Poster: Chaz/Worried Songs

Thursday May 29 * doors: 6:30, music: 7:00 * $15-20 sliding scale * TICKETS

In the tender, surrealist world that Dan 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.

Cameron Knowler hadn’t stepped foot on Yuma, AZ dirt since the incarceration of his father when he was eleven years old. CRK, a self-titled affair, finds the artist confronting darkness with an open mind, sculpting the diorama of his youth into a record brimming with medicinal soundscapes. In line with the regional ethos of composer Frantz Casseus, the minimalism of Bruce Langhorne and the genre-blurring lens of David Rawlings, this instrumental record draws on the history and geography of Knowler’s perplexing birthplace—a border town known for its eternal sunshine, lettuce production, affordable dental work and defunct territorial prison that once served as a high school. Knowler carries forward the grand pictorial canon made famous by Dorothea Lange and western films such as “3:10 to Yuma” while soberly reporting on day-to-day life in the Sonoran with “Christmas in Yuma,” a zany poem recited by Jack Kilmer.

Since 2005, Baltimore-based songwriter Bob Keal has released and performed music as Small Sur alongside a rotating cast of musicians. Keal has always been elusive–touring only occasionally, self-releasing the majority of his full-length records, and rarely throwing elbows in the attention economy. Despite this relative obscurity, his unique and understated songwriting has been hailed as “expansive” (Aquarium Drunkard), “stoic, dark, and exuberant” (Tiny Mix Tapes), and “serene minimalism [which] conjures large expanses of natural landscapes at their most beautiful” (NPR). His songwriting tends to speak the language of the natural world, and it is this relationship to nature which informed his work on 2022’s Attic Room, released via UK imprint Worried Songs.