Lee Noble

A TRILL Zine interview originally published in 2018

There is a compelling abstraction associated with Lee Noble’s work. Pulling from a myriad of sources and means to weave his sonic tales, there is a spontaniety of spirit and approach to his method. This carries through to his fine art work as well. Whatever the means, the end result of Noble’s statements are absorbing and provoking at the same time.

INSTRUMENTATION-WISE, HOW VARIED IS YOUR PROCESS? WHAT ARE SOME OF YOUR PRIMARY (OR PREFERRED) METHODS OF MUSIC MAKING?

It has been quite varied, so far my equipment has mainly just depended on circumstance, guitars, delay pedals, different old keyboards and synthesizers, tape recorders. One item I’ve always used and think I’ll continue to use is a Casio SK–1, it’s great for sampling voice, it has these very simple but sort of beautiful built–in envelopes, so you can have this soft fade up and sustaining sound. I’ve also used a Moog Source monosynth for a long time. As I go on, I feel less and less affinity towards specific gear, but I am interested in sounds that border on feeling organic and synthetic. Reed instruments that sound like synthesizers, synthesizers that resemble voices, etc. I made some recordings with manipulated speech synthesis software recently, next to tape loops of my own voice, next to collaged recordings of a sine wave generator.

WHO WOULD YOU CITE AS SOME OF YOUR MUSIC INFLUENCES?

What I listen to everyday is Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance’s first album, Yellow Magic Orchestra, and David Bowie. But I think very little of those kinds of sounds actually make their way through me and into a recording. There’s this album by Pieter Nooten and Michael Brook called Sleeps with the Fishes and every time I listen to that I just think “this is the exact album I want to make oops”. But I don’t know, there are so many brilliant people working in music, I look up to Tara Jane O’Neil, Xeno and Oaklander, Maxwell August Croy, Sean McCann, Ged Gengras, Loren Connors, Christina Vantzou, Belong, Sun Pack, Weyes Blood, White Magic, Hakobune, Matthew Sage, Christopher Bissonette, Tiny Vipers, Sarah Devachi, Carla Dal Forno, Anenon, Crescent, Ekin Fil, Ana Roxanne, Nickolas Mohanna, Ilyas Ahmed, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Electric Sound Bath, Ancient Ocean, Graham Lambkin, Kane Pour, also all the Obscure Records stuff, Gavin Bryars, Michael Nyman, stuff like Ligeti, Stravinsky, Meredith Monk. Movie soundtracks. It’s so easy to find inspiration. Sometimes I get worried because it seems like there are less and less places for all this unbelievable music to go.

I KNOW YOU JUST RECENTLY DID A TOUR OF JAPAN. WHAT IS THE EXPERIENCE LIKE PLAYING FOR INTERNATIONAL AUDIENCES VS. U.S.?

Every venue, artist, and show in Japan was so thoughtful! I played seven shows over there, they were honestly some of the best of my life. Really beautiful, well put together, considered DIY venues, that you could just tell were loved and cared-for, and all these bills of artists that fit together perfectly, everyone was so kind, I can’t say enough good things about it. The artists were so good — Hakobune, Ohta Takamitsu, Kazumichi Komatsu, Masahiro Takahashi, Fuguli, Hirotaka Shirotsubaki, Dup Sys, Hegira Moya... on and on. When I was in Europe, I played some great shows, but frequently it was like “why would anyone ever book me at this bar” with a totally random DJ or a math-rock band or just totally incongruous surroundings, and at no point was it like that in Japan. For the past couple years before that I really only played in L.A., and there are a million great shows a week in L.A., but I guess as a local artist there’s less at stake so everything can be hit or miss. But I think there are a lot of spiritual similarities. When I was planning my trip a lot of what I heard from people is how overwhelming and different it is in Japan, and I didn’t find that to be the case at all, coming from L.A., the feel of the shows, audience, artists were very similar. I think any artist from L.A. would immediately get the vibe in Japan. Genuinely kind, and thoughtful place.

YOU HAD A SOLO SHOW RECENTLY OF COLLAGE AND MIXED MEDIA PIECES (RECSPEC GALLERY - AUSTIN, TX). CAN YOU TALK A BIT ABOUT YOUR FINE ART WORK? DO YOU FEEL ANY CORRELATIONS BETWEEN THE PROCESS OF MAKING YOUR ART VS. MUSIC?

I approach them from the same direction I think, sort of unskilled, intuitive, relentless way of working. I consider all the work I do, audio or visual, as some form of collage. I’m interested in what happens to a song when it’s placed next to an abstract ambient piece, and how two images might be transformed while juxtaposed. Everything I do touches on ephemerality and obsolescence a little bit. It’s all just processing. I tend to make work from these pieces that are off gathering dust somewhere. Often with music I am sampling myself, I am constantly recording over or pulling from a big pile of old tapes, kind of exploring the ruins of songs I’ve forgotten how to play. And yeah, mainly for the visual stuff I used really old, really shredded books. The less applicable to contemporary life in 2018, the better. I also like totally useless, vague imagery...for instance I recently made some collages from some old porno mags, I would use like a picture of a flower vase in the background and none of the nudity. There’s just so so much lost / irrelevant printed matter. I could dig through this stuff forever. I don’t necessarily mean to make all this work that is just looking back and looking back... Online I think we can all tend to get pointed towards the same things, there’s this kind of inescapable current of the internet sometimes, and so it can be comforting to get lost in something tactile, with no direction. Maybe I’ll make something totally different soon.

Further linkage:
Official website
Bandcamp
Instagram
Night Club Gallery