The Sound merges music, field recordings, and a visual book created in isolation

Transmission 193: Interview with Knox Chandler

Knox Chandler is an American musician, producer, arranger, and visual artist whose career spans over four decades. He has worked with The Psychedelic Furs, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Cyndi Lauper, R.E.M., Depeche Mode, Grace Jones, and Dave Gahan, among others. After a decade in Berlin, where he developed his layered guitar technique called Soundribbons, he returned to the U.S. and settled on the Connecticut shoreline.

Title: The Sound
Artist: Knox Chandler
Release Date: 2025-05-30
Genres: Avant-garde, Dub, Experimental Music, Post-punk
Label: Blue Elastic
Description: Interview with Knox Chandler on The Sound his solo album of instrumental works and visuals created near Long Island Sound and released on Blue Elastic.

The Sound, released on his label Blue Elastic, is his first solo project—a collection of instrumental compositions accompanied by a visual book of paintings, sketches, photos, and writings. Created in isolation near the Long Island Sound, the work reflects a shift from urban life to a rural environment and its impact on his artistic process.

What do you remember about the first moment you felt compelled to create music?

It’s hard to really say. I was very young. As an infant, I was fascinated by it. My parents played a lot of Stravinsky. I just loved Stravinsky when I was a baby, apparently. Then my folks got me into taking lessons when I was very young on the recorder. So I think that probably somewhere around then was when I really became fascinated with actually creating music.

As far as more compositional stuff that’s connected to what I’m doing today, I would say that happened when I was in high school. My father had an old Tandberg reel-to-reel, and you could do sound on sound with it. I would just spend hours making these tapes that were pretty wacky.

What was the atmosphere like when you first became involved in the New York post-punk and New Wave scene?

It was really great. It felt like a melting pot of styles. There was Latino music, maybe pre-hip-hop type stuff going on, punk rock, free jazz—and people were bringing all these styles together. At the time I was living in the East Village, and there were places like the Pyramid Club and 8 BC, where you could go any night and hear amazing stuff. It was really fun.

When did the initial concept for The Sound start to take shape, and how did the idea of combining a book and an album come about? Was that part of the concept from the beginning?

I was living in Berlin for about 10 years up until three years ago. I moved back to the States to take care of my mother, who’s now in assisted living. During COVID, I recorded an album, almost like the big brother of The Sound. I came back to the States, and I wanted to put it out. I sent it to a friend who listened to it—she’s a music supervisor—and she absolutely loved it. She said, “You should do something different with this. You should do some paintings,” because I’ve studied art over the years.

I sat down and tried to do artwork for that record, but I just wasn’t connecting to it. I’d written and recorded that in Berlin, and now I was back in the States, really in the woods, in an old farmhouse. I had a hard time getting inspired to do anything like that. But I did start recording what I call sound ribbons. I did a bunch of those, and at the same time, I was doing some artwork, journaling, and photography.

It just developed into this idea that I’d go back to the Berlin record later, but I really got into these recordings influenced by nature. I spent a lot of time around water—mostly fly fishing, both in the sea and in rivers—and I found that’s where I was getting most of my inspiration, along with hikes in the woods and fields.

I noticed my artwork, writings, and journaling were all very much connected to the sound ribbons I was recording. So I decided to make a new solo project and create these compositions from the sound ribbons and connect them—naturally, I felt—to a visual book. That’s what I did. The book includes pieces of my journal writing, photographs, sketches, paintings. It’s really a musical memoir of the past couple of years.

How did the shift from an urban to a rural environment affect your perception of sound and silence while composing? Were there specific places or natural elements that directly informed certain tracks?

Oh yes, absolutely. That’s a good question. The whole thing didn’t really start until I started really getting into nature. I started reading about mushrooms and how their systems connect to other plants, but mostly it was the water. I started noticing different rhythms within small bodies of water—how the rhythms shift underneath each other.

Even at night, when you’re down at The Sound—I live on Long Island Sound, but on the Connecticut side, they call it The Sound—I was going down there at night, fishing, watching the tides. I was observing how the water flowed, the rhythm of the tides, how the light reflected on it. That gave me a real sense of these different shifts. It’s hard to describe. Most of it is heartfelt from that experience. But it has a lot to do with how light reflects off water, how water flows in different moments.

