“The Sound” marks the solo debut of Knox Chandler, whose long career includes time with The Psychedelic Furs, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and the Cyndi Lauper band, as well as work with artists such as Natalie Merchant, Dave Gahan, and The Golden Palominos. After spending many years in Berlin, Chandler moved back to the U.S. and found himself immersed in nature around his mother’s house off the Long Island Sound. While he initially had difficulty connecting with it, that environment ultimately proved to be a major creative force behind the album.
Primarily a guitarist, Chandler has an organic, experimental style built around his ‘sound ribbon’ technique of creating music. It’s heavily reliant on creatively used technology — processing and manipulating the guitar and other instruments, as well as field recordings. Chandler also works with interactive visuals for his live shows and created an accompanying book for The Sound featuring paintings, photographs, sketches, and written meditations.
Over Zoom, Chandler talked about his work and the making of The Sound.
Having been involved with many different projects over the years, what made you decide to release a solo album at this point in time?
Knox Chandler: It really happened within the past three years. I moved from Berlin back to the States three years ago to take care of my mother, who is 90 now. She lives in this old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere in Connecticut, and it was just too much. I came to visit her after Covid and it was just, you can’t do this, and she wanted to stay in the house. So I was like, ‘okay, I’ll come back and I’ll take care of you. I’ll do that’. Well, during that time period, she decided she didn’t want to live in the house anymore. She wanted to live in this assisted living place, so a year ago I got her into there, but I’m still in the house.
And it came about primarily because I never really fully documented the sound ribbon stuff I was doing, even though I wouldn’t say this is a sound ribbons album. All the pieces came from sound ribbons. And during this record… there was a guy named Peter Freeman who passed away a couple of years ago. Really incredible musician, bass player. Worked a lot with Jon Hassell, Seal, and a lot of different people, and I considered him my technical mentor. He pushed me into using class-compliant iPads, and he was always the one who said, “You should do an album, a guitar album,” and that’s what this is. It’s a guitar album. There’s no synths on it. It’s all processed guitar, upright bass, percussion.
I’d made a few attempts at it, never really got deep into it. In the meantime, I did do a couple records in Berlin before I came over here, and I thought I would put those out. Instead, it was mostly through talking to friends and playing them stuff — they really thought I should get back… one in particular, Sue Jacobs, felt I should get back into doing more artwork to go with the music. And it took me a while to find this inspiration living here in the country. I was in major cities for 40 years — New York, a little bit in LA, and Berlin, Germany — and I was having a real hard time connecting to being in the country, even though I grew up here.
And slowly but surely, I got into hiking and fishing and all sorts of stuff. That is the inspiration for what the sound is.
Where I live is on the Sound, Long Island Sound, and at first I couldn’t connect. It was bizarre. And I started doing fly fishing and hiking and all sorts of stuff, and it just naturally flowed into what this record is. And as far as the artwork too, it is happening at the same time. My journal writing and my photography — all that stuff — it’s just sort of melded together completely naturally.
So everything represents your creative output after coming back to the States. Did any elements or ideas at all date back to your time in Berlin?
Knox Chandler: Well, there are hangovers of it. Sure, absolutely. “Hidden Hammock Pond” — the beginning of that is definitely a hangover; it’s a scenario including cars and traffic, to give the rest of the piece this contrast. I think it just happens naturally that I’m going to have that stuff with me. The whole album is electronic, even though I think the way I see it and the way I hear it and feel it, it’s mostly coming from a very natural place. And I think that’s sort of one of the parts of my liminal space — to be able to find these natural elements in nature and transcribe them to the electronic stuff.
The material on the album has a very organic, kind of spontaneous feel to it. I’m curious as to the creative process behind actually making the tracks. Is it a matter of experimenting and picking out what you think works? What goes into making an album track with this type of music?
Knox Chandler: A couple of different things. Mostly it’s that I’ll start with a sound ribbon, and I’m always recording these. Just to explain exactly what that is — it’s these soundscapes, and somehow “sound ribbon” sounds more like it could drift on forever, but they are composed in the spontaneous sense. The pieces all come very spontaneously because there’s no preexisting audio.
