Tag: boycalledcrow

boycalledcrow – eyetrees

On By 429harrowroadIn Album reviewsLeave a comment

Carl M Knott’s music as boycalledcrow has always had a tendency to lean into the haze and uncertainty of emotions. There is often a brightness to his fractured acoustic guitar melodies, but these motifs are scaffolded by sounds that seem to pull against his effusive gestures. Not so on eyetrees, his new album for the Hive Mind imprint. This is easily Knott’s most uniformly optimistic album to date, and one whose openness and tenderness leaves an indelible mark on the listener.

A preview of eyetrees, ‘westbury’, was released through my Mortality Tables collaborative project in 2023, and a new version is included here. It found Knott interacting with a field recording of nature sounds, laying pretty acoustic guitar notes over a stew of pointillist rhythms and sounds that seemed to arrive with a playful, random edge. You hear that approach again on ‘sweet dunes’, where the sounds of breezes blowing across sand and the crashing violence of waves interact with a soft and hauntingly beautiful guitar melody. On ‘honeybee’ his guitar takes on a levity and bounciness, evoking the idea of a bee dancing from flower to flower in pursuit of sweetness.

Taken all together, eyetrees is the album that best reflects Knott’s previous life as a folk musician. English folk music was originally the music of the village and rurality, but Knott’s recent melding of plucked strings with electronics has skewed the form to a kind of post-industrial urban, modern living chaos. On tracks like the tender ‘a blissful day with her’ or ‘my friend, janu’, that skew is more or less completely removed, and Knott’s true colours are finally revealed.

This is Knott going back to nature. He talks in the press release about the gravitational pull of the countryside and its impact on his state of mind. He talks openly about mental health struggles, and a feeling of impeding death, something that walks in fields and woods helped to counteract. On eyetrees, that manifests itself in a kind of turbulence that usually resides in the background of the pieces here, while his acoustic guitar playing – mostly left alone, or just subtly manipulated – represents the salve of nature.

eyetrees can thus be heard as the sonic equivalent of standing outdoors in the sunshine and taking a series of deep and therapeutic breaths.

https://boycalledcrow.bandcamp.com/album/eyetrees

eyetrees by boycalledcrow was released October 11 2024 via Hive Mind.

Words: Mat Smith

boycalledcrow has collaborated with Mortality Tables on two projects – ‘LF13 / Westbury’ in the LIFEFILES series and ‘Kullu’, an album that found Knott revisiting his post-university travels through India. mortality-tables.com

(c) 2024 Further.  

Mortality Tables: boycalledcrow – Kullu

On By 429harrowroadIn Mortality TablesLeave a comment

an audio travelogue of sound artist Carl M Knott’s travels in India

released May 3 2024 in digital and limited cassette edition of 25 copies

mortalitytables.bandcamp.com

Watch the video for ‘Milk And Honey’ here:

“Eventually found a guesthouse. Not very nice: a park-bench bed with two blankets for a mattress, stone walls and a shared squat toilet, but it had an ashram ambience and great acoustics for the guitar. I could really feel those bass notes.

Spent the evening understanding the layout of the city, eating and playing the guitar. I met the devil in New Delhi railway station and sold my soul for his guitar tunings. Robert Johnson is taking over my fingers.” 

– Carl M Knott, January 26 2006 

Kullu is the new album from electronic musician and former folk artist boycalledcrow, the alias of Chester’s Carl M Knott.

The album is an audio travelogue of Knott’s travels through India in 2005 and 2006, just after he’d graduated. That journey was part of Knott’s concerted efforts to overcome the intense feelings of stress and anxiety that had gnawed away at him throughout his adolescence. Along the way, he documented his travels in a blog and accumulated countless memory cards of photos and videos. He stayed in basic accommodation and made numerous fast friends from around the world, one of whom, an artist called James, provides the album’s sleeve image.

Knott made copious field recordings during his travels, and this diary-like library of sounds forms the basis of the ten tracks on Kullu. We hear busy, vibrant towns from the back of an auto rickshaw, rapturous tabla rhythms, blurred chanting and tanpura drones, as well as Knott’s own playing, made using a guitar bought in Dehradun for £27.

