#40 Hypnagogic Tours: a conversation with Rangers' Joe Knight
The start of a new venture where I interview notable creatives
Since I published that Ballard piece in UnHerd last year, people have started calling me a journalist. I can live with that. And in fact, I’ve been thinking that more journalism might be exactly what Some Private Diagonal needs. The first fruit of this line of thinking is this current piece. What will come later in this post is the record of an interview with a musician whose work I’ve admired for almost a decade and a half. Before we get to that, a short(ish) preamble.
Though music’s been hugely important to me since my late teens, I’ve not paid close attention to the contemporary scene for over ten years. Of course, I’m not unusual. Many if not most of my peers are similarly disinterested. Even prior to the late 2000s my once-strong interest in new music was waning. The Libertines, The Strokes, Interpol and Franz Ferdinand: this hipster crew, the rock idols of the time, were merely doing straight rehashes of earlier styles. These bands were competent enough: you might be listening to The Clash, The Modern Lovers or Joy Division. And that was the problem: their homages were too good. With no real attempt to bring something new to the (mixing) table, why not just stick with the originals?
I’d discovered Mark Fisher’s k-punk blog in 2005, so was familiar with his developing critique of a mainstream pop and rock scene in crisis. Increasingly devoid of ideas and innovation, pop now struggled to generate what had once been its forte, the shock of the new. It was a view shared by dedicated music writer Simon Reynolds, who would later pen a book on the subject, Retromania. Music, even so-called “indie” (by this point a mere genre label, shorn of its original politico-economic meaning), had become conservative and backward-looking. So Fisher, Reynolds and others declaimed, and they deplored how pop musicians were apparently now content to reproduce what had gone before, coasting along on old glories.
Even so, the internet and MP3s made a new alchemy possible. From the early 2000s to the mid-2010s the meeting of this backward focus with the new technology brewed up a clutch of strange and intriguing alt genres. Fisher and co would write on them with interest, even with uncharacteristic hope. Among these microgenres were hauntology, chillwave, hypnagogic pop, witch house and vaporwave. I got into the first of these thanks to Fisher, the Ghost Box label and online music store Boomkat, where I would explore most of the others later. My interest in new music was revived, and for four or maybe five years I kept an eye out for new releases and emerging trends.
Revisiting the Boomkat site, which I’ve not been a regular customer of for a decade, I look back on my early purchase history. My first acquisition dates from October 2010: The Caretaker’s Persistent Repetition of Phrases, one of the key artists, and records, of British hauntology. Some kindred records follow: albums by Moon Wiring Club, The Advisory Circle, Belbury Poly and others.
What was that mini-genre, hauntology? Or rather, what is it, as it’s not dead yet (it’s undead). Given that the early (and some of the later) music of my interview subject fits comfortably inside hypnagogic pop, a microgenre Fisher and others considered an American cousin to British hauntology, it’s a question worth answering here.
Though Britain’s hauntological pop is fairly easy to define, its effects are harder to explain. The Caretaker excepted (whose music samples crackly records from the Al Bowlly era), with this subgenre of electronic you typically get old analogue synths, echoes of the library music of the 60s and 70s, spectral voices from the TV and radio of that era, and a nagging sense of familiarity. The best of the genre transcends mere nostalgia and evokes das Unheimliche, a feeling famously explored by Freud and variously translated as “the uncanny” or “the unhomely”.
It was probably a Boomkat recommendation that got me to cross the musical Atlantic and discover hypnagogic pop. I can’t think of another route that would’ve brought me to Rangers’ debut LP Suburban Tours, released in early 2010 by Olde English Spelling Bee. To my knowledge, Fisher never wrote about it, though he did pen a piece on Ariel Pink, hypnagogic pop’s “godfather”. Fisher’s introduction is serviceable as an intro to hypnagogic pop as a whole:
Credited as the founder of Chillwave, Ariel Pink was also central to hauntology (it’s now often forgotten that much of the initial discussion of hauntology was prompted by Pink’s records) and he is the single most significant influence on hypnagogic pop, which seems to be similarly poised between FM rock, MTV and the avant-garde. In Ariel Pink’s music, the past is simultaneously invoked and obstructed: fragments of what seem to be familiar rock and pop jewels are tantalisingly veiled behind multiple layers of distortion and effects. The name “Haunted Graffiti” perfectly captures the appeal of Ariel Pink’s sound: it is psychedelic as well as spectral, spraypaint-vivid as well as ectosplasm-insubstantial.
