Working.
“Watercolor, gouache, a wee bit of colored pencil, and the added self-imposed challenge of not using any black.”
A percentage of the proceeds went to the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota (www.ilcm.org)
“Fragmented sounds of a medieval world are channeled through Cannell’s re-interpretion and improvisation on Cello, Violin, and her signature ‘Overbowed’ Violin playing.”
Recently received the new 2026 DRONE NOT DRONES t-shirt. According to their site: “ALL PROFITS [GO] TO MINNEAPOLIS legal/rent/resources MUTUAL AID orgs in response to the DHS armed occupation of our city.” That city being Minneapolis and surrounding area. Abolish ICE.
I’ve played at the 28-hour drone festival a couple times over the years. It’s an extraordinary occurrence featuring dozens of participants taking turns playing a small part of one unbroken performance across two days. Recordings of my own sets from 2014 and 2017 are available in THE ENDLESS COMPENDIUM.
The first time I heard about the album AUTECHRE GUITAR was also the first time I heard about its creator, Shane Parish. This was not a surprise considering I’m not exactly a “guitar guy,” much less a solo acoustic finger-picking style “guitar guy.” I am slightly more familiar with the work of Autechre, and the sheer audacity of the concept made me very excited to hear the result. Interpreting the duo’s challengingly slippery tones and chaotic machine music with nothing more than a single guitar and ten fingers made this my most anticipated album of the year.
In short: it’s mesmerizing. You certainly do not need to be familiar with the source material to quickly understand that Parish is not only a master of the instrument but also incredibly clever with the arrangement. Early copy for the album included the line “This record shouldn’t, strictly speaking, be possible at all.” That’s true, but it does, and we are better off for it.
Two notes:
I’m excited to announce that a new Dirty Knobs album is on the way, releasing this Halloween. SCORCHER is something of a return to the early days of DK, back when it was more of an experimental glitch project. While I often try to obfuscate the equipment and raw sounds used to make songs, here I am keeping more of those elements clear and obvious with a focus on percussion and rhythm while still encasing it in a dark shroud of mystery and darkness and dark mystery.
I will be adding more preview tracks over the following weeks up until it releases on October 31st, so keep your dial tuned to the album page.
I hope you enjoy SCORCHER. I’ve put a tremendous amount of effort into it and I am very happy with the result. It sounds really good played very loud in a big room.
Here is a look into what I was thinking about while recording it:
Darkened ratways under the city’s megastructure pulse with a rolling, undulating rhythm. A dry scraping sound tumbles down howling shafts, racing against the falling condensation and pigeon shit. Shafts of pure white light catch drifts of dirt, dandruff, and fleas. A sub-harmonic pressure silently shakes tons of metal conduit, flaking off rust and paint in an abrasive red mist. Moss and slime house busy ecologies, living and dying and living again without any sense of history.
Fast shadows move like boiling oil against a glacial mass of decaying support struts. Cracks open, firing shrapnel across miles of emptiness. Eyeless heads turn vaguely toward the sound.
The city groans under its own weight, shifting, listing, settling onto waves of its past. Superheated jets of grime spray against concrete walls, eroding strange and shifting glyphs into the surface. The story they record is one of endings and obsoletion.
The album art was inspired by the mosaic image here, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope looking back at the sun:
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