| released August 4, 2015 Words and music by Dan Knishkowy Engineered, mixed and mastered by Jay Vega at The Wilderness Recording Studio in Pittsburgh, PA Art by Benjamin Lovell lilytapesanddiscs.bandcamp.com Dan Knishkowy (guitars, keys, vocals) Andrew Stocker (bass, vocals) Jay Vega (bass) Erik Pitluga (drums) Mike Slo-Mo Brenner (steel guitar) |
released October 26, 2018 All songs written by Dan Knishkowy 2016-2018. Co-produced by Dan Knishkowy and Will Stratton. Engineered and mixed by Will Stratton at The Buddy Project in Queens, NY and in Beacon, NY and Mount Sinai, NY. Additional recording by Cassandra Jenkins, Johanna Samuels, Winston Cook-Wilson, and Mike “Slo-Mo” Brenner. Mastered by TW Walsh. Album art by Chrissy Ziegler. Dan Knishkowy - words and guitars Will Stratton - piano (1,2,4,5,6,8,9,10), electric guitar (1,2,4), bass (10) Andrew Stocker - bass (1-9) Ben Seretan - electric guitar (1-9) Sean Mullins - drums and percussion (1-9) Cassandra Jenkins - vocals (1,2,9,10) Johanna Samuels - vocals (8) Mike “Slo-Mo” Brenner - lap steel (2), pedal steel (9,10), bass lap steel (10) Winston Cook-Wilson - keyboards (3,4,7) |
Dan Knishkowy - guitars, vocals Andrew Stocker - bass Ben Seretan - electric guitar, vocals Winston Cook-Wilson - piano, keyboards Sean Mullins - drums, percussions, mellotron Brigid Mae Power - vocals Matt Kivel - vocals Dave Lackner - saxophones, flute Kristen Drymala - cello Devra Freelander - vocals Words & music by Dan Knishkowy Engineered & mixed by Jason Meagher at Black Dirt Studio Additional recording by Dave Lackner, Matt Kivel, Matan Benzvi, Winston Cook-Wilson, and Peter Broderick Mastered by Patrick Klem at Klem Sound Art & design by Chrissy Ziegler credits released May 8, 2020 The record is called Solid Love. Half of that title, at least, should be immediately apprehensible when you listen. The songs Dan Knishkowy writes and sings for Adeline Hotel are tender and frank, disarming in their commitment to treating the sweetness of love and friendship with the gravity and wonder such a subject deserves. The “solid” part might take a little longer to sink in. The band—guitarists Knishkowy and Ben Seretan, bassist Andrew Stocker, pianist Winston Cook-Wilson, drummer Sean Mullins, with a host of others joining in here and there—plays softly and spaciously, with as much emphasis on listening as on making themselves heard. The sound they conjure together is less concrete than the album title lets on: a memory of chance encounter; a few dust motes glowing in a shaft of sunlight, then drifting away from the bedroom window. After years of releasing quasi-solo records with rotating casts of accompanists, Knishkowy assembled a settled band for the first time on Solid Love, each member of which has their own songwriting practice: “Five people with loud playing personalities, playing as quietly as possible,” as he puts it. In the unshowy intricacy of its arrangements, and in Knishkowy’s plainspoken delivery, Solid Love sometimes recalls Jim O’Rourke’s songwriter albums; in its languid gait and jazzy rhythmic elisions, it may bring to mind John Martyn. Verses blooming into choruses, chords changing with few hard distinctions between them—the songs revel in a kind of musical ambiguity that only comes when the players are intimately attuned to their companions, a looseness that seems to arrive paradoxically from deep togetherness. “‘Solid’ is less definitive, more a changing of state,” Knishkowy says. “On the verge of crystallizing, or beginning to melt away." - Andy Cush |
| Good Timing was performed and recorded by Dan Knishkowy, mixed by Ian Wayne, and mastered by Patrick Klem. The album art was designed, sewn, and photographed by Chrissy Ziegler. credits released February 19, 2021 Where does a piece of music originate? Before decisions about form and refinement of material, before building up or carving down, before composition itself—what lies in this white room, and how does one find it? Dan Knishkowy of Adeline Hotel did not set out to answer these questions when he began recording Good Timing, a mostly instrumental album whose crystalline latticework of acoustic guitar marks a departure of sorts from his previous releases as a songwriter. But as he worked, he found a certain freedom in a process uninhibited by pretense. “I liked the idea of embracing that,” he says, “instead of turning this into something more conventionally polished.” Knishkowy created Good Timing by layering improvised guitar parts, each one reacting intuitively to those that came before and guiding those that came after. Like a fractal blooming or a snowflake accumulating ice, the music dictated its own shape as it grew, a dynamic that is perceptible in the shifting surfaces of each piece. Rhythms unspool slowly, without tether to any strict pulse. Lines begin in apparent disarray, then converge for an epiphanic moment, then separate again. Though Knishkowy is well versed in the greats of solo guitar—among several possible connotations of the album’s title is a sly homage to a Jim O’Rourke acoustic masterwork—the effect of these multitracked pieces may have more in common with ambient music than anything from the American Primitive school. Low strings toll like distant bells; high ones sparkle like windchimes just outside the window. The physical properties of Dan’s instrument are as present in the music as his own hands. He arrived at this instinctual approach while working alone at home in the quarantine summer of 2020, when more precisely arranged compositions began to feel stifling. As a reprieve, he began recording the sort of ostensibly aimless music that had often uncovered the seeds of songs in the past. By centering these embryonic sounds as an expression in