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CD
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RM 4263CD
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"This is music inspired by the water and the wind. By the tattoo of the insects' beating wings and the soughing of the wattle in the sea breeze. By the dull roll of the surf and the rhythm of my breath against the pad of my feet as I walk along the sandy, leaf-littered path through the scrub to the beach. The fingers of the fire-blackened dead banksias clawing the vicious blue. Somewhere, a peal of laughter is torn from its source and flies for a moment on the thermals rising from the baking sand. It is the summer of 2024/25 in Australia as the ideas for this album coalesce from a dozen different threads. I'm camping with my family on Krowathunkooloong land in the south-east corner of the country. The place where I grew up. The same beach where I spent every summer through my childhood. We swim every day in the ocean and in the late afternoons in the calm of the Yeerung River. The water, stained red brown by Melaleuca, turns my hand into a bloody ghost as I watch it sink. This place asks questions of me about belonging, about the relationship of the body to the wind. Of memory, of history, and of forgetting. Sound braces us in the now but simultaneously connects us to the past - a porous membrane between inner and outer worlds. I am walking up the hill behind the Yeerung with my trumpet in my backpack. Stopping to play momentarily. Trying to find a space in which I can resonate the sounds I make with those around me. The river is full from earlier rain and is threatening to break through the thin sandbank that separates its deep red pool from the gunmetal blue ocean. The heat gathers and the pulsing of the crickets intensifies." --Peter Knight
Peter Knight is a composer, trumpeter, and curator whose practice thrives in the spaces between genres, categories, and cultures. His recent solo work extends the possibilities of his instrument with innovative approaches that interweave acoustic preparations, extended techniques with electroacoustic processing via laptop, vintage delays, and tape machines. Peter is interested in the use of repetition, rhythmic overlapping, slow harmonic evolution, and subtle timbral evolutions to shift our perceptions of linear time.
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LP
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RM 4153LP
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Australian composer and director of the Australia Art Orchestra, Peter Knight, resolves his extensive work as an improvisor and band leader into his first solo recording in a decade, Shadow Phase. This is a recording which charts out a sense of perpetual opening, in a time of restrictive movement. It is a music of verticality, spiraling simultaneously up and down, effortlessly generating a depth and openness that is reflected both compositionally and texturally. Shadow Phase is also a music of light and dark, of elements being revealed and concealed with unerring patience. Even at its most dynamic this is a music that carries itself with a quality of a reductive, yet effervescent landscape. It is a masterful exploration of sound, anchored by Knight's evocative approach to trumpet.
From Peter Knight: "Most of this record was created in the shadow of COVID and deep in the maw of Melbourne's 2020 long winter lockdown. It is a meditation on the nature of connection. Restricted to a 5km zone, one of the only people I saw outside my family during this time was my old friend and teacher, Ania Walwicz. We met in the overlap between our zones on the waterfront near Docklands to walk and talk on bright, cool winter afternoons. Those conversations became large in my thoughts when Ania suddenly passed away in September. Her voice was in my head as I worked on this music, trawling through threads of ideas, recordings made on my phone, and thoughts jotted down in notebooks. Ania's practice as a writer relied on 'automatic' processes. Her work was informed by everything she had read (a lot) but it was created in the manner of dreams . . . I recorded everyday using the trumpet, my old Revox reel-to-reel, a couple of synths, a harmonium I lent from a friend, and whatever else was around. I worked mostly on just diving a little deeper each time I sat down to it. Through the simple process of exhalation, I explored my relationship with the trumpet, which has been through so many twists and turns. I let the tones produced by my breath unfurl on long tape loops and degrade beyond recognition through pedal and plugin chains, until the only imprint of the initial gesture remained. My process also involved long bike rides during which I'd listen to the work of previous days on ear buds, gliding through familiar streets made slightly strange by the absence of people and movement..."
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