It’s all coming from one source — either a guitar. On this record, it was between an old 1930 National to a Les Paul, Telecasters, you name it, Gretsches — the usual source. But it also can come from a cello or bass, or sometimes I play this electric trumpet. But this one specifically came from guitar. And so I would create these sound ribbons, and then I would just listen to them. I listen to them quite a bit, and if it’s good, I can keep on listening and get deeper into it. And from there I get ideas and then I start piecing things together. It might lead me to another sound ribbon — some of these pieces have several ribbons deep inside them.
The track “Mars on a Half Moon Rising” came from what I call the symphony of frogs. I live right on a pond here and at night in the summer, it’s incredible. So I went out there and recorded it using a field recorder, about five or ten minutes of it, and I just came back and I just listened to it. I was just mesmerized by it. It was just unbelievable. It sounded fully composed to me. All this incredible stuff. And rhythms. It is great when you get rhythms that are very different — they sort of rub against each other — which is very much throughout the whole record at different points. So I just sat there and I listened to it. I listened to it, I listened to it. I was like, “Man, this is a piece on its own.” But I thought, “I’ll just do a sound ribbon with it.” So I started doing this sound ribbon with it. And then I just listened to that over and over again. I started hearing this melody, and it was after Mars Williams had passed away — who was a dear friend of mine and someone I also worked with — and somehow this melody just came through listening to the frogs in the sound ribbon. And so I charted it out and recorded it.
Could you talk about the tools you use, in terms of combining the traditional instruments with electronics and processing? How might that have evolved over the years?
Knox Chandler: Well, I moved to Berlin in 2012 from New York, and it was on the heels of just spending a lot of time working with Cyndi Lauper as well as Siouxsie and the Banshees and Dave Gahan’s Paper Monsters. It was about a good five to ten years, but in there, there was also all this other stuff. I was very busy working with other people and it was really great. I learned a lot. And then it ended. It came to a halt, and I started getting involved in some other things — some movie stuff — and I felt like I really needed to get back to what music meant to me in the beginning.
More so when I was getting ready to leave college, I was very much involved with 12-tone contemporary composition and improvisational experimentation, and I thought I was actually going to go to New York and become an upright bass player, doing more experimental music — and that didn’t happen. I always felt that that needed to be addressed.
Budgie, the drummer from the Banshees, was living in Berlin. He talked me into going and living with him and seeing if I liked it or not. Budgie and I had been doing some experimental stuff together. So I made the move and found, once I got there, it all sort of was like, “Oh, yes, I just really need to focus on what I’m going to do musically.”
At the same time, my friend Peter Freeman, who passed away a couple of years ago — I consider him my technical mentor. He was a guy I could play anything I was doing to, and he’d give me a hard, honest answer. I made an album back in 2005 that I didn’t put out, but he was very, very critical of it, and I changed the whole thing to the point where he said, “Yeah, you did it.” He was the guy I could always lean on for anything technical or to get an honest answer.
He was getting into using class-compliant iPads and actually developing an iPad app that’s now called Looperverse. It’s basically an app designed off of the Electrix Repeater. That was a box that I used, and David Torn used one also. He might still be using it. So I was beta testing that, using the class-compliant iPads, being that you’re using the audio drivers and the interfaces rather than the Mac drivers.
And he started turning me on to all this stuff I should try out. And I just spent two years exploring all these different apps and finding ones that work and speak to me — finding ones that work well together with other ones. And it was just endless hours of trying to find my voice in all this stuff, which I did. I started doing shows, started performing out with other people using it.
And during that time, Peter was really on my case about doing a guitar album. “You should do a guitar album.” So it wasn’t until I got back here where I was like, okay, I should do a guitar album, which would include a lot of the sound ribbon stuff I’m doing. And so that’s what it is — it’s just a guitar, upright bass, and percussion album.
Could you talk a bit about the visual side of the project, the book, and what went into that?
Knox Chandler: Well, along with when I’m performing sound ribbons, I’m also processing video. I have another iPad where I’ve taken a bunch of different video clips. Some of it’s animation, some of it’s stuff from nature or streets from the city or whatever. And in there I can process and mix these videos together in real time. So I’m doing that in real time, and I’m creating these sound ribbons in real time in there.
