In Italo Calvino’s 1957 novel, The Baron in the Trees, the eldest child of an Italian noble family argues with his father (over snail soup, no less) and climbs into the trees of their estate, vowing to never descend. The boy, Cosimo, keeps the promise, making the treetop canopy his own kingdom through equal parts stubbornness and ingenuity. He hunts animals for clothing, develops systems for personal hygiene, persuades a goat to venture up into an olive tree so that he can milk it. Among the boughs, Cosimo has time to devote his attention to other things—thinking, reading, meeting new people. The benefits of freeing oneself from the constraints of so-called ordinary life.
But his life in the trees is not completely removed from community below him. Upon meeting a book-loving fugitive, Cosimo helps pilfer reading material for his new friend. When drought strikes, he becomes a de-facto leader able to organise the community to best fight the fires. No matter how high Cosimo climbs, how many years he stays clear of the ground, he is never fully removed from society. Neither his freedom nor isolation are ever complete.
The Cherries are Speaking, the latest record from Dan Knishkowy’s Adeline Hotel on Ruination Records, follows Calvino’s line. “The fundamental question of Cherries is what it means to be apart from the world, but still a part of it,” Knishkowy says. The album picks up threads from the previous Adeline Hotel releases, with lyrics from Solid Love and Good Timing opening and closing the record. If the former was an embrace of community and the latter a retreat into isolation, Cherries is something of a left-field tangent, a space behind doors or portals built into past albums. Or perhaps a space above them, neither quite one or the other, a place into which Knishkowy has climbed, able to look down and see the world without being fully within in.
For while the songs of The Cherries are Speaking are clearly those of Adeline Hotel, they are represent a pivot away from distinctively folk sensibilities. Baroque pop might be the best descriptor, with orchestral wind and string arrangements supported by the piano lines akin to those from North African jazz. The style is achieved together with a number of collaborators, with Andrew Stocker (bass), Caitlin Pasko (vocals), David Lackner (saxophones, flute, clarinet), Eric D. Johnson (vocals), Macie Stewart (violin), Sean Mullins (drums & percussion) and Vivian McConell (vocals) all lending their talents, but as with much of Knishkowy’s work, the layers tend to emerge gradually and knit together with a seamless intuition.
Indeed, emerging gradually is a key motif of the record. The songs unfurl with a quiet grace, each its own day dawning, brightening in imperceptible increments until the full richness and peculiarity is suddenly apparent. A simultaneous embrace and subversion of diurnal patterns both stylistic and thematic. Winston Cook-Wilson describes the tracks as “recapitulations of and daring shifts away from Knishkowy’s previous work,” a selective engagement with the Adeline Hotel oeuvre that allows Cherries to function as the closing record of a trilogy and its own world entirely.
But if these roles carry a certain finality, Cherries subverts that too. Because above all else, the album represents another step in Knishkowy’s exploratory path. One with no set end or direction, but one pressing on with larger goals in mind. A part of a greater body of work which comes into view one record at a time, edging closer to whatever the full picture might be. “That wish to enter into an elusive element which had urged Cosimo into the trees,” Calvino writes in The Baron in the Trees, “was still working now inside him unsatisfied, making him long for a more intimate link, a relationship which would bind him to each leaf and twig and feather and flutter.” The Cherries are Speaking is might be Adeline Hotel’s most intimate work yet, but it will not be the last.
