DALLAS’S Chaz Knapp has a very particular way with an organ drone – or a drune, as he styles it – as you can hear on his forthcoming album, Organ Drunes.
He brings a singular texture to his way with a vibey drone, and one not without a wayward sense of humour, as you can see when you check the video for the first single drop, “My TMJ Pain Might Be An Abscess”, down below.
The album is entirely composed for solo performance on a secondhand Yamaha YC45-D electric organ, and is proper spreading of wings, a letting go for an artist previously noted for elegiac piano and strings compositions.
But then, Chaz is nothing if not always seeking fresh sonic horizons; he was a pre-teen blues guitar prodigy who shed that particular skin by joining underrated experimentalists Our Brother The Native, who operated out in the same weird landscape as first-phase Animal Collective and released three albums – Tooth And Claw, Make Amends For We Are Merely Vessels, and Sacred Psalms – for FatCat between 2006 and 2009.
It kinda could be dance music, but can’t resist drifting out towards a more Berlin digidub richochet of sound, heading even deeper, letting all kinds of minimalist and systems music cyclical layers loose in a wholly warming confection.
Chaz says: “I realized I can’t always control the music. Sometimes you need to let the music control you. I was finally able to let it.”
And you’re invited to totally puzzle over the accompanying video, in which Chaz jigs and reels down a suburban Texan backstreet, dripping blood from a head wound.
A brilliantly odd record comes ready with a brilliantly odd genesis, as Chaz relates: “I purchased a Yamaha YC45-D combo organ off of eBay seven years ago. I was living in Missouri and the organ was nine hours away in Tennessee. I drove down a long dirt road at midnight until I finally got to the guy’s house in the middle of nowhere.
“A very eerie night and a very quick transaction and getaway.”
Chaz Knapp’s Organ Drunes will be released digitally and on cassette by figureight records on April 2nd and is available to pre-order over at Bandcamp as we speak.
