Rangers serves as the moniker for Joe Knight’s lo-fi tape collage endeavor. Raised in North Dallas, Knight developed an early passion for music through classical guitar lessons and now makes his home in San Francisco. In 2005 he started tinkering with home recording techniques, blending heavily processed live instrument captures, sampled fragments, muffled vocals, and incidental noises into drifting, atmospheric textures. The project’s first releases came in 2009 via cassettes issued by As Above So Below and Not Not Fun, with the following year bringing Bored Fortress, a split EP alongside Matthew Mondanile’s Ducktails, the solo outlet of his Real Estate bandmate. Also in 2010, the debut full-length Suburban Tours appeared, shaping Knight’s sonic experiments into more compact pieces. For the succeeding album, Pan Am Stories, he reversed course and presented a double LP whose extended format let the material unfold freely.