For instance, feeling the undertow at your feet when you know the tide is going out—there’s a lot of that in my music.

In assembling the accompanying book, how did you choose what to include—the photographs, sketches, and written passages?

Each page corresponds to a piece of music. It includes a lot of my artwork, sketches, and what I was writing at the time of making that music. The rest is really like a journal of my experience—after living in New York City for 31 years, then Berlin for 10 years, and suddenly being stuck in the countryside.

My inspiration always came from the streets. I would go out, smell, see, hear all these different elements—and that gave me inspiration. Coming here, I felt lost until I really started engaging with nature: fishing, hiking, direct contact with it. That inspired a lot of the book. A lot of the photographs are from local areas. I did take them into a pretty abstract place, but all the elements are from what I experienced these past couple of years.

Did you use specific tools, analog or digital, when creating the images and sketches for the book?

A lot of the source material is analog—the paintings, sketches, and my writing. But then I worked it out digitally. I used some Photoshop and digitized everything in InDesign. InDesign was my main platform.

Was there a specific track that served as the starting point or core around which the rest of the album was constructed?

Yes, absolutely. Even though I had recorded a lot before, the one that really brought it together was Mars on a Half Moon Rising. This house is right on a pond, with a wraparound porch. In spring and summer, there’s a symphony of frogs out there. I do a lot of field recordings, including some of the stream at the end of another track. I recorded the frogs—what I call the symphony of frogs. It’s just magical.

I sat there, listened to it, picked up the guitar, and started playing a melody. I had already created a sound ribbon with the frogs. I figured out which one would work, picked up the guitar, and that melody came out.

I was working on it around the time that my friend Mars Williams passed away. He was a sax player with Psychedelic Furs, and also had a big career in free jazz. I’d worked with him over the years. There was already a lot recorded, but once I had that song, that melody, and shaped it, everything else just fell into place. Before that, I was just blindly recording, painting, and drawing. Once I had that, I could see how the rest of the album could take form.

How does The Sound relate to or depart from your previous work with other artists or past solo projects?

It’s kind of like an afterthought that was always there. When I first started working with the Psychedelic Furs, I was using a 2290 and trying to process my guitar so it didn’t sound like a guitar. That always interested me. I brought that into every artist I worked with.

A defining moment was working with Cyndi Lauper on the Shine album. We got to do some really wild stuff with my processing. You might hear things that sound like something else, but it’s the guitar. That was probably the most extreme example with a popular artist.

With everyone, I tried to make the guitar—or cello, or whatever I was using—sound like something else. My close friend Peter Freeman was instrumental in influencing me technically. He got me using computers in the ’90s—back when Cubase was black and white.

I was always curious what I could do with my guitar using computers. When I moved to Berlin in 2012, Peter pushed me toward class-compliant iPad apps. I spent two years reinventing myself after decades of working with popular acts. That’s when I created what I now call sound ribbons.

I brought that into working with artists in Germany, including indigenous Nepalese musicians, free jazz, dance music. I realized this thing I had always done could apply across genres.

Is The Sound intended as a standalone work, or do you see it as part of a longer trajectory with further multimedia projects?

I think it’s going to continue, definitely. I don’t know how successful this book-album project will be, but for me it’s important. It’s the first time I’m putting out a record of my own. I made one back in 2005, but never released it.

This is the first time I’m releasing an album and artwork together, and I really enjoy the process. I have the luxury of this house to myself. There’s an art studio, a music studio, it’s in the middle of nowhere, and I’m pretty isolated. It gives me a lot of time and space to explore.

What’s your next project?

I plan to put out Sea of Stars next. I’ve already started working on artwork for it. That’s the album I recorded in Berlin. I’ve also been working with Cynthia Sley of the Bush Tetras—we’ve written a bunch of stuff together that we’ll continue to develop and eventually release.

I’m also doing a project with Rick Moody—Blues No Blues is the working title. And I hope to keep working with Bobby Previte. We made a record that came out a couple of months ago on Subsound Records. I try to keep busy.

Photos courtesy of Knox Chandler

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others