My fascination with the visuals sort of expanded a bit, I would say. And I got back into doing some painting in Berlin. Moving here, it all shifted. I was sitting here twiddling my thumbs, looking out the window — which I’m doing right now — and going, this is so damn pretty, but I’m not feeling a damn thing. I’m not inspired. There’s something seriously wrong with me. I’ve been away from nature for about 40-something years and I’m back and I’m not getting it.
And I took up fly fishing, got really deep into that. So I spent a lot of time standing in the middle of a river, and I went down and did saltwater fishing down on the Sound here, and a lot of hiking. And along with that came photographs. I started shooting a lot of photography as well as painting, sketching, journaling, writing about being in these different places — the experience, very abstractly.
All the writing, all the photographs, all the paintings, as well as the music, all happened — this transformation from the city to country life. And so it is basically a documentation of the past three years of this experience.
You mentioned returning to what you had initially seen yourself doing musically. How did you come to work with so many other artists? What led you in that direction, of being a collaborator and touring musician?
Knox Chandler: I thought I was going to be an upright bass player. When I got to New York, I got scooped up by a bunch of guys I knew to start recording, be a guitar player in this rock band. And that kind of went to another thing, to another thing, to working with Gary Windo. That led me to meeting the Psychedelic Furs, to eventually working with Richard on what was to be a solo album, which later became Book of Days. And then within there, Richard didn’t force me, but he really pushed me hard to start playing the cello. So I learned how to play the cello in that experience.
It just snowballed from one thing to the other, mostly being a guitarist. And I think the challenge for me, which I really liked, was each artist that I worked with in their own way was very different — not only personality-wise, but also musically. And the challenge was trying to be able to fit in, and sometimes I might really be on the periphery of the whole thing. Each one of them had a different shape, and I had to try to fit my part of it into that shape.
Have any stood out as either being particularly creatively fulfilling or particularly influential on the development of your overall career?
Knox Chandler: I mean, they all were sort of very equal. I have to say creatively fulfilling — there was a wonderful experience recording Anima Animus, the Creatures album, at Budgie’s place in France where we just had free will to do… we had different rooms set up with drum kits, and even the greenhouse had a drum kit in it. At one point, the drum kit was outside. I was experimenting a lot with some looping stuff and different sounds and whatnot.
And working on the Shine album with Cyndi Lauper — she was really into me doing whatever I wanted creatively. To Darden Smith, who was a singer-songwriter I recorded with in the nineties — there’s no reason we should ever be in the same room together except an A&R guy thought it was a good idea. And that was great. I got to really bring my voice to some music that I probably would never normally play.
I mean, every single experience has been that kind of thing where, on some level, I felt it was very profitable to where I am today. I’ve learned something. And again, you also start understanding how other people hear things too, which can quite often be very different than the way I hear things. I would say there’s not one thing that specifically stands out.
Could you talk about your new label, Blue Elastic?
Knox Chandler: I’ve always been fascinated with primary sources. I got kind of deep into it. I was the head of the guitar department at a college in Berlin, and they put me through to get another degree in education. In that process of researching and writing these papers and whatnot, I became very fascinated with primary sources — whatever I’m reading or listening to or watching, I try to go back as far as you can to the primary sources.
During that time, I was finding that a lot of the stuff that really influenced me was very blues-related. And then even through that, I started seeing the Native American influences on the blues. And so I got deep into that aspect of it and started studying some of that stuff.
So Blue Elastic is basically the idea of stretching the blues, and I consider this my blues album. It’s just what it is — where I came from and where my attention goes.
I do have a project with Eric Manus called Bursting Blue Bone Bark. The album’s done. We’ll probably put that on this label. I have another solo record called Sea of Stars that I’ll put out on this label. And then there are other projects that I’m working on at the moment. One’s with Rick Moody called Blues, No Blues, and the other one is a project with Cynthia Sley from the Bush Tetras.
The Sound can be purchased from knoxchandler.bandcamp.com/.
Be sure to aslo check out our 2014 interview with Knox Chandler.
