Who is Alex Knost and how did he end up in a band with Kim Gordon? Among the many questions raised by Glitterbust—the debut noise guitar record from this California duo—the most pressing one is also, at least partially, the easiest to parse using Google. Knost is a 31-year-old pro surfer from Costa Mesa, Calif. "I thought surfing was cool because it was an art form and a subculture," Knost once told an interviewer, and he has referred to his single-fin longboard as an art piece itself. Surfer magazine has called Knost "unlike any other surfer in the world," drawing from '60s and '70s technique for a poised, imaginative, eccentric form. "Alex looks like a beat poet," one journalist wrote in 2008, comparing his surf style to "a 1984 Fender Stratocaster about to be beaten against a Marshall stack. In a good way."
Before she became the loft-dwelling, paint-splattering, flip-up-shades-donning embodiment of Warholian, Downtown cool, Gordon was raised in California (where she smoked weed, hitchhiked to Big Sur, and saw the Dead in San Francisco). In a sense, Glitterbust is the sound of the most New York woman to ever live returning to her West Coast roots. The record's five compositions have the corrosive edge and arty temperament that distinguish all of Gordon’s projects, but this impressionistic noise is often mellower, more spacious and atmospheric. Glitterbust has nothing to do with classic surf music, but you could imagine its ritualistic drones and white-heat mantras soundtracking a séance on the beach.
Gordon and Knost have provided no context for Glitterbust. They quietly played a first show at a festival last fall, and they are ostensibly named after a blistering, alarming Royal Trux song (you could imagine "Glitterbust" alongside "Talk Normal" and "Secret Abuse" in Gordon's "Noise Paintings" series, in which she renders the names of noise bands in acrylic on canvas). Knost has played in more conventional rock groups, such as Tomorrows Tulips (also of Burger Records, perhaps explaining the curious label choice for Gordon), but his primary medium is not music. And maybe Gordon—who has often said she considers herself a visual artist first—found a kindred spirit in Knost for this reason. In limitations, they find a world.
Most of these pieces (not all quite songs) use just a few primitive chords; there is a recurring air of dread. Sounds pan dramatically, filling frames like full canvases. Bits of piercing noise drill into your skull and install hooks. The grating dream logic of the dense, windy 11-minute "Repetitive Differ" sounds like destruction and regeneration underwater, like notes swimming at the seafloor while Gordon treads above. Its heavy, enveloping drones are busy with overdriven details that shoot into the red.
The music unspools slowly. This is ambient abrasion, like no wave directed by the cycles of the Sun or Moon. The LP's nine-minute highlight is "The Highline," the most conventionally composed piece here, like a collage of song fragments. It's also the only track to foreground Gordon's painterly, almost-mystical singing voice. Underscoring the whole record's shadowy mood, at the "chorus" Gordon and Knost speak-sing in unison of a "shadow behind the buildings," their voices blending effortlessly. There are bits of spoken word on most of Glitterbust, but you can rarely make them out—"Sometimes I think words are not her primary language," Gordon’s astrologer, Peter Smith, once told The New Yorker, and that's not hard to believe here. "The Highline" shares a name with the touristy park in New York housed within a former above-ground subway platform, which now runs parallel to Manhattan's austere gallery district—the song likewise combines the industrial and the organic, with its blown-out guitar manipulations and wide-open vocal phrasings.
Glitterbust is not unlike Gordon's other recent duo, Body/Head, though less bold. Still, it feels like a gift to spend time in the oceanic space Gordon and Knost summon, letting its nuances wash over you. The experience, like all great noise music, is at once dissonant and, in a peculiar way, meditative and serene. In his epic 2015 surf-memoir, the journalist William Finnegan writes that, "Surfing is a secret garden, not easily entered. My memory of learning a spot, of coming to know and understand a wave, is usually inseparable from the friend with whom I tried to climb its walls." On Glitterbust, you hear a sonic equivalent—two professional outsiders in total communion, knowing and understanding the crest of a wave, becoming inseparable in the process.
