Welcome to the website of
Knox Bronson, accomplished roué & cat lover.
I’ll be famous when I’m dead.
Recent POSTS
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.
the seasons
Amber Arbucci graces the cover of "the seasons"
the seasons
Release date: February 14, 2009
Label: Tangerine Sky Interactive
Songlist:
- summer of ’68
- autumnal sun
- winter blue
- the forever spring
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.