Knott took these foundational sounds, then augmented and processed them in the style that he has developed on albums such as // M E L O D Y_M A N (Waxing Crescent, 2023) and Mystic Scally (Wormhole World, 2020). These pieces roam freely between the engaging and unpredictable; joyous yet reflective; uplifting yet inquisitive. They are pieces filled with constant motion; taken as a whole, these pieces allow the listener to follow Knott’s journey through the remote Kullu Valley and along the Beas river that bisects the Himalayas.

This is an album of intense discovery, of new sounds and new atmospheres, and a sense of healing and catharsis. Knott wrote in his blog about trying to avoid being drawn into the well-worm paths of mediation and yoga, unlike most of the travellers he met between New Delhi railway station and his time in the Kullu Valley.

Instead, the pieces on Kullu find someone acutely listening to the turning of the world around him. It represented an awakening of Knott’s approach to documenting the sounds he is drawn to, fused with a distinctive, emotive and original compositional style. 

1. Charas
2. Pretty In The Sun
3. Joy
4. Vipassana
5. Tuktuk
6. Milk And Honey
7. Golden City
8. Kanashi
9. Sadhu
10. Kali

Music and production by Carl M Knott.  
Mastered by Antony Ryan at RedRedPaw.  
All field recordings and photographs by Carl M Knott, India, 2006. 
Design by Neil Coe. 
Video editing by Neu Gestalt.

Digital edition and limited cassette edition of 25 copies released May 3 2024 through mortalitytables.bandcamp.com


All proceeds from sales of Kullu will go to CHUMS. CHUMS provides mental health and emotional wellbeing support for children, young people and their families.  

chums.uk.com

A Mortality Tables Product
MTP29

ABOUT BOYCALLEDCROW

boycalledcrow is the alias of Chester-based sound artist Carl M Knott (Wonderful Beasts, Spacelab). Knott, a former folk musician, uses his myriad acoustic influences to create unique, strange and beautiful compositions. 

boycalledcrow.bandcamp.com

(c) 2024 Mortality Tables

boycalledcrow – //M E L O D Y_M A N

On By 429harrowroadIn Album reviewsLeave a comment

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.

Wonderful Beasts – The Art Of Whisper

On By 429harrowroadIn Album reviewsLeave a comment

Front cover

More than ever before, ambient music feels somehow necessary right now. It represents a vehicle through which to still one’s restless mind amid a tickertape feed of dystopian signals, harrowing statistics and only the briefest flourishes of hope. Whether as a tool for absorption or distraction, ambient music can centre you elsewhere, allowing you to regain focus and perspective.

Unfortunately, a lot of ambient music is also terminally boring, the equivalent of sonic wallpaper or a naff pastiche of inconsequential New Age reference points. That accusation thankfully cannot be levied at Wonderful Beasts, a pairing of electronic artists boycalledcrow and Xqui, whose first collaboration together is anything but music to drift off to sleep to.

For the most part, The Art Of Whisper is built from blocks of gauzy texture, etiolated clouds of sound that float past you and hover, mirage-like and just out to reach, before vanishing into nothingness. Sprinkles of delicate synth melodies are cast over pieces like ‘I Fell Into A Dream’, a languid pace and frosty atmosphere evoking crystalline structures and ghostly shimmer. ‘Love Her’ and ‘Quiet’ include what could be the heavily-processed sound of pealing church bells submerged under layers and layers of dense reverb so as to leave the merest trace outline of joyfulness.

Elsewhere, there are pieces that break free of these beatific soundworlds. ‘My Old Guitar’ has a firmness and drama, its delicate melodic gestures nudged forward with a murky bass undertow and a distant beat. The track opens with a distorted, over-amped synth passage, creating the sense of memory and nostalgia enshrined in the title. A similar effect can be found on ‘She Is The Melody Man’, wherein a pounded, tribal rhythm supports a framework of high-velocity sequences and plucked guitar-like sounds, simultaneously carrying a sense of threat but also a youthful vigour, like looking back on the adventure games you played as a child. ‘Into The Emerald Eye’ is perhaps the noisiest piece here, with squalling layers of angry noise that finally ebb away into the same stylistic terrain as the likes of ‘Love Her’.

What boycalledcrow and Xqui offer is a sense of narrative without once revealing the story, offering little more than glimpses of moments freighted with emotional, yet ephemeral significance. To do that within the context of ambient music is nothing short of remarkable.

The Art Of Whisper by Wonderful Beasts was released March 20 2020 by Wormhole World.

(c) 2020 Further.