As Rangers’ Joe Knight explains below, Ariel Pink’s approach (if not so much his sound) was inspirational for him in his early days. Suburban Tours is at the rock end of hypnagogic, with guitar and bass to the fore, but many of the other features I enumerated for British hauntology apply here. There’s what I recall the Boomkat blurb called “a subtle glaze of electronics” (the album and blurb are gone from the site). One key difference from hauntology is the sound here is lo-fi and the vocals or other elements often distorted, as if heard through an antique radio or at the edge of sleep (hence “hypnagogic”). Another difference is the frame of reference. Like Ariel Pink’s records, ST seems preoccupied with the 80s, in contrast to the earlier decades that o9bsess its British contemporaries. These could be lost progressive rock or New Wave tracks (think Rush or The Passions), but there’s something a little strange going on, something “other”. For me, it’s this haunting aspect that renders ST more than just straight pastiche. I quickly counted the record among my favourites, and to this day I play it often. The artwork, which I’ve always found fascinating, deserves a mention. Depicting the near-empty car-park of what one imagines is a dead mall, the eerie painting underscores the music’s peculiar spectral quality.
In 2011 Rangers released a worthy follow-up to Suburban Tours, Pan Am Stories. Though similarly lo-fi, this record is a little less hard-driving than ST, more wistful and melancholic. A clutch of other Knight records were unleased on the world around the same time and shortly after, with a number of them being collaborations with Peter Berends and put out under various names. A longtime favourite of mine is KWJAZ’s 2012 self-titled release, a purely instrumental, psychedelic affair.
The middle of the decade saw Knight moving away from the late 2000s / early 10s lo-fi sound to something cleaner. But many of the psychedelic and hypnagogic elements—distortion, reverb, vocal samples etc—have continued to feature in his music. Joe Knight is now well established on Bandcamp and Spotify with, as the cliché runs, a modest but loyal fanbase, especially on the former.
But anyway, enough with the preliminaries. On to the interview.
Paul Heron: Hello Joe, thanks again for agreeing. As I said, we exchanged emails back in 2010 or 11 I think it was, after Suburban Tours but before Pan Am Stories. I think you had a website and had some new tracks on there. Then you pulled one or more of them and I wrote asking where they’d gone, lol. Maybe this rings a bell? You replied saying you were reworking some tracks for a new album. I think that was the extent of our communications back then. So anyway, I’ve been a fan since 2010 and now that I’ve a Substack and an audience I thought it’d be interesting to seek you out and ask you about your music.
Joe Knight: Vaguely rings a bell! And sure thing, all sounds good. Crazy how long ago that seems, it was like another lifetime for me.
PH: Yeah, does for me too. But also feels like the time’s passed quickly if you know what I mean. Okay then. To get us rolling, could you say a few words about yourself?
JK: Sure. I was born in Houston, Texas in 1979 which makes me 45 and a very, very young Gen X'er I guess. I grew up in the golden age of MTV and started classical guitar lessons at the age of 12. All of my close friends also played guitar and that was also the golden age of guitar magazines. These magazines would offer tablatures of songs and had a formula, a classic rock song (Zeppelin or ACDC), a modern rock song (Metallica, Nirvana or any grunge band of the early 90's) and then there would always be some type of punk or post-punk song (The Smiths, Echo and the Bunnymen, the Cure). I watched a lot of Headbangers Ball and also 120 Minutes on MTV, which was an AMAZING show and played a lot of music from England at the time (Morrissey, Suede, anything coming out of Manchester in the early 90's) as well as American College/Indie rock. My friend Paul had a Tascam 4 track cassette recorder and we spent a lot of time recording music as teenagers. I think the idea of recording something, anything, intrigued me more than being in a band in my formative years, as crazy as that sounds. Music was pretty dormant for me through my college years and it wasn't until post-college and the crush of the reality of working in an office that I realized I needed some kind of creative outlet. This was around 2005-2006 when the first iterations of GarageBand came out and that's when I started recording music. Ariel Pink also emerged during this time and he was very inspirational. This is a bit hard to articulate but while I was never in love with his music, I was very inspired by it. He had created his own world and I wanted to create mine. I moved to San Francisco and was there from 2009 to 2012. Glorious years. I met many like-minded friends who I am still close with; it was the only time I ever felt part of a community. We all scattered out of SF and I ended up back in Texas. I still write and create music although it has a smaller role in my life now. I work for a university where they send me around the world to meet students and I am content.
PH: I remember Ariel Pink being a key figure at that time. And the whole idea of hauntedness seems connected to him especially. “Haunted Graffiti” etc. That’s something I’ll ask you about.
Something that struck me about Suburban Tours is how so many tracks were named after apparent places, but I’ve never been sure if they’re real. “Deerfield Village”, “Bear Creek” etc. This has always tied the record in my mind to Eno’s Ambient 4: On Land, where you have “Lizard Point”, “Dunwich Beach” etc. Place comes up again with Texas Rock Bottom, Out In The Sticks and probably others I’ve not got to yet. Would you say place has been an important inspiration for you as an artist?
JK: Those are all real places. I lived in a subdivision called Deerfield Village in Houston when I was very young.
