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RM 4192CD
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In a radical re-approach to his musical output, Yann Novak devises his most dynamic sonic offering to date. The Voice of Theseus, expands his mode of operation, inviting in key contributions from vocalists Dorian Wood and G.Brenner, both of whom contribute to the core compositional elements of the record. Starting at voice as a point of departure, The Voice of Theseus traces sensation and sense making as a primary means to understanding the reality you find yourself within, a reality that is fraught by, and forged by, physiological and psychological ways of being. This record significantly expands Novak's oeuvre and in doing so opens an entirely new chapter in his practice.
A note from Yann Novak: "In Greek mythology, the legend of Theseus describes how the king-founder of ancient Athens rescues the children of his city from King Minos' minotaur on the island of Crete. In commemoration, Athenians began a pilgrimage to honor his victory, taking the ship of Theseus and sailing it from Athens to Delos. It was with this tradition that a philosophical paradox about the historic ship was raised: As the ship was repaired, piece by piece, until it was no longer composed of any original parts, at what point could the ship no longer be considered the same entity? In recent years, I've become interested in exploring the perceptual differences I experience. While some of these differences? partial color blindness and dyslexia -- have been with me my entire life, tinnitus caused by hearing damage is a relatively new change to how I experience the world. It is these sensory challenges which have shaped my artistic practice by creating what I call a perceptual insecurity -- an uncertainty of how accurately I discern the world around me. The Voice of Theseus is my attempt to explore the obstacles I face in processing external sensory information. If I have trouble perceiving reds and greens, if I have trouble hearing certain frequencies, if I don't interpret written language in a standard way, how closely can I experience reality in the way that others experience it? The album asks the listener to question how their unique means of perception and interpretation might differ from that of others. For The Voice of Theseus, I asked two of my favorite vocalists to assist with this experiment. Both Dorian Wood and G.Brenner recorded vocals for me to manipulate throughout the album . . . The myth of Theseus' ship allowed me to tease at the nuances of how reality can be observed, interpreted, and altered in an indeterminate number of ways; it can be dismantled and rebuilt, many times over..."
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RM 4159CD
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On Lifeblood of Light And Rapture, Los Angeles artist Yann Novak contours a phosphorescent listening experience that shimmers with a hazy glow; like neon in fog. Each piece bares his trademarked sense of patience and unerring harmony, but more so than any previous editions Novak opens up the presence of these elements to create a more absorbing sensibility. "A Biochemical Cascade" captures the experience in a snapshot, as gentle eruptions of harmony fold and melt over the top of one another, each eruption seemingly more luminous than the wave before it. The result is a wholly consuming sense of tidal ecstasy.
From Yann Novak: "When I began working on Lifeblood of Light and Rapture I was thinking a lot about both my personal and society's tendencies towards nihilism. When I was in grade school, I was taught that 2020 would be the turning point in our collective fight against climate change -- that if we did not change by then, there would be no turning back. After learning this at a young age, I watched helplessly as little was done to save the planet. It made me certain that I would not live to see past 2020 . . . Now that 2020 has come and gone, I have the luxury of hindsight. I can look back and see that so many of my decisions were made not to destroy myself, but in order to self-medicate. In my teens and twenties, the world was a difficult place to inhabit, but I could use chemicals and other distractions to cope. Similarly, as it turns out, this is also the story of the industrial, technological, and digital revolutions. Even though the intention of these eras was to make the world an easier place to live in, most of the progress attributed to them over the last two centuries has directly contributed to the climate crisis. On Lifeblood of Light and Rapture, I wanted to explore this parallel -- that so many of the things we do to try and make this world livable also contribute to its destruction. Formally, this album follows the path I set out on with Slowly Dismantling (RM 4112LP, 2019). I sought to express myself in a more immediate and honest way through the use of digital and analog synthesis. With Lifeblood of Light and Rapture, I built upon this same path; but I also tried to imagine the listening experience over the process of making it, focusing solely on the pure pleasure of listening..."
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RM 4112CD
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With Slowly Dismantling, Los Angeles based artist Yann Novak problematizes understandings of ambience as homogenous and static. Slowly Dismantling deconstructs ambient, pulling it way from the blank and the atmospheric, refusing the perceived luxury of sound within which context is erased. Reflecting on his formative experiences as a queer youth in middle America, he explores the idea of these acoustic and social spaces as zones of liberation within which a spectrum of identity is formed.
From Yann Novak: "The cover of Slowly Dismantling features the remnants of Hotel Washington, home to the LGBTQ+ community in my hometown of Madison, Wisconsin from the '70s until 1996 when it burned down . . . I was 17 when the hotel burned down and had only gone to the cafe a handful of times. What I expected to be the formative site for exploring my newfound queer identity was suddenly lost to the past, and I was left wondering how such a space would have influenced me. What remained in Madison after the fire was only the mainstream version of gay culture . . . Art and music are often identified as 'queer' when they share these same core aesthetics, tropes, and character stereotypes . . . This led me to withdraw; the alienation that came with my introversion made it hard for me to take up space in the world. As my work as an artist and composer progressed, this lack of self confidence became part of my practice. I began using field recordings as a way for me to limit my decision making. I could shape and mold this source material to an extent, but there was always an external structure. While this allowed me to create work that was autobiographical, I was never totally in control of what I was making; thus, I was never fully visible in the work. This all changed following a transformative experience at a queer music gathering in the spring of 2019. I was finally immersed in a queer community that existed outside all dominant cultures, finally allowing me to feel seen as queer without any of the shortcomings the mainstream culture would have me believe . . . As I worked through Slowly Dismantling, it became a liberation from and a reinterpretation of myself. It allowed me to shed my insecurities and routines: grounding my work and process in something outside myself. Instead I choose to utilize digital and analog synthesis, recorded at my studio in Los Angeles and reprocessing recordings captured at MESS in Melbourne and EMS in Stockholm."
