Think of the music of Olympia, Washington, and a familiar history unfolds: Beat Happening and Kill Rock Stars, riot grrrl and a young Nirvana. A heavyweight legacy, but these well-told stories also have a habit of bulldozing the smaller, slighter histories that came before. In fact, the Olympia of the early 1980s was a wide-open creative space where a loose community of DIY musicians drifted across the borders of sound art, new-age music, modern composition, and free improvisation. American Rituals uncovers one of these all but forgotten histories: a set of playful, experimental, wholly original recordings made in the early ’80s by Cheri Knight, a music composition student at Olympia’s Evergreen State College.
Hailing from Western Massachusetts, Knight grew up in a musical family, playing piano and clarinet before her head was turned by the music and ideas of John Cage. Through her studies she discovered the possibilities of synthesis and met the composer Pauline Oliveros, whose philosophy of deep listening proposed new ways of understanding and experiencing sound. But you get the sense, listening to American Rituals, that the real genesis of Knight’s music was the access she was granted to Evergreen’s on-campus recording studio. You can hear her formulating her own musical language using just her voice and simple instrumentation, fashioning a unique sound world out of loops and layers.
Knight utilizes a range of sounds on American Rituals: guitar and bass, piano and chimes, rhythms beaten out by hands or on struck metal. But her voice is at the root of her music. On pieces like “Hear/Say” or “Primary Colors”—they’re less songs than chants or mantras—Knight multitracks her voice and weaves it into tessellating patterns. Some of her music adopts the dry tone of an educational text: On “Prime Numbers” she counts upwards, her vocals panned hard left and right, accompanied by music with a faintly post-punk feel; padding drums and shard-like intrusions of guitar brings to mind a band like the Raincoats. But the track also evokes one of those animated musical interludes you might see on an old episode of Sesame Street, a half-remembered earworm both comforting and strange.
As part of her academic work, Knight spent time at New York’s Zen Arts Center and studied Buddhism. Her music doesn’t generally express spiritual themes, but there’s a devotional sensibility to American Rituals, an underlying sense of mindful practice. “Tips on Filmmaking,” the album’s best track, blends chants, handclaps, and dancing marimba to sound like music from a peaceful ashram. “Breathe” takes the form of a meditation exercise—breathe in, breathe out. Still, there are none of the dizzier nostrums common to new-age music. American Rituals feels relatively clear-headed, guided by an academic sensibility.
There is an umbilical link between Cheri Knight and a later generation of independent music from the Pacific Northwest. The selections on American Rituals first came out on regional compilations and cassettes like 1981’s Dub Communiqué, compiled by Steve Fisk—later producer of Nirvana and Screaming Trees. (That compilation also featured a track by one Bruce Pavitt, who around this time had recently started work on his own zine, Subterranean Pop—the rest is history). On another timeline Knight might have slotted into this burgeoning Pacific Northwest alternative history, but life took a different route. She moved back to rural Massachusetts, where she lived on a farm and raised goats. She still played music now and again, but the playful, experimental sounds compiled here gradually passed into memory.
American Rituals feels of a piece with other recent rediscoveries made by Freedom to Spend and its parent label, RVNG Intl.—releases such as Ursula LeGuin and Todd Barton’s Music and Poetry of the Kesh, or avant-garde autodidacts like Anna Homler aka the Breadwoman, whose sonic explorations sprang from somewhere instinctual and personal. As an anthology, American Rituals is relatively lean, collecting just seven tracks in 40 minutes. But what’s here is worth treasuring: the sound of an artist with a bit of learning and a lot of vision, breathing a new sound to life.
