Elliot Knapp is a singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, composer, and poet/lyricist whose output encompasses six original recordings released since 2010.
Knapp's music and words are steeped in the avant-garde and outsider traditions that have emboldened countless musicians across the years to create innovative, genre-defying music whose individuality is an end in and of itself. His highly conceptual output treads far-ranging stylistic territory and adventurous listeners are rewarded by art that is challenging, profound, elaborate, irreverent, chaotically beautiful, and always full of surprises.
Knapp's 2010 debut In Not-Even-Anything Land saw him working within the singer/songwriter vein, exploring progressive structures and mystical themes using a lush acoustic palette. 2012's conceptual Cheap Seats at the Cartesian Theater turned inward, exploring the labyrinthine potential of the human mind in a series of 22 brief experimental songs. Cheap Seats' radical compositions expressed an abundance of ideas through increasingly complex and unusual arrangements, expanding the sonic landscape to encompass electric guitar, woodwinds, keyboards, drums, and unconventional instruments.
2013 saw the release of three releases: Anadromous briefly returned to the realm of experimental folk with its mysterious narratives and spare-yet-knotted extended compositions. Next followed Discoveries, a surreal album-length sound collage composed from field recordings collected in Seattle's Discovery Park. Finally, Paraprosdokian! married Cheap Seats' deconstructive compositional approach with pop song structures to produce Knapp's most accessible work to date.
2017's Prismatic marked Knapp's first new release in 4 years and the first of several planned instrumental works. Prismatic's lush, textural guitar soundscapes extrapolate ideas first developed in earlier works, combining Knapp's trademark intricate counterpoint with extended hypnotic oscillations, and translating the distinctive qualities of light and color into the medium of sound.
Cloudwatcher, the 2018 follow-up to Prismatic, again explores album-length instrumental tone painting using the electric guitar and a wide variety of effects. Cloudwatcher further refines Prismatic's studies in audio hypnosis with an emphasis on space, texture, and transportation to surprising new atmospheric locations.