Welcome to the website of
Knox Bronson, accomplished roué & cat lover.
I’ll be famous when I’m dead.
Recent POSTS
Science gallery
Br-r-r-r-r-r … It’s froggy time again!
Just got in from a ride up to UC campus … big clothing store on Bancroft … bought some gloves, etc., and froggy hat kept my ears warm. Thank you, Froggy! Summer is def. over.
Flight of the Atom Bee cover art
I am happy to share with you the final art for the long-awaited digital release of the analog classic “Flight of the Atom Bee.” I will be posting some articles about some of the vintage analog instruments used on the cd, as well as some words about the songs themselves, over the next month.
I found this image on the website Mirabilia Images. The utterly charming couple, Luciano and Mira, whom I assume to be residing in Italy, do some wonderful work: perfectly matched, in my opinion to the music found on “Flight of the Atom Bee:” beautiful, strange, sexy, and otherworldly. I was so happy when I found the site.
I wrote to them about licensing an image, along with a link to the music and they wrote back with a yes, and very complimentary words about the cd, which I of course appreciate. So we came to an agreement on the license and they sent me the image and I spent some time putting in the Atom Bee and … here we are!
CD Master and artwork go off to the distribution center next week, to become available online everywhere within the next few weeks.
Free download—If I Was Sober (I’d Go Get Drunk)
This cost $18, so it stays. Sorry.
I recently got a very rude email about this song from some woman who (a) considered herself somewhat of an expert on the blues and (b) actually believed I might possibly care about her ramblings. She asked me if I had ever listened to Robert Johnson. Actually, I think she asked if I even knew who he was …
She basically said that “If I Was Sober (I’d Go Get Drunk)” was fake blues, because (a) I can’t play blues guitar (b) it is a silly song and (c) … I forget … To all of this I wish to respond … normally, I take criticism with a grain of salt: I have no false modesty about my work; I know what I put into it, even songs like this. But sometimes, no. Make that always, it is the duty of the artist to confront such egregious asininity head-on.
Dear Ms. No-Boundaries:
Of course the song IS silly; there are thousands of silly blues songs. I mean, read the damn title for Christ’s sake.
What do you mean I can’t play blues guitar? You mean like, say, Eric Clapton? Well no, but I play from the heart and this song comes from real-life hurt (I still remember how it felt when I figured out what that girl was up to! Luckily I was still drinking and that helped a lot.) and therefore it is a real blues song, dumb ass.
And lastly, as some old blues guy said if it hasn’t been hocked, it can’t play the blues. Well, if that is the criteria, this guitar is Lucille, Jr. and I am BB King’s bastard son. Word.
Your truly,
K.B.
And for the rest of you:
Click here to download If I Was Sober (I’d Go Get Drunk) and feel free to write me about it! I care!
Every artist needs a muse
And to be amused.
Meet Maia and her daughter, Sophia. Muse and amuser. Some of you know my song “3 Seconds Before Maia Smiled.” (original instrumental on Deus Sex Machina, reworked with lyrics for Pop Down The Years. Yes, both are still available on iTunes and Amazon!
I recently wrote another Maia song, “Maia, It’s You,” which may very well be on the next cd of original songs, as yet untitled. It’s quite nice, with a potentially anthemic chorus which could easily be stretched out a la “Hey Jude” or that Arcade Fire song – you know the one. I’ll probably just keep it classical guitar, acoustic piano, lush strings and white noise. Yes, white noise is coming back to my music just as soon as I get the Roland Jupiter 6 with the Europa mod from my friend Gus.
It is my plan to release a cd of acoustic love songs, covers, mostly from the sixties and seventies, next. And after that, I am thinking that I will release a very odd mixture of music: mostly acoustic vocal tracks, mixed with some very electronic instrumental works. Who knows?
It occurred to me that I take pictures of four things with my iPhone: my cat Baby for her blog babysnohelp.com, Maia and Sophia, my instruments, and the occasional flower I pass on the street.
Alright, here are the girls.
With the machines, March 2009
Podcasts
Riding the Wild Bubble
FRISCO: The Secret History
BOOKS—Masterpieces All
FLAPPING
Chervil Orbane, a youngish man living alone in the San Francisco Bay area, has awakened flapping. And knows it.
