With the machines, March 2009
Early Sunday morning pictures
Ellroy and me on his new book, “Blood’s A Rover”
More later from me.
My new guitar
A thing of beauty is a joy forever — John Keats
So it goes full circle and I am back where I began, with a simple and beautiful nylon-string, classical guitar.
I have forgotten the pleasure of holding and playing an exquisite instrument. Many years I spent making music with machines, some of which I truly loved (and still love), for some of them are quite quirky (my handmade Serge Modular for example), and computers, which I value for the power of creation: I can’t hire an orchestra, but I have one in my Mac Mini. And don’t get me wrong: I still love electronic music!
But we must go where the Muse takes us and it seems that my path, ever since the release of the very electronic and orchestral Pop Down The Years, has been back to my early days of learning songs, practicing for hours, with just one lovely guitar.
This one is certainly the nicest guitar I’ve ever owned. I have adorned her with LaBella Argento Silver strings, very expensive jewelry, and they shimmer and sing!
Okay, enough time at the computer. I must play. We are getting acquainted, she and I. And like a great woman, she only gets better with the passage of time.
Interview with Live, Love, Health Talk Radio
On Friday, August 31, a short interview with yours truly aired on the Life, Love, and Health show, part of the Health Radio Network. Christopher Springmann, the interviewer, is former photo-journalist, an ace raconteur, and a thoroughly charming gentleman. I’ve listened to the interview a couple times (the first time was the broadcast and I was in a bad-reception area, so it was cutting out). I am not thoroughly embarassed.
Video interview for OakBook magazine
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.”
Other reviews of “the seasons” from around the web
Click here: THE BLARG
Knox Bronson “The Seasons” – A beautiful and brilliantly mastered four-track instrumental work that bridges the gap between the orchestral and symphonic, and the subtle digital realm of acts like Plastikman. Each track (coming in around the fifteen-minute mark) represents a different season, and Bronson has somehow managed to rip apart summer, fall, winter and spring, and put them back together in the form of a song. One of the best of this batch.
Mix electronic, classical, ambience and pop and you have the new, innovative piece by Knox Bronson in The Seasons. Even adding that symphony orchestra element to the background, Bronson takes you on a hypnotic trip. Bronson is the singer, songwriter and composer who brings you four excellent installments that run for an average of 15 minutes. All instrumental, the album is one to listen close to with true meaning behind each creation of sound.
On the cover you see an attractive woman unclothed with her legs in the air and arms covering her private essentials. Definitely an eye-catcher and this beauty is actually Victoria Secret supermodel, Amber Myles Arbucci. She can be seen on the back along with inside the contained artwork displayed in different poses. The true essence can be seen from the cover because she seems completely at peace with herself and her body. Her eyes are closed and she lays there on her back without a worry in the world—carefree spirit if you will. The ironic part is that this seductive portrait of Arbucci actually captures the pure emotion of the album. That raw emotion being peace and tranquility is the premise of the record.
The Seasons is just that; inviting you to experience each turn of the seasons one by one. The album starts with “Summer of ‘68” and ends with “The Forever Spring” taking the listener on a magical journey. Bronson offers a whimsical quality along with a strong spiritual well-being that resonates throughout the composition. Each song signifies not just the spirit of the seasons, but also the spirit of Bronson inside.
Knox Bronson
The Seasons
Bullz-Eye Magazine
By Jason Thompson
How exactly to peg Knox Bronson? Perhaps we shouldn’t and just let the music speak for itself. On this album of four extended pieces, Bronson mixes jazz-like passages with electronica, sometimes almost pushing it into a trance realm, but not quite. It’s too sophisticated for that sort of programming, and that’s definitely a plus. What it is definitely is languid and spatial, with “Summer of ‘68” and “Autumnal Sun” being completely wondrous works of music. If there’s a misstep here, it’s only in “Winter Blue” and only because it’s the one spot where the music doesn’t live up to the prior cuts, sounding a little too syrupy at times. But things get back in the groove with the closing “The Forever Spring.” Consider it Vivaldi for 2009, if you like. And if you don’t, there’s still a pretty lady all over the CD’s art in various stages of undress. Ooh la la.
One Man’s Opinion Of Moonlight
Pop Down The Years
