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LP
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WS 028LP
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Featuring contributions from Jordan Tice (of Hawktail), Jay Bellerose, Harrison Whitford, Rayna Gellert, Dylan Day, Mark Goldenberg, Rich Hinman, and Robert Bowlin, this album, a self-titled affair, finds Cameron Knowler at an exciting crossroads between American tradition and forward looking guitar soli -- toeing the line between personal regionalism and the universality of landscape memory. Knowler draws on the history and geography of his birthplace of Yuma, Arizona -- a border town known for its lettuce production and defunct territorial prison. In line with the regional ethos of the composer Frantz Casseus and the minimalism of Bruce Langhorne, this instrumental guitar record launches into a world of desert sun, propane tanks, dark jail cells, and the verdant Colorado. Knowler ferries listeners across a sensitively crafted world with deft, understated playing, pushing the current of instrumental acoustic music forward through lush original compositions, while keeping an eye on tradition with his singular arrangements of old-time fiddle tunes. With what many describe as the closest thing to the right hand of Norman Blake, Knowler's delivery also nods to the work of creative outsiders Terry Allen and David Rawlings. With this work, Knowler sonically illuminates untold stories of the Sonoran, lending a voice to the pictorial canon made famous by Dorothea Lange and western films such as 3:10 to Yuma. There is a sense of interiority to the record as well, Knowler says, noting that he "grew up isolated, unschooled in a desert with very little contact with children my own age." He only returned to his hometown recently to revisit places held in memory, and this album stands as a direct result of unpacking those landscapes coded with personal darkness. By creating an outward-facing work of art, Knowler strives to "make sandcastles out of grief" and emblazon the diorama of his youth. Here, the world receives a sound poem, a memory palace that stands as a document of both personal grief and acceptance of the many dimensions of a place.
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