Two agencies–one extra-dimensional, one a super-secret government entity – know it also. And they want Chervil, for the furtherance of very different agendas.
An allegory, Flapping hews to classic epic form (the call, the journey, the dying, and the rebirth) in bite-size chapters, with diagrams, charts, and graphs to assist the reader in grasping essential concepts underlying Flapping — Chervil Orbane’s saga, his moment of clarity, the great epiphany, the big ideas, the good guys, the bad guys, the gratuitous sex, the refreshing absence of name brand pop-culture icons, a predictably cinematic happy ending, the ipso and the facto, as it were, of nuevo-millennial metaphysical thought.
FLAPPING comes with its own cd soundtrack – Flight of the Atom Bee. This wonderful CD has been remastered for maximum fidelity. Flight of the Atom Bee is a haunting, beautiful, and otherworldly suite charting the erotic, tensile fields that bridge harmony, melody, and undiluted electronic sound.
PIXELS AT AN EXHIBITION
The emergence of a new art form for the twenty-first century, inspired by, shot with, and processed on the iPhone.
Pixels At An Exhibition documents the unexpected emergence of a new art form for the twenty-first century, one based on the technology of the iPhone, its limited camera and buggy apps, to create a new kind of magical realism. Combining camera and darkroom, canvas and paintbrush in one tiny device, the iPhone inspired the birth of a global art movement. Pixels At An Exhibition features the best of the pioneering artists and galleries culled from the 33,000 curated images on the Pixels website, many available nowhere else.
I finished, after three-and-a-half years of curation, writing, design, layout, and production, my history of the early years of iPhone photography and art, PIXELS AT AN EXHIBITION, 370 pp, 177 artists, 600+ images.
iBook for iPAD or Mac on the Apple Bookstore $14.95
Hardbound copy available at Lulu.com $99
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE HONEYBUN EMPIRE
Riding the Wild Bubble Berkeley To Frisco To Hollywood To Las Vegas & Back; Intimations Of Immortality On The Technicolor Lam, Sober.
In 1999, I wrote a semi-naughty, mostly humorous article for Salon.com entitled “The Gentlemanly Art of Spanking” under the nom-de-plume Carson Fitzgerald. It became one of the fifty most-read stories of the year, generating a huge reader response.
A couple years later, I had the idea to make spanking kits and sell them online. It used to be that if one was first to the web with a product, one was guaranteed success. The HoneyBun Spanking Kit was the exception that proved the rule. Nonetheless, it was a cute product and, just as I was finishing the HoneyBun website, I was forced to leave Oakland under threat of death as a witness to some drunks firing their guns up the street from his apartment—no one was injured—so the book began as a road story.
I packed up a carton of spanking kits, his guitar and clothes, and headed south to LA and Hollywood. He then began writing email updates to all my friends in the Bay Area and elsewhere.
After a time, some friends encouraged me to turn the emails and the ongoing story into a book. This is the book. The book is a kaleidoscopic memoir—coming of age in Berkeley in the 60s, San Francisco in the 70s, a brief chapter about the 80s, and one about early sobriety in 90s. A fair amount of spirituality, commentary on materialism, the JFK assassination. Enjoy the ride!
Albums
Pacifica, released Nov. 10, 2025
Six gorgeous electronic/orchestral works. On all stream platforms except Spotify. Listen and download for free at Bandcamp.
Flight of the Atom Bee
My first cd, Flight of the Atom Bee, is a collection of instrumental pieces, strange and beautiful, featuring a lot of early analogue synthesizer technology along with an Emu SP-12 drum machine, a Jupiter 8x-P digital/analogue hybrid, and all sorts of outboard processors. To say I didn’t know what I was doing as I plunged back into modern music production is an understatement. But I heard sounds in my head I had to bring forth. It was an exhilarating time as I made my way by trial and lots of error.
Inspired by the weird fiction of Cordwainer Smith, Flight of the Atom Bee is a technicolor romp through the, bold, bright, and beautiful realms of analog synthesis.
Also available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, etc.
Pop Down The Years
My first vocal cd, Pop Down The Years, garnered some good reviews. Eight original songs, one Donovan cover.
Also available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, etc.
Flapping, The Official Soundtrack
Flapping—The Official Soundtrack, when it was first published as a paperback, came with a cd, my album, “Flight of the Atom Bee.” When I decided to publish it again as an e-Book on Apple Books, I thought I would release a new official soundtrack to go with it.
