SKU: 75715124438

Cheri Knight - American Rituals

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Cheri Knight - American RitualsOn the outskirts of late 1970s Olympia, Washington, something stirs, sings, and breathes. Cheri Knight, a music composition student at the Evergreen State College, is developing her practice in a quaint but adequately equipped campus recording studio, amalgamating with the sonic timbre of the surrounding time, space, and place, while devoting to her own inner maxims. At once performative and meditative, electronic and organic, collaborative and self

On the outskirts of late 1970s Olympia, Washington, something stirs, sings, and breathes. Cheri Knight, a music composition student at the Evergreen State College, is developing her practice in a quaint but adequately equipped campus recording studio, amalgamating with the sonic timbre of the surrounding time, space, and place, while devoting to her own inner maxims. At once performative and meditative, electronic and organic, collaborative and self-contained, Cheri's early compositions are simultaneously complete and sketches of a ceremonial process at play. American Rituals captures the artist's environmental emergence, unearthing a unique compositional voice and signposting a regional sonic ethos. The path to Evergreen seems gently preordained for Cheri, a whisper in the trees. Growing up in a musical household in Western Massachusetts, she learned to play piano and clarinet, demurring from notated music but composing piano pieces in the minimalist mode of Erik Satie and folk songs inspired by Joni Mitchell. In high school, her class studied John Cage's work, an epiphanic moment for the young artist. The group also visited a studio outside Amherst where she encountered the modular limitlessness of a Moog synthesizer. Cheri studied philosophy and music at Whitman College in Washington, and then took a year to build a stone house with some friends in New Hampshire. She settled at Evergreen soon after, carrying with her a zeal for improvisation, creative investigation, and hands-on experimentation. The seven works anthologized on American Rituals are foremost an expression of Cheri's elemental approach to creating, rather than writing, music. Polyvocal chants, spoken-word collages, primal post-punk excursions and hymn-like incantations are bound together by a performative energy; a Cage-ian commitment to the present moment which harbors a meditative interior. The first piece Cheri made at Evergreen manifested when a multi-tracked mic test spontaneously evolved into a vocal ostinato. This experience of layering her own voice allowed Cheri to see images of the sounds she was making "in real time." In Cheri's music, language takes on a playful, fluxist, material quality as it is patterned in space. This word play is most evident in pieces like "Prime Numbers" and "Primary Colors, " which uses speech as an elemental material forming our changeable perception of the world. Channeled through the human voice, which is instrumentalized in every piece on American Rituals, language becomes a mutable force and a virtuosic apparatus. Spoken, sung, recited, incanted, chanted, instructed, whispered. It asks us to breathe, in and out. It tells us stories, reads us instructions, reminds us of water. Through rhythmically repeated speech patterns and flowing turns of phrase, the voice conveys ritualized patterns of everyday material becoming beautiful and strange, musical and memorable, conceptual and devotional. The musical output of Evergreen entering the 1980s should not be underestimated in it's contribution to the burgeoning Seattle-Olympia DIY axis, with pieces on American Rituals evidencing a contagious ethos and aesthetic. K. Leimer's Palace of Lights label first issued Cheri's "Primary Colors" and "Hear/Say" as part of it's 1982 compilation Regional Zeal, Mouth Music From Olympia Washington, while "Prime Numbers" and "Breathe" were included on the Steve Fiskproduced compilation Dub Communiqué the same year. But beyond catalog crossover and collaborative evolution, there is a shared sonic energy coursing through American Rituals which speaks to an absorption of place, of atmosphere, of weather. During a peer pilgrimage to the 1981 New Music America Festival in San Francisco, a change in weather was forecasted when Cheri met composer and theorist Pauline Oliveros. She spent part of her final year at Evergreen independently studying at the Zen Arts Center in Mount Tremper, New York, with Pauline and her partner, the performance artist Linda Montano. Aligning with both luminaries amplified the artistic and philosophical resonance of Cheri's work, bringing tenets of Buddhism and Living Art into both her artistic and life practice. Following these principles, Cheri's art eventually did become absorbed into life: living on a farm with goats in rural Massachusetts, writing songs, playing in bands, and eventually drifting away from music and into other things. But as is often the case, the path taken is never forgotten, only temporarily out of mind. With the help of old friends and new, the music of American Rituals was salvaged (not without hundreds of emails and phone calls) from master tapes stored in the collections of various peers and recording engineers from the extended Evergreen set, and is re-presented / represented now with care. Cheri Knight's American Rituals arrives in vinyl and digital formats July 15, 2022 from Freedom To Spend. A portion of the proceeds from this release will benefit Draft Gratitude, a draft horse rescue in Winchester, New Hampshire dedicated to saving the lives of senior working horses.

