Yann Novak is a Los Angeles-based artist & composer. His sound/drone work possesses a range of emotion: foreboding, beauty, tension, meditative. There is a density to his work that seductively lulls but at the same time will reveal a complex underbelly if you allow yourself to submerge beneath the layers. Since 2005, Novak has also curated the Dragon’s Eye Recordings label which has an impressive catalog of over 70+ releases. Having just returned from a solo tour of Europe, we asked Yann a few questions about his latest work.
COULD YOU GIVE ME A BIT OF BACKGROUND ON YOUR LATEST ALBUM (THE FUTURE IS A FORWARD ESCAPE INTO THE PAST)? THERE IS SUCH A DISTINCT AND UNIFIED MOOD YOU’VE CREATED OVER THE COURSE OF THESE FOUR PIECES AND I WAS CURIOUS WHAT INFLUENCED THEIR CREATION?
I started working on the new album shortly after my last solo exhibition––Repose––at Human Resources in Los Angeles, and the shift of intent the show underwent due to the turbulence of US politics played a huge role. Between December 2015 (when the exhibition was scheduled) and February 2017 (when it opened) a lot changed. Originally the show was going to deal very formally with only color and sound. It felt irresponsible not to at least acknowledge the intensity of current events, but that’s all I could really do for the exhibition. So the new album became my chance to explore what addressing politics through abstract music might look and sound like.
I was already toying with ideas of the passage of time and nostalgia because I was coming up on my 39th birthday, so I wanted to see how those concepts fit in with the precarity of global politics right now. This lead me to Terence McKenna’s The Archaic Revival, a book I had drawn a lot of inspiration from in the 90s. McKenna posits that when a culture becomes dysfunctional it attempts to revert back to a saner moment in its own history. Revisiting that text now made me realize the eerie similarity to the nostalgia-driven nationalism of today.
More disturbingly I found that the act of looking back at my own history and reminiscing about this book I loved in my raver days, I was falling into the same trap of selective memory: indulgently daydreaming about how easy and idealistic the 90s were, totally erasing how hard it was to be queer in the midwest, how hard growing up is in general, etc.
I wanted to find a way to explore this kind of feedback loop of ideas and maybe break the cycle if I could. So I decided to find things in my old pieces that didn’t work, that were not worthy of nostalgia, and try to resolve them.
WHAT METHODS DID YOU USE TO CREATE THESE PARTICULAR WORKS?
In order to fulfill this idea I had to subvert the impulse to look back and only see the good. I had to explore things that hadn’t been sucessful, or that to me were just not good. I started by trying to incorporate distortion, which is one of the textures that I think links the album together. I used to use it all the time, but became really skeptical of how good the slow introduction of distortion was for creating a tension or a crescendo. It had become a kind of crutch, so I nearly stopped using it, or when I did, it was used so subtly that it didn’t register. So throughout the new album I tried to find a new way to introduce distortion. I wanted it to add texture and dimension without adding drama.
Another technique I abandoned was using transient or sustained synthesized bass, I used to add subtle slow rhythms or just fill out the low end with really clean bass sounds. I love the physicality of these types of sounds, but in my quest to achieve stillness in my work I had a hard time justifying these gestures that felt too musical. So on the new album, particularly Radical Transparency and The Inertia of Time, I tried to reintroduce bass, sustained in the former and transient in the latter. On an album that in one way is addressing politics and in another is deeply personal and emotional, I felt I had the room to play with more musical techniques in order to create more emotional resonance.
The final thing I wanted to revisit was vocal processing. I had employed this technique once before with artist and musician Marc Manning. He and I have collaborated on and off for years, but we don’t live in the same city so our work together takes a lot of planning. I was also interested in working with a female vocalist because I have always had a bias towards female vocals. The new album felt like a good opportunity to try working with Geneva Skeen, who I had long been pondering a collaboration with, but had not had the time. Geneva contributed a vocal sample I could use which ended up creating the very subtle climax on Nothing Ever Transcends its Immediate Environment.
HOW DIFFERENTLY DO YOU APPROACH LIVE PERFORMANCE VS. STUDIO RECORDING?
For me, everything starts in the studio. I have always thought of myself as a composer rather than a musician because when I do perform none of the sounds are being generated live. Well, they are in an acousmatic sense, but the character of the sounds I use are always shaped in the studio.
When I started working with the computer I could never afford a computer powerful enough to live-process the sounds I wanted while still offering me the large palette of sounds I wanted in my performances. My solution was to record all the layers of everything I did individually, then use that library to layer and compose in my performances. The character of each layer is shaped by the space, the speakers, and the sounds it’s mixed with, then my role as a performer is how these layers are composed in time, through the duration of the performance.
Performance and recording are also really integrated because I often create the layers to a new work in the studio, then use live performances and concerts to workout how it will be composed. Then once I have figured out what works and what doesn’t in a live setting I am able to commit the composition to a recording and that is what will end up being released.
I tried to challenge this method as well with the new record. Instead of performing it and then committing it to the release format I finished everything in the studio, then I took the material on tour in Europe and had to figure out if and how everything was working in a live context. I have not decided if it was a good idea yet––it made for some really stressful soundchecks, and it certainly made every performance unique. Luckily my label was along for the tour and recorded most of the performances, so now, for the first time, I will actually be able to listen to all these variations and see if it was a successful experiment.
Further linkage:
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