It’s really the greatest hits from Flight of the Atom Bee and Deus Sex Machina.
Also available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, etc.
One Man's Opinion of Moonlight
On Valentine’s Day, 2020, I released my second vocal cd. One Man’s Opinion Of Moonlight.
It’s an album of cover songs, ballads from the sixties and seventies, with one jazz standard, Autumn Leaves, and one original, Pop Down The Years, which is a love song to all the songs and music with which I grew up. The album title is one line from Young Girl Blues, written by Donovan, from his 1967 classic album, Mellow Yellow.
The album includes some of the songs that shaped my romantic ideals in my youth, a collection of songs from the era when “love almost conquered.”
Also available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, etc.
the seasons | remixed/remastered
some distance, now, from the original composing of the seasons i must say that my understanding of the dire situation in which i found myself and the subsequent resolution and release through the act of creation abides, stronger than ever. i rightly intuited, as i neared its completion, that the arc of the seasons followed campbell’s archetypal hero’s journey in a most wonderful way. i would ascribe the elements of the story thusly:
summer of ‘68 ~ the call & crossing the threshold
autumnal sun ~ the road of trials, meeting with the goddess & diving into the abyss
winter blue ~ death, rebirth, transformation & atonement
the forever spring ~ the magic flight, the crossing of the return threshold & freedom to live
Buy it on Bandcamp! (It’s available for free download, leftover from the COVID lockdown era.)
Also available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, etc.
Deus Sex Machina
Deus Sex Machina is another collection of electronic/orchestral works. I consider them to be mid-period works. I finally had a grasp on the technology and had gained a fair amount of confidence in my arranging abilities. A couple of these pieces—Ubi Mel Ibi Apes (where there is honey, there are bees) and 3 Seconds Before Maia Smiled—are in the permanent collection of The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as a part of a multi-media installation that ran for six months in 1999, Glenn McKay’s Altered States.
Also available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, etc.
Photography
Recent Works
You can find more in the Gallery section of the site.
Nudes
All sorts of naked women.
Flora
An astrologer told me once, “Knox, we know you love women and flowers. It’s all Venus.”
Referring to the fact that I have Venus in Scorpio in my astrological chart.
Fauna
Pictures of animals, lots of cats.
The Sun King series
I was looking at this picture and the thought entered my head, “You need to put a banana in the sky.” I rode my bike down to the produce market and bought a banana, the right banana, went home and put it in the sky. I’ve been putting the same banana into pictures for ten years.
Early Work 2010-2011
Still some of my favorites. I loved the iPhone 3gs, the terrible camera and all the buggy apps.
The Pierce Street Community Garden
I hit Coalinga hard in early August, 2016, drummed out of Oakland by a jealous landlady and skyrocketing rents.
Years before, tweakers had trashed the little house into which I was to move. It had been empty since then and it showed. I slept on a foam pad on the floor as I worked to make the place livable. My only furniture was a lawn chair. I lived on roast chicken from SavMart, Starbucks breakfast sandwiches, and burritos from Tres Agaves, the all-night taqueria which serves the best food in town. The temperature hovered around a hundred and five degrees every day and the swamp cooler attached to the house was non-functional. Truth be told, I had never seen a swamp cooler before and I didn’t know what it was.
Read the whole story of one of my proudest accomplishments here.
Videos
There are tons of videos on this site. Here’s a link to the “Music Videos page“. Here’s a link to the “Art Videos” page. Here’s link to the “Weirder Videos” page.
My cover of Marty Balin’s Coming Back To Me was on my album, One Man’s Opinion of Moonlight, just me and guitar. However, a year or two later I returned to the song and listened to the piano part my friend Rachel Efron had played for it during our late night session. Producer Rick Baretta and I had decided not to use it on the album release. I thought I would see what I could come up with in terms of a minimal arrangement, cello, strings and oboe. And Rachel’s piano, of course. What Rachel does as we go into the bridge kills me every time.
The Most Beautiful Day in the History of the World
I remember the day I received this cartoon from my friend, Gus, via email. I was immediately inspired and made a few over the next few weeks. I still make them from time to time. Available as limited edition archival prints or on a commission basis. Contact me if interested.