The premise for Carl Knott’s latest boycalledcrow release is an imagined world where decommissioned transmitters and dusty radios awake from the slumbers of redundancy and begin functioning again. Imagine fractured sounds, faltering rhythms and glitchy sonic non sequiturs, transmitted abruptly into a era more used to the vapid sterility of streaming and internet radio.

I can’t think of a better place for Knott’s music to exist, even if it is fantastical. As boycalledcrow, his work has always occupied a sort of fragmentary landscape of its own: sounds form, burst into sharp sonic fractals and re-emerge in infinitely rearranged forms; melodies falter and collapse in on themselves; guitars, betraying his origins as a folk musician, offer recognisable shapes but are clipped, alien and discordantly unsettling.

Each of the fourteen pieces here is accompanied by a brief and evocative poem, and at times it feels like these collections of words have been subjected to the same skewed logic with which Knott’s music is developed. The verse to accompany the title track is a more adroit description of his work than any reviewer could muster:

And now
He’s pulling all of the strings
A cat’s cradle
Of tangled tunes
Weaving paths
And making up names

I’ll get my coat. I would encourage you to ignore everything I’ve ever written about Knott’s music.

None of this is intended to suggest that //M E L O D Y_M A N is some sort of messy, randomised sprawl of an album, even if the complicated algorithm-like names of the tracks might indicate otherwise. To suggest this would be to undermine Knott’s skills as a sound artist. In fact, quite the contrary – the album contains some of Knott’s most beatific, resonant works to date. ‘God * Woman = C I R C L E ()’ and ‘dr dr dr || WOODS 777’ consist of tiny cycles of pretty melodies that evoke comparison with Steve Reich, offset by plaintive, organic gamelan textures and shimmering reverb that, when combined, produces an arresting, enveloping minimalist warmth.

Nevertheless, there is something endlessly intriguing about Knott’s more restless moments. The velocity at which ideas form and are replaced creates a sort of turbulence within pieces like ‘(S) illy Song #2’ that leaves you more than a little dizzy as it skips and hops along a path seemingly all of its own. Such pieces are an offset to more delicate tracks like ‘’, ‘~ f o r e s t … MOON ~’ and ‘SUN sun +’, leaving the listener stood perpetually on a precipice of expectation.

And that’s what’s ultimately so interesting here: as one track finishes and another starts, you find yourself trying to anticipate where Knott might pivot you to next. To predict this, however, is a fruitless endeavour, and it’s that sense of bold adventurism that makes //M E L O D Y_M A N such an extraordinary and enriching listening experience from start to finish.

//M E L O D Y_M A N by boycalledcrow is released October 27 2023 by Waxing Crescent.

boycalledcrow recently recorded a piece for my Mortality Tables collaborative series LIFEFILES. Listen to ‘LF13 / Westbury’ here.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2023 Further.