Ivy Knight

Ivy Knight—Berkeley, CA-born singer-songwriter—a song should be a collage of apparitions, usually organized around anchors of received American imagery. Rear-view romantic fantasies, myths, surfaces, cliches—the imaginal miscellany of Americana; these are phantasms, not so much devised by Knight but appearing to her, spontaneously and of their own accord. Like a hallucination; or the free-associations of a day dream; or, even better, the fragments of soaps and classic movies and sitcoms strung out in channel-flipping sequence, beaming from a roadside hotel room TV; Knight's itinerant imagism stacks object upon object until she has a kind of scene, full and full-fledged, in 3 dimensions and color.

Taking cues from the folk revival sounds of women like Karen Dalton and Judee Sill, and from the hazy alternative styles of Liz Phair and Cat Power, Knight's song-scenes sound with a heft out of all proportion with the sparse means of her arrangements, sometimes just a guitar and vocals. Dotting her (mostly) psychedelic folk catalogue are collaborations with long-time friends Taraneh, Evanora Unlimited and Deer park—detours, rogue but subtly consistent, into cloud rap and hypnagogic pop sounds.