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SKU: 75715124438

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billy
Battle Creek, US
★★★★★ 5
My dog is a toy destroyer
Color: Consuela the Cactus - Large, Size: Large Dog, Color: Consuela the Cactus - Large, Size: Large Dog
I’ve had a hard time trying to find toys that my dog, Zara loves because she’s actually very picky. Ive gotten plenty of Kong toys that are well known to be indestructible but she wants nothing to do with them. Then I got her ropes and that seemed to be good for a while until she was getting sick in the middle of the night from eating all of the string. Stuffed toys aren’t good because she’ll rip them within seconds and eat all of the stuffing. I felt like I’ll never score the perfect toy for her. I found the three layered cactus toy and decided to give it a go. It’s clearly designed to be ripped and destroyed to get the ball in the middle which is actually really cute and fun to see all of the layers. The cactus arms have stuffing and of course that’s the first thing she went for and ate. I had to watch her and make sure I took the stuffing away before she ate it. And before I knew it, she ate half of the first layer fabric lol once she got through the first layer, all she’s been doing is walking around the house with the toy in her mouth. But now she’s tired and passed out on the couch from all of the fun. This toy won’t last long with a toy destroyer but it sure does give them something to do and it’s a cute toy. I do recommend!!
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Reviewed in the United States on July 26, 2024
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Verified Purchase
Klara Gengler
Belleville, US
★★★★★ 5
Last a while. Will be buying more toys soon.
Color: Consuela the Cactus - Large, Size: Large Dog
Best dog toy I have ever bought. I have three dogs, two at the time I bought this toy. It took them over a year to break through the first layer. The flower comes off first so be careful your dog doesn't swallow it. It still has the second layer so it still looks like a cactus. No stuffing to clean up when they tear into it, which makes it far less messy than other toys. One of my dogs is obsessed with fetch so I use it like a ball inside. The oval shape makes it hard to ensure when it bounces that it will bounce straight. It's bounced into walls and other stuff that I wasn't intending it to hit. Not much of a squeak so I can let them play with it for hours and I don't get annoyed with the noise. Great toy that lasts a while.
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Reviewed in the United States on September 25, 2025
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Cassie
Grantham, US
★★★★★ 5
Nice Value
Color: Consuela the Cactus - Large, Size: Large Dog
Very cute! Its soft and feels like it is well made. It is a heavier toy and a tougher one. Not a plush toy. I will order again for our older dogs. Nice value for sure!
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Reviewed in the United States on June 11, 2026
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Blakely McAllister
Massapequa, US
★★★★★ 5
Great toy for our best boys!
Color: Consuela the Cactus - Large, Size: Large Dog
You can never go wrong with BarkBox toys and this was no exception. Our dogs like toys that have squeakers and that they can tear into. This style of toy fits the bill. The design is cute as well. I’ve had this in the house for months and, while it’s definitely seen better days, it’s still intact and they haven’t gotten to the inner layer. (Not for want of trying.) The perfect type of toy for our fur babies.
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Reviewed in the United States on February 10, 2026
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Amazon Customer
Carnegie, US
★★★★★ 5
Survives 7 months so far.
Color: Christmas Consuela, Size: Large Dog
It is still intact after nearly 7 months of constant play. My blue heeler normally destroys toys in just a few weeks. Consuela has exceeded expectations of survival with an extremely chewy, destruction prone dog.
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Reviewed in the United States on June 6, 2026

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