themselves, rather than a route to some other end, he crafted 10 pieces that glow with intimacy and presence, vessels for capturing memory in real time. “I feel like all records are approximations of your creative process, in a way" he says, "but with Good Timing, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to the source.” - Andy Cush | Dan Knishkowy - piano, vocals, mellotron Andrew Stocker - bass Caitlin Pasko - vocals David Lackner - saxophones, flute, clarinet Eric D. Johnson - vocals Macie Stewart - violin Sean Mullins - drums & percussion Vivian McConell- vocals Words & music by Dan Knishkowy Engineered & mixed by Rick Spataro Mastered by Patrick Klem Painting by Maria Gordon credits released October 22, 2021 The Cherries Are Speaking—the sixth album released by Brooklyn singer-songwriter Dan Knishkowy as Adeline Hotel—begins and ends with lyrics from his previous two records, respectively. “Holy visions” surfaced first on the mournful acoustic ballad “Ordinary Things,” a rare, stripped-down moment on his folk-rock opus Solid Love from last May. “Good timing,” in turn, is the eponymous lyric from the critically acclaimed followup, released in March of this year—and one of its only lyrics, too, since the record is largely a suite of layered acoustic guitars. The original context for these phrases hint at the fresh musical and lyrical ground Knishkowy covers on The Cherries Are Speaking, an interconnected series of miniature baroque pop songs and, quietly, his most ambitious work to date. In the skeleton of its arrangements, the album expounds upon “Ordinary Things”’ minimalism, eschewing the intricate guitar counterpoint of his previous work in favor of piano lines inspired by the breezy melodies of Ethiopian jazz. The playing is often supported by just bass and drums, before pastoral wind and string orchestrations creep in—a breathtaking leap forward for Knishkowy as an arranger—informed at turns by Judee Sill’s neo-classicism and the mystic woodwinds of ‘80s Van Morrison. On Cherries, Knishkowy creates full mise en scènes within verses, folding autobiographical moments of meditative self-evaluation into imagery from Italo Calvino’s 1957 novel The Baron in the Trees—most importantly, the titular anthropomorphic cherries. The book centers around a boy who makes the decision to live in the trees and engage in a selective relationship with the world around him. Knishkowy found resonances between the character’s self-imposed, imperfect notion of “freedom” and his own unsettled definition of the concept. “The fundamental question of Cherries is what it means to be apart from the world, but still a part of it,” Knishkowy explains. The Groundhog’s-Day-like experience of life in relative isolation feels built into the form of the album, too, with each song beginning like another morning breaking in a week without days. If there was a certain pandemic-era irony to the phrase “good timing” before, Cherries instead explores a more sincere reading. The recurrence of the titular line on “We Go Outside,” brings a break in musical tone, like a breath of fresh air after too many neurotic hours in the apartment (“It was all I could stand of myself / we go outside” followed by “we go outside / good timing”). The Cherries Are Speaking’s recapitulations of and daring shifts away from Knishkowy’s previous work feed into its musical and thematic depth, which speaks far beyond the real-world context of its writing. The album is a bold but unforced gesture from an artist whose creative lifeblood is the sense of constantly pushing forward, creating new links in a daisy chain of a discography which seems to compound upon itself in significance with each new entry. -Winston Cook-Wilson | "One pleasure of following Dan Knishkowy’s music as Adeline Hotel in recent years is the way each album suggests something new, building on what came before, rather than making a drastic break. A record of folk songs (2020’s Solid Love) led to a set of solo guitar explorations (2021’s Good Timing) led to a suite of piano-led chamber music (The Cherries Are Speaking, 2021’s second Adeline album). Hot Fruit, his latest, continues that gradual trajectory while opening the widest new territory in his discography yet. While its jazzy and orchestral acoustic-guitar-led instrumentals may have surface-level precedent in canonical albums by Jim O’Rourke and more recent ones by William Tyler or Marisa Anderson, they ultimately operate on a wavelength all their own. Hot Fruit began as a work for solo guitar, pointed and narrative where Good Timing was diffuse and atmospheric. Each of the seven pieces contain a detailed enough trajectory that the album could have been finished there. Instead, Knishkowy brought the music to an ad hoc band that included the members of the jazz-leaning Brooklyn trio Scree (electric guitarist Ryan El-Solh, bassist Carmen Rothwell, and drummer Jason Burger), as well as pianist and longtime Adeline collaborator Winston Cook-Wilson (of Office Culture), and... more credits released October 6, 2023 Produced by Dan Knishkowy & Ryan El-Solh. Composed by Dan Knishkowy (1, 2, 6, 7), & Dan Knishkowy and Ryan El-Solh (3, 4, 5). Arranged & performed by: Dan Knishkowy: acoustic guitar Ryan El-Solh: electric guitar Carmen Rothwell: upright bass Winston Cook-Wilson: piano Jason Burger: drums & percussion Additional arrangements by Ryan El-Solh, performed by: Aimee Niemann: violin Ivan Arteaga: clarinet Alec Spiegelman: flute Rebecca El-Saleh: harp Adam Brisbin: pedal steel Engineered by Lily Wen at Figure 8 Recordings, with additional engineering by Nico Hedley, Irving Gadoury, Adam Brisbin, and Alec Spiegelman. Mixed & mastered by Chuck Johnson at Cirrus Oxide. Photographed & designed by Chrissy Ziegler. |