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TO 105CD
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The Future is a Forward Escape Into the Past is the latest album by Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist and composer Yann Novak, and his second for Touch. It considers the relationships between memory, time, and context through four vibrantly constructed tracks that push Novak's work in a new direction while simultaneously exploring his sonic past. The Future is a Forward Escape Into the Past is composed as a sonata -- a single gesture broken into four parts -- that meditates on the inevitable progression of time. The album's conceptual roots stem from The Archaic Revival (1991) by American ethnobotanist and psychonaut Terence McKenna. In it, McKenna theorizes that when a culture becomes dysfunctional it attempts to revert back to a saner moment in its own history. He suggested that abstract expressionism, body piercing and tattooing, psychedelic drug use, sexual permissiveness, and rave culture were proof of this default to a more primal time. The text's idealism was influential to Novak in the '90s, but the theory bears a darkly-veiled resemblance to the modern rise of nostalgia-driven nationalism. Novak on the release: "For this album I was interested in expanding into a more emotive compositional style and palette. In doing so, I was reminded that this was territory I had covered early on in my career -- the whole process became a way to reconnect with my own past and history." The album's four tracks dynamically shift and surge, where time is rendered as material and momentum compels it into movement. Subtle distortion throughout the album ties the tracks together and echoes techniques explored in Novak's Meadowsweet (2006). Tension gives way to a halcyon vision of place in "Radical Transparency", immediately followed by the austere swells of "The Inertia of Time", a piece that captures the twin impulse of generating optimistic beauty in harshly muted tones. Both tracks introduce subtle bass swells and stabs reminiscent of In Residence (2008). From there, the album grows darker with "Casting Ourselves Back into the Past" and "Nothing Ever Transcends its Immediate Environment", two icier tracks that preserve the album's core. The latter introduces a processed vocal sample of Geneva Skeen, similar to Novak's collaborative work with Marc Manning on Pairings (2007). The album is a study in perception and alteration, manipulation, and awareness, effectively capturing Novak's command of emotional texturing. Artwork & photography: Jon Wozencroft. Mastered by Lawrence English. Edition of 500.
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TONE 055CD
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Yann Novak is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Ornamentation is Novak's first physical release on Touch and continues his investigations of presence, stillness and mindfulness through the construction of immersive spaces, both literal and figurative. On Ornamentation, Novak resists modernism's problematic relationship to race, class and labor, and attempts to decouple contemporary minimalist sound work from this historical precedent. The title refers to Adolf Loos's notorious 1913 manifesto, Ornament and Crime, in which the author argues that the desire to adorn architecture, the body, objects, etc., is a primitive impulse, and the proper and moral evolution of Western culture depends in part upon the removal of ornamentation from daily life. Loos devalued the labor traditionally associated with aesthetics and beauty, and equated ornamentation with the degenerate. In this context, one could consider ornamentation as a way of viewing decay. His examples as such (tattoos, fashion, style, painting, et al.) predictably fell along divisions of race and class, coding modernity as the next outward manifestation of white, capitalist patriarchy. Throughout the process of creating Ornamentation, Novak attempts to sidestep some of Loos's modernist intolerances by focusing on the labor of composition itself, rather than particular processes or structures. Novak began by incorporating specific field recordings from his archive, deliberately selected for their poor quality; awkward interruptions, low fidelity smartphone recordings, problematic frequencies. The selection of these difficult sounds, processed alongside recordings of modular synthesizer, created a unique set of challenges where the familiar, reductive approaches would fail to be useful, Novak ultimately abandoning them in favor of more dynamic, additive, and laborious processes. Unlike minimalism with its roots in modernism, or "sound art" with its conceptual biases, Novak creates a work that acknowledges these conventions, yet stands apart as a meditation on beauty, labor, and aesthetics; Ornamentation as an adornment of time itself. Presented live in Los Angeles at a small, private event. Source material includes field recordings captured throughout the United States and Canada from 2006-2016 and modular synthesizer recordings, all digitally altered.
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LINE 045CD
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"Relocation.Reconstruction is derived from the sound elements of the three installations in Yann Novak's solo exhibition Relocation at Lawrimore Project (May 2009). In the original exhibition, Novak explored the multitude of emotional states experienced during and after the relocation of one's life. With this latest work, Novak continues his exploration into this theme a year after the initial event that inspired him, with the new insight that although he has arrived at his destination, the relocation process is far from over. By utilizing the altered sounds of the previous works as a point of departure, Relocation.Reconstruction retains some of the moods and themes of its predecessors, but reconstructs them into a slowly evolving, immersive composition. Textures, tones and faint melodies drift in and out of audible perception, never standing still, always in a state of becoming and disintegration. Through the development of this static, yet dynamic state, a familiar sense of melancholy arises from these simultaneous experiences of discovery and loss."
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