The Book Of Knots has had the pleasure of collaborating with some of the worlds most talented musicians, including Tom Waits, Mike Patton, David Thomas, Blixa Bargeld, Jon Langford, and Carla Bozulich. Founding members Matthias Bossi (Skeleton Key, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum), Joel Hamilton (producer/engineer for BlakRoc, Pretty Lights), Carla Kihlstedt (Tin Hat Trio, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum) and Tony Maimone (Pere Ubu, Frank Black, Bob Mould) forge a sound both epic and intimate, empowering and devastating. Cinematic, symphonic landscapes give way to crumbling acoustic chamber ballads. Broken guitars and beautifully warped orchestras describe the ungraceful demise of boats, blast furnaces and bloated industries. Accounts of the failed adventures of tragic would-be heroes are given voice in the band's two previous critically-acclaimed releases. Their newest album serves as the final chapter in the bands "By Sea, By Land, By Air" trilogy.
Since 2007's Precambrian, the Ocean has become increasingly conceptual. Two separate offerings from 2010, Heliocentric and Anthropocentric, had longtime fans in a quandary as to whether the band were visionaries or merely pretentious. Over two years in the making, Pelagial was originally envisaged by guitarist, lyricist, and band mastermind Robin Staps as a single piece of instrumental music that charted the seven levels of the sea - Epipelagic, Mesopelagic, Bathypelagic, Abyssopelagic, Hadopelagic, Demersal, and Benthic - by portraying their depths musically, from the surface where light enters (Epipelagic) to the murky, enclosed-in-darkness ocean floor (Benthic) where bottom feeders live. Staps was also influenced deeply by Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky's masterpiece Stalker, a work that charts the journey of three men through a bleak (presumably post-apocalyptic) landscape to a room where all desires can be fulfilled…