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Rating: Knoxville is a psychedelic journey to the edges of the known world, in a land suspended between contingency and transcendence, where the real and the fantastical blend into a homogeneous yet nuanced mix of emotions.
Knoxville is an orgiastic ritual of ambient, post-rock psychedelia, shoegaze, and kosmische.
Knoxville is the recording of a live performance, which took place in the city of Tennessee on February 7, 2009, and has been available to listeners worldwide since October 2010. That day, three figures found themselves on stage and improvised half an hour of pure music. The three were Buck on drums (already part of the jazz group Necks), Daniell on guitar (from the experimental band Saint Agustin), and, on electronic manipulations, the Austrian Fennesz.
The album opens with a mournful arpeggio of a typically post-rock guitar, accompanied by herr Fennesz's electronic manipulations, layering dissonant and noise-inducing synths on top of it, in a crescendo where Buck showcases all his percussion mastery. The work proceeds in this manner, among cosmic whistling, synths that are sometimes caressing and soft, sometimes cacophonous and bordering on noise, with background noises, fluid guitars, avalanches of feedback, and a percussive work suspended between rock, jazz, and avant-garde.
"Antonia" is the masterpiece of the album – magnificent, sweet, and exalting, a song suspended between rarefied ambient and soft, melancholic shoegaze (a bit like Slowdive). In the final song, there's room for a true noise orgasm, seven minutes of pure and ecstatic psychedelia.
A beautiful work, a cerebral psychedelia but not so difficult to assimilate, in any case, a work that's hard to describe and categorize, one of the best releases of this excellent 2010.
Tracklist
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