How can absence be lined? But the music of Dan Knishkowy’s Adeline Hotel project feels in tune with that idea. On the gentle folk songs of last year’s Solid Love, Knishkowy allowed his voice to sink into the mix, letting lyrics get lost in a tide of guitar and percussion. The effect was to de-emphasize whole images in the service of soft-focus fragments—a trick that feels true to the logic of memory, which only ever crystallizes partially.
Good Timing attempts something similar in a new context. There’s no band here, and almost no singing. These are delicate, tumbling guitar compositions without any fancy manipulation or production. And as Knishkowy strips things down, the music becomes more immediate: A song might build toward a chorus before rejecting it and moving on; melodies spin out of nowhere and settle back down. In their casually improvisational structure, these pieces flow like thoughts.
“Photographic Memory” opens with loose, circular playing that recalls wind and falling leaves; it keeps threatening to arrive at something more songful, but never quite does. “Relate to Joy” is similarly naturalistic, with a back half that’s among the most stunningly orchestrated passages on the album. Knishkowy relishes the give and take between order and chaos: moments of clarity set against a glittering, interstitial tangle.
Knishkowy settled on this solo approach last summer as an antidote to the constraints of an isolated year, and you can hear it in the music. Good Timing rejects the convention that every idea should play itself out, that phrases need to be fully developed before they’re put to rest. When you’re this planted in your own head, not everything needs to make sense.
The title of “Remembering Machines” seems to get at that, too, suggesting that even without lyrics, these songs offer a kind of oblique access to the past. “Blueberry Fingers” borrows its name from the lyrics of a song on Solid Love called “Trace,” and the way in which Knishkowy picks up the emotional thread wordlessly evokes how memories can recur in new forms.
The album’s peak is “Untangling,” which exists somewhere between a campfire and an avant-garde performance space. Bright, spindly textures nod to John Fahey and William Tyler, and right at the midpoint, a hint of conversation bleeds in from the background—the just-perceptible sound of people talking in the distance. It’s a rare moment of physical presence on an album that is otherwise profoundly solitary.
Knishkowy breaks that solitude one more time, on the title track, which contains the album’s only lyric. It’s a single line, repeated over the course of about a minute: “Good timing/When you’re lonely.” Shadowed by guitar and multi-tracked echoes, the words drift and blend together, slowly losing their shape. That energy—the feeling nothing is ever quite set in place—is at the heart of the album. It’s intrinsic to the free-associative thought processes Knishkowy maps out on guitar, and it’s part of why his music amounts to more than just cold etudes. Changeability is more than just a conceit; it’s what keeps these songs alive.
0 comments:
Post a Comment