A wry ‘Cellar’ dweller emerges

John VANDERSLICE is a busy man. In addition to owning and engineering a San Francisco analog recording studio, he runs a website offering unreleased tracks by the Walkmen and other underground artists, sings and writes songs and still finds time to tour. This Wednesday, in support of his fourth record, “Cellar Door,” he’ll perform at the Knitting Factory.

Since 2000, when Vanderslice debuted as a solo artist, he has built a reputation as one of the country’s most idiosyncratic songwriters, penning absurd if poetically powerful lyrics on concept records that juxtapose present-day politics with classic literature.

“What I like is when the narrator of a song is morally questionable and morally unreliable,” said Vanderslice, who defuses lethally pretentious references to Dante, Blake and Coleridge with humor. “Then you need to find out where is this person coming from.”

On “Cellar Door,” the 30-year-old tackles the complex psyche-scape of family in multilayered songs that marry piano, strings, horns, blips and beeps.

“I can’t play a lot of those instruments,” said Vanderslice, whose collaborators included college radio faves Death Cab for Cutie and Mark Kozelek of Sun Kil Moon and the Red House Painters. “What’s exciting is that if you give someone a wide margin, then they come up with something that’s better than what you could conceptualize on your own.”

John Vanderslice, with the Wrens, Knitting Factory, 7021 Hollywood Blvd. Wednesday, 8:30 p.m. $10. (323) 463-0204.