Inside The Wire 462, composer, hiker and self-proclaimed patternist discusses American Rituals, a compilation of early works recorded in the early 1980s, and recently rediscovered and released by Freedom To Spend. “I have to laugh at the whole thing to be honest,” Knight admits to Claire Biddles. “The tapes literally were unplayed, I just had them in a box. Every once in a while I’d run into them looking for something else.”

Knight goes on to describe her time at Washington liberal arts college Evergreen, an epiphanic Wendy Carlos concert, her time as an apprentice at Pauline Oliveros’s Zen Arts Center in Mount Tremper, as well as her recently revived practice.

Here, Knight has compiled a mix of compositions from the 1960s to the 80s that opened up the way she listens to sound and influenced her own music making. “Because of their dual effect on my listening,” says Knight over email, “these pieces, beginning in 1968 and ending in 1981, are different milestones in the work of putting sounds together. On listening, each one was cellularly familiar – at once presenting me with a vastness I couldn’t comprehend. This was seen immediately as an invitation! The special nature of hearing in this way drew me further into the wide open and empty frontier of each piece where I discovered myself all alone with my own emerging ideas.”

Tracklist

Wendy Carlos Air On A G String
Steve Fisk “Snake Attack”
Laurie Anderson “Time To Go (For Diego)”
Richard & Linda Thompson “Beat The Retreat”
Brian Eno “1/1”
Robert Ashley Automatic Writing
Alvin Lucier I Am Sitting In A Room
John Cage 4'33"
Hildegard von Bingen “O Choruscans Stellarum”
Meredith Monk Dolmen Music

Read Claire Biddles’s interview with Cheri Knight inside The Wire 462. Wire subscribers can also read the article online via the digital archive. American Rituals is released by Freedom To Spend.