Rush was also a big influence as a teenager; they have a song called “Subdivisions” I really liked. I only really was into a slice of their catalogue from say 79 to 85.
PH: I tried to Google Maps search the Suburban Tours place names once and got nothing, ha.
JK: And yes, I am a geography nut, whether it's rural topography or built up urban areas. As I kid I would look at globes and atlases all day.
PH: I know you don’t like the lyrics on Late Electrics [Joe calls them “cringe” in the record notes on Bandcamp, having revisited the album 6 years on for remixing], but “Never Expected Much” mentions “a lot of California plates, 800K” and “liberals with your high net worth”, and declares “this town is yours”. A rare appearance for politics in your music?
JK: Eh, I think I was struggling for lyrical content tbh haha. I lived for 1 year in Austin from 2017 to 2018 and it didn't go well. Long story short I left a smaller company in Dallas for a bigger company in Austin and it was the pits......so I asked for my old job back in Dallas and worked remote from Austin for a year before moving back to Dallas. It was a crappy situation. Austin is a tech hub and a lot of people who work in tech and live in a tech hub can be smug and you could feel that smugness there. A lot of self-important people who think they are changing the world. I'm very allergic to all that. When I left I swore I would never live in a tech hub again; now I live in a very low-key college town. So I wasn't trying to be political, I was just observing my surroundings and didn't think they were too spectacular.
PH: Alright, gotcha. I remember one reviewer or blurb writer (it might’ve been on Boomkat, where I used to get my music) comparing your first album to Steely Dan, who I hadn’t listened to then. And when I sampled them, I couldn’t hear the alleged similarities (I didn’t know then that the Dan’s music varies so much in style).
Anyway, that album has always evoked the 80s for me. Snippets of TV soundtracks heard late at night. Similarly Pan Am Stories and Reconsider Lounge. I think after that you moved away from that “hypnagogic” sound. Did you / do you see your early music as part of that scene? Hypnagogic / vaporwave?
Btw, I was born in 76, so that’s why the 80s thing resonates with me.
JK: I think they make the Steely Dan comparison because I use the occasional major or minor 7 chord which is a "jazz" sounding chord.
There is a tune called "California Slime" which I think I have as a bonus track on Sabbatical [I’ve not managed to confirm this with the Bandcamp version of the album, but the track is definitely on Curiosities 2017-2021] that is the closest I ever got to Steely Dan
Yeah, I remember the David Keenan Hypnagogic pop article in The Wire and I guess I see that. I honestly am not that familiar with Vaporwave
There is an old version of “California Slime” on Session Man but I did a sleeker version as the bonus track for Sabbatical.
I think for me that [80s] sound was somewhat accidental. I had a really cheap drum pad which I would manually play for my drum sound, and the only snare sound that sounded decent to me was a gated sound, which is like the 80's sound. Think any 80's synthpop and it had that snare sound. Almost anything automatically sounds 80's with that, and maybe that's why I thought it sounded good, because I grew up with those sounds all around me.
When you start piddling with home recording, especially on a tape machine like I had, you have to go to great lengths to make the music sound "interesting" because it isn't going to sound "good" in the traditional sense. So you use a gated drum setting. You crank up the effects on the guitar. You run the whole mix through distortion. You slow it down. Speed it up. Anything really.
PH: Alright, I’m going to get Sabbatical next. That’s one I’ve not listened to as I’ve mostly relied on Spotify since the end of the MP3 era (though I still use MP3s as Spotify quality isn’t great).
Btw, have you done much in the way of live shows?
JK: Almost nothing for live shows, I had a band in San Francisco for a while and we learned a lot of the Suburban Tours songs, but it just didn't work. For better or worse, a lot of Suburban Tours’ charm is the sound. Would anyone really want to see a dry version of "Woodland Hills"? Beyond the novelty of it? Anyway that was years ago and now I'm older and I could try to do the one man thing but I don't think I have the patience or the technical knowhow to make that interesting and I definitely don't have the time or the patience to try to round up band members to rehearse, lug around equipment to gigs, etc...
PH: You could do a collab with [James] Ferraro or someone like that…
JK: To be honest I wouldn't be interested at this point in my life; I think he has been a lifer musician and I never have. It's always been a hobby and I've always had a job.
PH: Actually, I think it was Ferraro’s Last American Hero that made the TV theme connection. I played it to an ex and she said it sounded like some old TV show. And then I realised your stuff had something similar going on. I think that was something in the air at the time. Maybe from Ariel Pink as you mentioned. But it also pops up on your later records. The electronic bits have that feel for me.
You mentioned geography books and atlases as an interest. Are you a big reader?
JK: Not as much as I should [be]. Tim Marshall had some interesting books on geography, Prisoners of Geography was really interesting. I'm reading a book called Ghost Wars now about the US involvement in Afghanistan leading up to 911.
