Test post with pic from my iphone
Let’s see if a picture gets resized.
On sensation and elation
This site is, for the most part, a drug-and-booze-free zone. It is also a guru-free zone. Knox grew up in the sixties, a fourth-generation West Coast lad, and came of age in the seventies.
He partook freely in the pursuit of sensation and elation through much of those decades and beyond and has, unfortunately, seen far too many of those closest to him fall into the abyss, too often with fatal consequences. Suicides, overdoses, car crashes, all manners of drug and booze related death has Knox witnessed close at hand. Knox himself has been booze and drug free for seventeen years.
For those of you who still buy into the romantic notion that creativity comes from drugs and/or booze, Knox suggests you listen to the Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow, one of the most musical and sexy and romantic (manifesting the naive and wonderful optimism that was once so identified with the West Coast) albums to come out of the golden era of pop music, and then listen to their Bless Its Pointed Little Head album, a cocaine-and-booze-fueled barrage of live drivel from three years later. If that doesn’t demonstrate the fallacy of drugs/booze=creativity and musicality, write Knox and he’ll send you some more examples.
But be assured that Knox is not anti-drug. Knox is, however, pro-sobriety. Knox has no problem with earth-people getting drunk or high or whatever it is they do on occasion.
Knox is not preaching: please feel free to use any of the drugs he somehow missed in the old days, as well as any booze he failed to drink.
Put on some music! Have a glass of wine.
Pop Down The Years video (acoustic)
This is the title song to my first cd. The cd version had an orchestral arrangement, my tribute to the Beatles and George Martin. The song is a love song to the music of that era, and to a girl of course. I happen to like this acoustic version I recorded in my living room one night. Video is found footage. You will recognize some of it.
First review of “the seasons” – 5 stars
Mark Tucker
Fame Magazine
I reviewed Knox Bronson’s Pop Down the Years a little while back (here) and Seasons has followed with gratifying swiftness but also with an almost shockingly rapid maturation. Completely instrumental in a slow languid pace that urges the listener to relax and luxuriate, where Pop was quirky, interesting, and prog-oriented, Seasons is chambery in the Impressionist sense with tantalizing echoes of Eno (Summer of ‘68 uses the intriguing slow hooning of Discreet Music), Peter Baumann (ca Transharmonic Nights), Peter Michael Hamel, a tranked-out Terry Riley, and the more sensual of the electronicists.
The disc contains just four long songs for an hour’s submersion in
intelligent, slow, spare processionals and ambiences. Michael Hoenig
peeks out occasionally from Autumnal Sun, though the estimable German
never wrote like Bronson does, slowly shifting in sound fields,
coloration, and environmental palette. The attention to perfection here
is bracing, resulting in a piece of spacey furniture music, high art
wanting for nothing, content to take its time in seeping through the
speakers and into cerebellums. Mix the hedonism of the Ibiza crowd with
the seriousness of old Brit/Kraut ventures, then add a sprinkling of
the silently uncanny ideas of Vidna Obmana, and you have a starting
point.
Despite the fact that the quartet of songs was composed during a
dark period in the writer’s life, every minute of Seasons sparkles.
Even the moody segments have a shine and glow lifting them above the
melancholy, indicative of the redemption art brings. The entire
enterprise is pensive but never existentialist, remarkably zen in many
ways, unattached to judgementalism, formula, and tradition. A goodly
portion of the entirety is Debussy-esque, borrowing heavily from tone
poem concepts for heady textures and gestures nailing down authenticity
in genteel certainties alongside intriguing ambiguity. Pore over the
progressive, electronica, and ambient catalogues as you will, you’re
not likely to find very many releases to stand with this one.
Oh my, we are live
I impulsively took down my old site. It was done in Joomla!, a content-management system quite popular in certain circles. I was bored with it … some flashy stuff … who cares?
I thought I would go completely minimal. Black and white, nice typographic layout. If you want color, visit my old site “Sun Pop Blue.”
One Man’s Opinion Of Moonlight
Pop Down The Years
