Celestial Seasons by Donny Knottsville

Celestial Seasons is the debut Donny Knottsville album released way back in the summer of 2017. Previous to this I had recorded and released several mixtapes that were all tracked over at my brother Joel Hatstat’s studio. It was called Hatstat Audio at the time and later became High Jump Media. Joel and I first met when we used to mop floors and work security at the 40 Watt Club, right after I moved to Athens. In between floor mopping we would converse here and there about music and found we shared a lot in common, including a love for legendary nineties trailblazers Digital Underground. Later we would go on to cross paths in various musical incarnations and share stages around town and around parts of the country even, including at the good ol’ 40 Watt Club where we used to work. We went from mopping the floor to mopping up the stage!

When I started off recording my Donny Knottsville stuff, I had such a good time working on the mixtapes with Joel that I decided to wrangle him into helping me do an album. We began making a bunch of beats together and I decided as a production duo we should be called “Studebaker Assassins”, but the name never really took off. In addition to the tracks Joel and I made, my old collaborator Cubenza of Deaf Judges contributed one beat and my good buddies Chris and Eric from the band The Nice Machine came through and recorded an instrumental as well. Eric, aka “Riled Up”, also gave me a few far out beats that he had programmed on some old confounded device. Of those, Joel and I added some elements to one that became the song "Power U", an ode to women’s empowerment. Another I tried rapping to but it never quite landed, so I got my friend Svetlana to record some spoken word in Russian for it and it became the outro for the album. I remember when Svet came to the studio to record her part she was drinking coconut rum out of a container disguised to look like a bottle of suntan lotion. Another memorable vocal contribution came from Sienna Chandler, singing the hook for "Strawberry Chandelier" which we would later go on to shoot a music video for. Sienna’s band Monsoon was just starting out back when she contributed to this and some of my earlier mixtape material. I would go on to work with her again a few years later on the song “Quick & Nimble” from the My Strangest Adventure album. Monsoon is such a great band and I’m glad they remain active. I’m always looking forward to what they will do next.

In retrospect, I believe the focus of Celestial Seasons was the “psychedelic” beats and off the wall sample combinations that we came up with for the musical backdrop of the album. The lyrics were mostly thrown together without too much thought. I think of this as my Captain Caveman era of writing. However, like the original Captain Caveman himself, I reckon we ultimately succeeded in having fun and keeping it groovy.

Southern abstract absurdist lyrical cave paintings and assorted curiosities