“Taking from drone, musique concrète, found sound and electroacoustic music, the Dragon’s Eye man’s recorded fields are laptopped and trailed into sonorous stases that seem to stem from the liminal to an ineffable occluded vastness.
In which Yann Novak muses on ‘the inevitable progression of time, our relationship to the past, and our distortion of the past through the imperfections of memory,’ themes extrapolated from re-visions of US psychonaut Terence McKenna. The Future is a Forward Escape into the Past (Touch) references that ‘cyclone of unorthodox ideas capable of lifting almost any brain out of its cognitive Kansas’ (Tom Robbins) whose The Archaic Revival (1991), an old trip transmission made theory, sees the functionality of a culture, once exhausted, as tending towards a sort of nostalgic reversion. New skin for the old ceremony of memory curated by Novak, and a point of departure to make his way back into the heart of his material.
Abstract expressionism, body piercing and tattooing, psychedelic drug use, sexual permissiveness, rave culture… That was then. This is now: making sense in the present tense at the dead end of late modernity, the artist recovers the concept of ‘selective memory’, re-reading history through its own magnifying glass. ‘Expanding into a more emotive compositional style and palette,’ the artist finds reconnection with his own past, reminded this was territory covered earlier, ‘looks back at his own older works though this lens as inspiration,’ seeking to syncretize reason and emotion, to synthesize different sonic fragments into a whole. Taking from drone, musique concrète, found sound and electroacoustic music, the Dragons Eye man’s recorded fields are laptopped and trailed into sonorous stases that seem to stem from the liminal to an ineffable occluded vastness; chthonic sub-bass and tone-mass shift and surge under distortion grain and echo revenance. With a stillpoint of focus on the moment, from within come slow reveals, elements linking parts in sequence—fields with substrative oscillations, trans-harmonic cyclicity, discreet interference, animate samples.
For all Novak views his materials as affordance structures for mindfulness of the present, exhorting to ‘reclaim the present moment as a political act,’ the music, more coded than loaded, bespeaks différance. But while posties may fly free semiotically, no hors-du-texte (hi, Jacques), talk of ‘darkly-veiled resemblance to the rise of nostalgia-driven nationalism’ suggests we take it outside. Seen as if through a glass darkly, its quadriptych is spread for a heavy freight of significance: “Radical Transparency,” “The Inertia of Time,” “Casting Ourselves Back into the Past,” “Nothing Ever Transcends its Immediate Environment”—titles turn into takes on what to make of the opaque. The Future is a Forward Escape… resounds with the hum of disquiet at the back of everyday hyperreality.
The Future is a Forward Escape Into the Past is out now on Touch. (Bandcamp)