I'm interested in geography and geopolitics; it also comes in handy for my job. I recruit international students and a lot of factors go into international student mobility, geopol being one
PH: I’m also interested in those. I’m reading Fernand Braudel now (in translation, I don’t speak French beyond phrasebook level). Going to investigate those books.
Okay, I’d like to ask you what your favourite Rangers albums and tracks are. Which are you most satisfied with? Also, which record was the most fun to create?
JK: That’s a really hard one. Pan Am [Stories] was probably the most fun because those times were a lot more innocent and fun, and for a brief moment it seemed like a lot could be possible.
I'm probably happiest with Sabbatical though, even though it was a digital only release. I would be curious to open those files back up like Late Electrics. I've learned more about mixing. Sabbatical was [recorded] during the pandemic, rough time.
PH: Did lockdown conditions have much influence on the making of the album? I picture you having nothing much else to do but make music.
JK: You would think so but it was also a very uninspiring time. I think I work best in small windows. For example, I just had a long university holiday break and I always think I will be productive with music during these stretches, but I can very quickly get sick of myself.
PH: I’ve started on Graham Coxon from Blur’s memoir. In the intro he talks about “ear worms”, ideas for chord sequences and so on that arrive “in his mental inbox”. Do you relate to that? Ideas coming from nowhere that nag away at you until you give them concrete form?
JK: Sometimes that can happen. Usually I need some kind of spark though. Sometimes I can map out a whole song in my head with different parts and dynamics and almost all of the time if I manifest it, it never turns out how I imagined; many times it doesn't work at all but every now and then you get lucky and it evolves into something else and it surprises you. Music is humbling like that. Often when I feel like I have control over it and am orchestrating something to my own will it sucks....but something random or weird will happen [that] I didn't control and it changes into something else and you like it, but it was out of your control.
There's a part in “Glen Carin”, or "Glencairn" on Spotify, from ST, where towards the end there is a misplaced keyboard. Total mistake, but it makes the song
PH: I think everything creative is like this. Writing for instance. There’s a sort of sorcery of the accidental. William Burroughs explored that.
In the notes to Late Electrics Reimagined you mention you’re working on some new music but something weird is happening in your life. Can you elaborate on that?
Also it’s funny that the title of that song is also wrong. Cairn: a pile of burial stones.
JK: Well that was my fault, that is another Houston neighborhood. For years I thought it was Glen Carin and I named it that in 2010, but when I looked it up it was Glencairn, so I fixed it on Spotify. I don't know about new music; I had a whole thing, probably 60 minutes of music and I think I'm going to scrap most of it and start fresh. I really don't know at the moment. I could take it or leave it.
PH: Just listening to “Glencairn” again and I agree, the accidental keyboard really sets the seal on it. Of course I never realised there was anything amiss.
Some of my favourite tracks of yours are on odd little releases. Like the dual single you did with Ducktails [Bored Fortress Split 7”, released 2010 by Not Not Fun—note: I’ve always had Rangers’ contribution listed as “The Bridge of Marin”, but the correct title seems to be “The Bride of Marin”], and Low Cut Fades. [You’re] similar in that respect to My Bloody Valentine, who have gems tucked away on EPs etc.
JK: I’ve released collections of those kinds of tracks: Death of Rangers (2009), Scrap (2013), Curiosities 2017-2021.
PH: One thing more if I may: who did the artwork for Suburban Tours and Pan Am? The ST art especially has always intrigued me.
JK: I did the art for PA, for ST it is from an artist but I forget who. It was an existing piece and the guy who ran the label asked for permission (or so he told me).
PH: The Pan Am patchwork has a psychedelic quality which I associate with some of your music too.
To wrap up, is there anything you’d like to add?
JK: A couple of things. One is that the process of writing and recording music is my main motivation. When I am working on a project I am at peace and whatever real world hang ups I have going on evaporate momentarily. Once an album is completed and it's out in the wild, my head has already moved on to something else. It's very nice if someone appreciates it and sends me an encouraging message or if a publication decides to review it. All good. But that all pales in comparison to the process of making it. The end result almost doesn't matter. I thought of that when David Lynch passed because he always seemed to encourage anyone who has a creative idea to try to manifest it because of the joy it brings the person and if more people went through that exercise the world would be a better place. There is that somewhat famous speech where he says something to the tune of "You got to get your butt moving!", in that corny, nasally pinched voice that sounds like a parental figure. I think that is what he was referring to. The act of creating is transcendental.
PH: My favourite novelist, JG Ballard, said essentially the same thing. Once he’d finished a story or book it was sort of dead to him. On to the next thing.
Joe, thanks so much for giving this interview. It’s been a pleasure.
JK: Thanks for the interest! Keep in touch and I'll keep you posted on any future projects.
Rangers’ latest release, Late Electrics Reimagined, is available on Bandcamp.