Cheri Knight - American Rituals

Another blast from the infinite unknown past from the hard-digging folk at Freedom To Spend. Who exactly is Cheri Knight? Without the release of American Rituals, you'd be forgiven for having absolutely no idea. And yet she has a history that touches hands with a good few you may have heard, collaborating in musical ways or others with such US underground luminaries as Steve Fisk, Pauline Oliveros, Calvin Johnson, K. Leimer++. A student of Evergreen State College in the Pacific Northwest, Knight's work leans towards the academic avant garde of her education, while also possessed of the same DIY sensibility that was bubbling under in that part of the world in the early 80s (though i'm loathe to call it post-punk). Collected here are seven disparate tracks, culled from various DIY cassette and vinyl compilations, which when taken together seem to express a penchant for rhythmic repetition (Cage is cited as a prime influence, though i also hear some primitive Reich and Mkwaju Ensemble) and looped vocal abstraction that's got a little of the freeform thinking of both Laurie Anderson, Marnie Weber and Leslie Winer. It's bracing, hypnotic fair that seems even more so for the fact that it was mostly lost to time until now. You might understand it were these lo-fi, home-recorded tracks, as great as such things often are, but the ambition on display here belongs to a much wider collective ear. Take the closing No One's Hands, a 13 minute meditation built around layered vocals - the kind of devotional avant composition that belongs in the pantheon of a label like Lovely Music. And yet, as precocious as it is, it's perhaps the off-hand/casual nature of Knight's overall attitude (although not her immaculate practice) that makes it most compelling, an artist who could turn it on in a second, then retreat into farm life raising goats another. Nice to have a goat, of course, but nicer still to have seven songs as impressively realised as this. Freedom To Spend come through again.