Adeline Hotel // Whodunnit LP

アメリカ・NYのフォークレーベルRuination Records諸作を入荷しました。

本作は、レーベルオーナーAdeline Hotelが、2024年9月にリリースしたレコードです。

サイケロック作品『Solid Love』、ギターによるアンビエント・フォーク作品『Good Timing』、ピアノ中心のネオクラシカル・ポップ作品『The Cherries Are Speaking』、ユニークなアンビエント・ジャズ作品『Hot Fruit』と続き、今回は言葉／歌をテーマにしたスローコア〜インディーフォーク9曲を収録。DLコード付属。ゲートフォルド仕様です。

マスタリングはカナダ・トロントの重鎮Sandro Perriが担当しています。

Dan Knishkowy - guitars, vocals
Winston Cook-Wilson - piano, una corda, synthesizers
Sean Mullins - drums, percussion, una corda
Carmen Quill - upright bass
Katie Von Schleicher - vocals
Jackie West - vocals

レーベルその他作品はこちら /// Click here to see more Ruination Records releases available at Tobira.

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Includes DL code. Gatefold jacket.

Tracklist:

1. How Did I Get So Lucky?
2. Whodunnit 06:09
3. Preying On
4. Grief 03:45
5. Egg On My Face
6. Joy
7. Isn't That Enough?
8. I Will Let Your Flowers Grow
9. Possible Lives

Sam Sodomsky :

"Dan Knishkowy has never written a song like “Whodunnit.” With his acoustic guitar dropped to a deep, open tuning, the Brooklyn artist noticed a fragile melody resonating from the strings, stretching out like a neverending highway. The lyrics followed suit, emerging in a series of intimate and escalating verses almost effortlessly while he played. Delivering the words in an inquisitive hum, Knishkowky soon found himself addressing the profound, lingering questions that would become the core of his latest album, Whodunnit, the most striking and ambitious record he has ever released. 

In the tender, surrealist world that Knishkowy has developed under the name Adeline Hotel, stories have been told through sprawling psych-rock epics (2020’s Solid Love), stark solo guitar performances (2021’s Good Timing), piano-led orchestral song cycles (2021’s The Cherries Are Speaking), and lush, jazzy compositions that felt like a genre unto themselves (2023’s Hot Fruit). Inspired by indie lifers and fellow world-builders like Jim O’Rourke and Phil Elverum, the Ruination Records co-founder has rewritten the rule book with each new project, inviting listeners to join as he discovers new channels for his singular voice. By now the sound of Adeline Hotel is equally identifiable through Knishkowy’s dextrous fingerpicking—the aural equivalent of tracing your fingers through cool sand at sunrise—as his low, whispered vocals and autumnal melodies.

As soon as he began writing the material for Whodunnit, a few things seemed instantly clear about his new direction. This time, the words would become the focus and the arrangements would be more threadbare. In order to maintain the immersive feeling that has come to define the project, he would have to craft songs that felt both layered and raw, close to the chest but open-ended enough to suit his amorphous, free-flowing song structures. Imagine Neil Young’s On the Beach cast in the twilight colors of John Martyn’s Solid Air, or Gillian Welch’s Time (The Revelator) as interpreted by the stream-of-consciousness players on Van Morrison’s Veedon Fleece. Whodunnit flows as if in a trance, pulling you closer to the heart with every word, every note.

Writing about the end of a marriage, Knishkowy refused the bitterness and brutality often associated with the breakup genre in favor of a kind of cosmic curiosity. These are songs full of space and silence, recurring images and textures, openness and grace. They are also among the most immediately affecting in his vast songbook. On previous Adeline Hotel records, Knishkowy cast his voice as a melodic texture interwoven with his visceral, dynamic guitar licks. Here he commands the room, even with a whisper: a fitting delivery for a set of songs where the action tends to occur in moments of crushing isolation and disconnect.

Despite the solitude in the lyrics, Knishkowy recorded Whodunnit with a tight-knit community of collaborators. Working with producer/engineer Katie Von Schleicher—a similarly idiosyncratic songwriter who encouraged Knishkowy to trust the intuitive spark of his first takes—he assembled a band who could embrace the delicate balance of the material: drummer Sean Mullins (Moon Mullins, Sam Evian), keyboardist Winston Cook-Wilson (Office Culture), bassist Carmen Quill (Scree, Tilt), and vocalist Jackie West. Together, they found the ability to gather a dust storm of psychedelic Americana (“Preying On”), a mystical ballet in miniature (“Egg On My Face”), or a tender pulse that blends seamlessly with morning birdsong (“How Did I Get So Lucky?”).

Discussing the central metaphor in the stunning, six-minute title track, Knishkowy reflects on his favorite mystery ‘whodunnits’: “By the time you find out who’s responsible for the crime, it sort of doesn't matter anymore. What's compelling is watching the dialectic circumstances in the plot reacting to and causing each other.” In the spirit of this observation, he envisioned his record as a close investigation into what went wrong between two people; eventually, he realized he was telling a story that extends beyond any one relationship, speaking instead to the particularities that allow us to connect at all. “It’s only then I start to wonder,” he sings in the title track’s closing lines, “if it’s strange to need somebody.” 

“Even though I was going through something that was objectively hard, I didn't feel lonely,” Knishkowy reflects of the transitional period in his life that inspired the record. “I was being freed to find myself, to build my own connection with the world that had been lost.” It was this sense of gratitude that led him to open the record with a simple question: “How Did I Get So Lucky?” Even when the lyrics touch on alienation and loss—when a requisite encounter with a waitress spirals into an existential tailspin, when the intricacies of fading love resemble the scattered clues in a grim detective story—Knishkowy maintains a tone of optimism, a sense of hope in our potential to start again and know ourselves better. He understands he is not the only traveler on this road, and Whodunnit will be a treasured companion for those of us seeking comfort on our own journey. "

Artist : Adeline Hotel

Label : Ruination Records